The subtle movements and narrations of intricately converging and speculative processes are lost in the contraction to the circulatable, instantaneously digested image. What has overtaken architecture today, though by no means destroyed it, is the same practice Siegfried Giedion described fifty years ago: the mindless hunting for form that characterizes playboy architecture.
[The hunters] take many guises and cut across all generations: young narcissists stricken with computer puppy love, who believe in magic (and software faeries too no doubt), and are totally enthralled with whatever the beloved machine digitally excretes; the rodeo gang with big offices, big personnel, and military software (“no time for thinking here boys, just aim… and shoot”), who favor anything gymnastic that other, smaller operations can’t manage (and from which fact alone, they think, merits them a commission); the eightdollar word boys who clearly know a thing or two, who spin a fancy, provocative phrase but deep down know that bimbo structures— cosmetic silicone and aerobicized drawings— are what’s really turning heads these days; finally, even octogenarian wannabees, who rightly and wisely deny software’s significance or power for formal understanding, yet offer the world trivial Form-Z stock artifacts tackily gift wrapped with campily mispronounced titles while fashion-victim critics slavishly bleat masterpiece behind them. The hunters for form are everywhere, and almost nowhere are they discouraged.
- excerpts from Sanford Kwinter's Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology
and Design Culture (Barcelona: Actar, 2008).
