New Massings for New Masses

Housing and Drawing: two long, modern shadows whose dark space conceals the fact that each has ceased to exist. Were they in fact the same shadowed surface, illuminated by a single light, which during modernity had twisted back upon itself so as to appear two-sided? If so, architectural reasoning must come to terms with a reality in which politics and technics are simply two names given to the same primal impulse: to live together, rather than merely survive on one’s own.

The questions today: What if we were only able to once dream of living together because we had been drawn together? What would a post-orthographic material philosophy of collectivity look like? And if one were able to somehow propose new, nonmodern architectural collectives—even presently impossible ones—would anyone even want to live in them?

To the skeptics, for whom those questions hold no weight, we say: fine, then tell us another story, over which irony or anachronism do not hang like a luminous haze…