ISSUE 41: RED TAPE LETTER

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ISSUE 41_RED TAPE LETTER
_ANON 009
_SUBJECTS_ #
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DEAR ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL...Since reading Revenge on Red Tape' (reproduced Issue 39), several nights I've lain down to sleep and awoken having dreamt of that bungalow, and that revolver. In the dream, I'm both the council planner and the owner simultaneously. Assured righteousness and power-lust thinly veiled by bureaucracy and resignation, I direct the bulldozer with the finger of the greater good. Then, with the first sound of roots snapping and the thud of a trunk going down, that stomach fire of power-applied transforms into a raging insanity of love lost, like the tree roots are pulling straight out of my chest. I can only see panic and white noise - then I'm standing face to face with myself, the gun levelled at my opponents heart and silently a new hole there blooms along the fibers of the shirt cotton.
There's a block of apartments just around the corner from my house. Last Christmas they strung the profile of a green neon pine tree across the face of their building. You could see it down the train track, fading out in the dark. The week David Bowie died, the tree was rearranged into a lightning bolt and it's still there now. I kind of hope that it stays until it gets changed into something new again; when something proves to be as important and universal as Bowie. To make that lightning bolt, every single balcony had to lend a hand; there's a cable tie on every balustrade. It seems to me to symbolise a mutual ownership of that place and mutual participation in a culture - an expression that belongs equally to each of the people who live there and to all of them at once. Once I ride past that building, there's a landslide of apartments on my way into the city. Each one is sprayed over with a gaudy advertising campaign of architecture championing inner city lifestyling. Dead eyes for dead windows. This is the work of the city's architecture firms, nothing seen of the people inside.
Mass-custom digitally fabricated urban uniqueness made possible by the agency of robots. A chicken coop and a led-strip lightning bolt. What ends the spread of urban ubiquity and global sameness? What is the character of it? Dead eyes dead windows. How different are two things made of the same intent, regardless of the amazing novelty of their individual forms? What good is a work of architecture if it does not speak with the life that occurs there?
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