[Images: From a 1999 RIBA Gallery exhibition I attended; tear-off pads were affixed to the walls, with each pad bearing one of these mini-festos, repeated 200-250 times. And, yes, that means I’ve been saving these things in a file for 6 years… These are my own (crappy) scans. But the tear-off pad as a method of architectural publication is absolutely great and full of DIY potential; imagining here a guerilla reprinting of everything ever posted to BLDGBLOG, with each entry assigned its own pad, then a gallery tacked full of the things… Anyway, click on images to enlarge (and read): it’s the late return of the architectural mini-manifesto].
They’ve done it at the Design Museum, I have some Archigram ones. These ones look nicer.
I’d like to be able to rearrange the exhibits themselves. Now that would be DIY.
You could make the whole exhibition like one of those refrigerator magnet displays, where everyone can rearrange the words on a huge magnetized wall. Words of different sizes, words in different fonts, and words the include the whole architectural jargon thing.
First, Archigram wheel themselves in on their walkers, or push one another through the door in their wheelchairs, drooling and stricken, and they drum up some enthusiasm – and Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster and Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava and… and… and… – and they put their manifestos on the walls.
Then the public is let in, and for one night the magnets don’t move. People drink wine and eat comte and read the words of the masters…
But the next day the rules change, and the public can rearrange the exhibition. For a whole month. At the end of the show’s run, then, the distributed, ruined, rewritten, misedited, obscenity-laced remants of the original architectural manifestos – Hadid with Foster with juvenile rantings (but I thought we’d exclude Libeskind, actually) – read proudly from the walls, displayed there, magnetized, illegible – and a million-pound prize if you can guess the original texts…
Umberto Eco meets the architectural refrigerator magnet.