I was thinking today about performance art pieces involving architecture, and I thought maybe someday there should be a man who travels around the world, visiting cities and jungles and deserts and islands – and it’s all so he can take Flomax inside famous architectural structures.
[Image: A bunch of pills, via the European School of Oncology].
It’s the new art of pharmaco-architourism.
Similarly, I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago about “gonzo” architectural journalism, and how most people seem to think that just means getting high before interviewing Rem Koolhaas, or taking hallucinogens, or a cannabinoid, etc., and then off you go on a plane to Dubai – but who’s to say a building would be any less interesting if you experienced it all jacked up on prescription diuretics? Or high on Cialis, for that matter? Every church in Rome, visited in a libidinal haze – surely some interesting journalism would result? You could sign yourself “The Cialisian.” Soon, you’ve got a monthly column in Vanity Fair.
For Christmas, you receive a specially tailored set of loose trousers.
Or you cover your head with a spot of Rogaine foam inside every building Mies van der Rohe ever designed – except, by the end of the piece, your hair is so long you’re actually refused entrance to Berlin’s National Gallery. Your book would be an instant, if controversial, bestseller.
It would be called Mies van der Rogaine.
Or you take heroic quantities of Prilosec in buildings built before 1500AD, and you pitch the resulting articles to Archinect. Pop some Adderall and plow through the High Gothic monuments of Europe, publishing your research in The New York Times.
The next year it’s Lipitor, or Effexor, or a whole rucksack full of Brovana inhalers, as you write about anything built by Le Corbusier.
Because then, of course, there’s Clozaril, for your upcoming feature on Gaudí…
Maybe just one building, one month, 30 visits, 30 drugs. More exciting ones for the last 2 weeks- going out witha bang on day thirty with some exotic south american jungle root that turns you into a lemur. Start with a lazy day on Percocet, and end hanging upside down looking for your pouch.
So: mammalian devolution in archo-pharmaceutical form?
I’d commission it if I could.
obviously, drugs synthesised from the buildings construction materials would feature somewhere…
tying off in every gas station from buffalo, NY to seattle, WA . . .
high-traffic downtown areas with overhangs are very important if you are going to be selling coke . . . i had a gentleman press a baggie into my hand and tell me I could make a lot of money selling around in the malls inside block E (minneapolis) earlier this evening; i must be getting older, he didn’t ask me if I wanted to buy any. . .
and of course junkies / crackheads / meth users are some of the most prolific adaptive reusers of commercial and public real estate; one day the boarded-up house down the street is filled with light and soon afterwards you start to see women and men walking down the street, older, well-dressed, teeth a brown horror.
if you went around taking pictures of junkies in well-known places such as market st. (SF) burnside bridge (PDX) or skid row (LA), could you get it published in an architecture journal?
Geoff… Archinect’s Orhan is already onto this. See AIA 06