We manage more than one “me”. Our digital persona is carefully curated and exaggerated, while behind closed doors there is chaos. The spectrum of human emotion is dense. Happiness, sadness, and anger only begin to scratch the surface, there is no longer a need to manage them, just fabricate them. Thoughts are constrained to 140 characters, connections are made through hashtags, and memories are not memories without the right filter. Everyone else, they are just pretending too.

Fake it, Photoshop it, google it, hashtag it…chaos chaos chaos….but the screen does not speak. Silent in your hands, but only for a second….like it, favorite it, comment on it….chaos chaos chaos. Fear of missing out? No. Fear of not posting it. Fear of being judged. Fear of our physical persona not living up digital….chaos chaos chaos. Battery is low, it is red, and now it is dead, chaos? Not anymore. Quiet and lonely. Scream, but who will hear you? Who will like it? Who will comment?
The only life worth living is a life online. Narrating your own story carefully behind the safety of your screen. Reality is the only realm for sad now. Avoid it at all cost.  We are conceding to the digital world and declaring our independence from reality. No longer chaos, just life, a life finally in our control.

​Retweet. 

At the 8:50 mark in this interview with Madelon Vriesendorp, she answers a question about 'Bad Taste'.  Her explanation of embracing of bad taste within her work is a great context when understanding some of the early work of OMA. It is something that we are interested in exploring further this summer and beyond in new work. In order to set the stage for that, the following is the Manifesto for Bad Taste. 

Good taste is accepted as the ideal object, representation, or moment in time. Is good taste the ideal? Who decides the ideal? Status quo is the ideal. Fame is the ideal. Security the ideal. Comfort is the ideal. Routine is the ideal. Wealth is the ideal. A fence is the ideal. The ideal is binary. The ideal becomes standardization.  Expression and provocation. The anti-ideal. When seeking the ideal, anything less than conformity fails you. 

​The embracing of bad taste is the embracing of a world of possibilities and accepting beyond personal belief. In an ideal world, nothing is ideal. ​

​Architecture is meaningless. An empty void of orthographic projection. Without image, architecture is meaningless. Without architecture, image is still powerful. Image transcends medium. It is photograph, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, writing, and craft. Image transcends scale. It is objects, people, communities, towns, cities, countries, and worlds. Image transcends reality. It is rational, surreal, speculative, narrative, dystopian, and utopian. Image transcends language. It is political, social, provocative, satire, experiential, cultural, and worth more than a thousand words. Image goes places that architecture cannot. Architecture’s rejection of image does not condemn the image. It proves the power of image. While social movement, cultural engagement, and political provocation moves forward, architecture will be left meaningless, four walls and roof. 

This was a project to attempt rewrite Delirious New York in the spirit of the present time.

Introduction

MANIFESTO
The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence. It is time to look back on what has been done to the build environment. It is time to be retroactive. There is too much evidence, too much documentation, too much photography, too many attempts to grasp the city, for the result to be nothing. The city no longer has meaning. It no longer stands for something. The city is not a fantasy, but a backdrop. It disappears the moment you walk out your door. This makes the architect very uncomfortable, but what is worse no one knows the difference, even that same uncomfortable architect. He is left beating his head against the same wall, but all is well come payday, time to start over.
 
PERSCRIPTION
Cities are in search of a theory, but cannot find it. This delirium no longer feels good. Th ecstasy has worn off. All that is left is pain. Pain that must be killed. Isolation that must be accepted. The city has been lost.
 
BLOCKS
The structure of this manifesto is that of the grid. Order placed on the page to organize the individual block. If you understand blocks as individual pieces within a whole, you now see them differently. Their proximity and juxtaposition of them reinforce their separate meanings. The beauty of the block is that escape from nothing is right in front of you.
 
 
Prehistory: 1969

L AND O
In 1969, UCLA students transmit the text “l” and “o” from one computer to another. This moment changes the city forever. The invention of the internet has the greatest impact on the city. Not because of all the technological advancements that would follow. Not because it leads to the iPhone. It set the stage for humans to experience something without physically being there. Place no longer matters.
IDENTITY
Place is identity. The internet ushered in a new form of globalization. Ideas were shared quickly, repeated even faster, and before we knew it everything looked the same. Mass production no longer was the way to create products to buy, it created our environments where we live.
GLOBALIZATION
Rapid globalization changed the circumstances faster than ever. The issue is there is not an architecture that can compete with the dynamic nature of the of the globalized world we live in now. Architecture is lost.
 
 
Unconsciously Corb

MACHINE
Le Corbusier was resisted. The Radiant City never happened, or did it? The “living machine” knows no scale. The best part about a machine is it needs no consciousness to run. It has one job and it executes perfectly every time. The highway is a part of the machine. The reach of the highway is infinite. It knows no bound, and it does not have any because the single-family home goes forever.
 
MASS PRODUCTION OF SPACE
It is easy to point at the typical suburb and say that is the moment of mass production of space. While true in some sense, it now happens everywhere. Le Corbusier said the car is the ultimate machine of transportation and the highway has since lived up to his expectation. Speed fueled his desires. Where there was highway there needed to be nothing else. The speed of the car would alter perception and no one would notice. Where the car did not exist, his architecture did. Space now happens everywhere; unconsciously because the machine is now the market and our connectedness to the world. Le Corbusier had to travel from city to city to share his ideas. The entertainment district and stadium can now travel on Google and reproduce itself rapidly in our cities. Architects attempt to play the game, but it is just mass production. Le Corbusier hid his emptiness with the speed of the car, and now the phone keeps everyone’s head down when walking. Perception altered. Mission accomplished.
ROUTINE
We all strive to predict our day. We plan days, months, years in advance to make sure we know. Routine is comfort. Routine is security. Routine is no longer a desire, it is unconscious. If you do not have it what is the point. Do not just plan your next day make sure to plan your marriage (to buy a house), and your baby (to buy another house). Do not forget these steps. Finally, architecture can be redeployed in the world. A world that is predictable and understood. A world architects can protect their buildings from. The real suckers are the weathermen.
ISOLATION
Ahh the American Dream. Nothing else like it. 3,000 square feet, a four-stall garage, and a nice big green lawn (do not worry the lawn service takes care of it). Isolation is routine’s best friend. It follows it where ever it goes. Isolation needs stability. Wake up enclosed in your house. Walk into your garage and enclose yourself into your car (its cold outside so do not open the garage door until you are in the car). Drive to work. Drive your car into the parking under your office. You got lucky the elevator is right by your spot. Ride that up to your cubicle and do it all over again on your way home. The city loves isolation because all it has to do is work. Bring people in for work and send them out for bed. The ultimate machine.
 
CONTROL
The moment of control has come. The machine is working at its highest efficiency. It actually gets to pick and choose who it works better for and who it does not. The market, the politics, and the planner all have a place at the table again. Their weapon of choice, in their desire for control, the masterplan. The architects will just sit outside and twiddle their thumbs.
 
 
The Myth of Revitalization: Re-isolation

PRETEND
Urban revitalization is every city council member’s dream. No longer do they have to annex, it is now happening within their limits. It is an opportunity to add new value. Time for the masterplan and design standards. Would not want this to happen without our finger on the trigger. Mix-use sounds good. The brick is the ultimate tool of history. It reinforces the past just by the way it looks.
LINE
The gated community in the suburb has an entry point. It is its time to shine. A big sign and a name that evokes the sereneness of nature always works. They flaunt their intentions with the gate. The district, on the other hand, hides them. Their problem is they cannot resist the temptation of drawing their line of demarcation and they name themselves. NoDo, SoDo, or whatever the name. A new district was just made (probably where one once stood last week). At that moment, the gig is up. These districts are happening in the city and the notion of revitalization means that there was something that was not as nice as it could be. The moment that they showed their hand, they made clear that they only want the good parts. The brick storefronts (perfect for coffee shops) and the old factories (the lofts will be amazing) are all they are after. Revitalization does not want or care about the social and economic baggage of the surroundings. Everyone has missed the boat with gentrification. It is not that it happens where the less privileged live, it happens near them. Those districts have always had economic life and able to support themselves, but revitalization redraws the line of isolation (as if the highway that broke the neighborhood in the 50’s was not enough). The district revitalization is not meant to kick people out, it just ties the noose. The market will take care of the rest.
MILLENIALS
Ask the internet, millennials are all about minimalism and living for the experience. They are racing to the city. They are inhabiting these new hip districts. Tech jobs lead their charge. You can tweet for your job now. Things do not matter to these people. They are a generation unlike any before...wait, but are they? Think our grandparents that said that about our parents and they turned out just fine (like them with a car and oceans of square feet). Millennials, let’s talk when your 40. Your race back to isolation will be just in time. We only build for 20 years now and the next dose of revitalization will come around soon. Ahhh routine.
 

​Island in the Sun

INSTABILITY
Back to where we started, MANHATTAN, the ultimate instability. The resistance. The island and blocks that locked it in place and set the stage for the Culture of Congestion and Manhattanism that protects it from the emptiness of the American city today. It still stands as the Rosetta Stone, but in a world where the stone was forgotten. Social life still thrives, not because isolation and routine have not attempted to control it, but because of the culture of congestion. Land has only gotten more scare and population is always on the rise. Rem saw congestions potential, but knew its only chance of success was to become hyper-congested on levels unknown at the time. Manhattan has resisted and its battle cry is the honking horn. Take ridesharing for example (Uber or Lyft). In all cities, it only reinforces the highway. Now you can use someone else’s car to get from place to place. Its goal is anti-congestion. Less cars on the street. Manhattan, on the other hand, engulfs Uber. The efficiency does not exist because hyper-congestion exists. 
POSTMORTEM
Manhattan stands alone. The irony is the same people who created the invisible city, idolized Manhattan (the Rosetta stone) in school. The island, its geography, was the only resistance.
LIGHT
The block may hold the key. These singular moments among the whole. A few hundred feet separate the person from the next adventure. Le Corbusier needed a blank island for his tabula rasa. The real tabula rasa lies within the street. The beauty of this is there are many blocks within our cities that lie blank. Resist like Manhattan, there might still be time.
 
​-Alex Moore
Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press.

Marcel Duchamp's readymades were shocking to the art world during their time of creation. They were a sort of off shoot from the Dada movement, but never had a manifesto for his work. This project was meant to modernize the meaning of the readymade in a manifesto. Duchamp never seemed to necessarily go out of his way to defend the art work, but it really came down to the principle behind it. The artist has the control to determine what is art and what is not. This was pivotal in the abstract art movement. ​The Readymades created an intense debate between the “establishment” and the more extreme members of the Dada movement. In the present, those questions of reality are very relevant. The manifesto works in short stages and questions all facets of, not only art, but society. That was also an underlying goal of Duchamp. In the end, it is up to artist, opinion giver, and whoever controls the message, truth is now in question always. As our world polarizes, it forces everyone to take a side and debate, and that’s all that was desired in the first place. 

-Alex Moore