Please State Your Problem

You Must Change Your Life!¹ 

Observing the joint sublimation of the architectural product, practitioner, and organisation by the market economy, alongside the systematic lack of investment in architectural avant-gardening that is, a posteriori, its cause and consequence, this thesis undertakes a series of strategic manoeuvres – conceiving an architectural design studio and public relations start-up (The Architectural Compensation Corporation); an alternative national institution (NZIArchitecture^.org); a psychoanalysis chatbot, publisher, and event planner (ELIZA^TM); a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe World^Ltd), and a collection of essays, lectures, and multimedia presentations (How to History, What is Criticism? How is Architecture? etc.) – each designed to inflect one or more of these categories in such a way as to invoke the (re?)emergence of the hypothesised absent architectural arche-gardens that would otherwise nurture and sustain them.

1. Rilke, R. (1918). Archaic Torso of Apollo.

Architectural space is the space that precedes architecture before it is the spaces produced by it².

2. Architecture is the deferral of building. The uneaten sacrifice. Food for the GODS

Architects are the avant-gardeners of these architectural arche³-spaces before they are the designers of buildings.

3. Arche (ɑːrki; Ancient Greek: ἀρχή) is a Greek word with the primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authority”, or "command". In philosophy arche-‘x’ stands for the first principle or element of ‘x’, the "ultimate underlying substance" or "enabling principle", which, although un-demonstrable and intangible in itself, is its condition of possibility.

Architectural agency reflects the cultivation of these collective gardens within which architecture is continually tested, contested, and produced before its evaluation by the market place of investors, users, and consumers⁴, and as such, must be the anthologist⁵ of its own criteria.

4. i.e. that architectural value exceeds the metrics of the market economy.

5. Literally “flower gathering”, from anthos “a flower” and logia “collection” from legien “gather” from the proto-Indo European root leg- “to gather” with derivatives meaning “to speak (pick out words)”. The modern sense of a collection or collector of poetry (which emerged in Late Greek) is metaphoric: “flowers” of verse, i.e. a collection of small poems by various authors.

In the absence of such a commons architectural meaning is rapidly exhausted by non-architectural commodity metrics like exchange value, which in turn become the dominant code for evaluating architectural products⁶, exchanging architectural subjectivity⁷, and determining collective architectural action⁸