*Good Lord. It's a massive eruption of the stuff.
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/documents-maps-and-files-of-fictional.html
"DOCUMENTS, MAPS, AND FILES OF A FICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE
"One of the more interesting student projects I've seen in a long time used a "document-based" approach to architecture to fabricate an entire fictional world—one in which top secret underground research labs, militarized bacteria, artificial earthquakes, and much more were all found conspiring beneath the streets of Berlin, Baghdad, and Istanbul.
"A group project by three students at Columbia's GSAPP—Yuval Borochov, Lisa Ekle, and Danil Nagy, under the guidance of professor Ed Keller—Protocol Architecture was pitched as a team that "investigates potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents. These document sets create evidence for future scenarios that string together a specific history of political, social, and technological developments."
"As such, Protocol's work becomes less architectural than it is archival:
"By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.
"The resulting fictional archives—or "fabricated histories," as the architects describe them—allowed the group to question "the role that fact and evidence plays in how we perceive our own history and our place as designers within it."
"As Yuval Borochov explained to me in an email: "Protocol Architecture is a forum for investigations that challenge the traditional design process and situate every project in its own tangential line of history. We found that... the design opportunities within the plot holes of history are quite liberating. You know, I read a statement by Rem Koolhaas, in a book of his conversation with Peter Eisenman, where he explains his attempts to become the 'architect as journalist.' I think Protocol Architecture is akin to this mode of operation. Perhaps architects as historiographers."
"Their semester's worth of work was remarkably varied—and mind-bogglingly prolific—and it can all be explored on their website. However, I want to focus here on three aspects of their document-based approach: The Rühmann Notebook, The Nesin Map, and The Wilbert Contracts.
"Before I go much further, though, I have to say that I genuinely think this approach—and the resulting work—bears comparison to books by writers like China Miéville or Franz Kafka, (((well, yes, and it raises the intriguing but obviously dangerous possibility that people might hire the likes of China Mieville and Franz Kafka to build houses, or even do some urban planning))), even filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, (((worse yet!))) for whomever might find those coordinates intriguing.
"These fictional documents frame entirely self-contained imaginary worlds, and each one of these ideas deserves radical expansion elsewhere, in forms beyond architectural design; as such, they seem at least as appropriate for discussing with a literary agent as they are with the dean of an architecture school. ..."
(((and after that, it starts getting good!)))
(((You know you are "fiction" when you have a book instead of a building.)))
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/protocol-architecture—recovering-berlin/11038169
