out with the old

Design cycles faster and faster these days. See the New York Times for Flash in the Can: Designs Soon Forgotten. If you have a wall for of antlers or resin deer heads, trade it in quick, or be as hip as a proud owner of a Michael Graves teapot in the supermodern era.

Which begs the question, how can architecture continue to avoid fashion? To be sure, there are mini-fashions, but the blob remains with us a decade after its rightful death. And what is parametric design, after all, then the newest version of Bucky-Fuller-speak? Has architecture even caught up with what I wrote about fashion back in 2001? Maybe instead of less fashion, we need more fashion? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this…

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Goodbye to Cool?

Malcolm Gladwell’s classic New Yorker article on the Coolhunt can be found on his Web site. Not only did this piece inspire William Gibson’s character Cayce in Pattern Recognition, for some of us at SCI_Arc in the late 1990s, when Neil Denari was director, this article allowed us to understand how young architects might break the stranglehold of a neo-avant-garde dominated by 60-something architects. I summed up my position on all this in Architecture After Couture.

But as Grant McCracken points out in his blog post "Who Killed the Coolhunter," Coolhunting failed. Why? In the Quest for Cool, Lev Grossman at Time Magazine suggests that it doesn’t really matter if you are cool anymore.

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