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.

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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