The Designers Republic⁠™ Latent Utopias

[SLIGHT WATER DAMAGE]

In 2002, at the Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher-curated Latent Utopias (Experiments within Contemporary Architecture) exhibition at Steirischer Herbst in Graz, SVA and TDR™ converted a quarter-section of a circular corridor in the Landesmuseum Joanneum into a series of identical, claustrophobic grey cells (capacity 17 people) disconnected by sliding doors and true/false typographical architectural dictates proven and/or disproven by the addition of same-size (UN)/(SO) text from the front/back of the accompanying catalogue.

The catalogue itself was conceived and designed as a prototype for the planned second SVA and TDR™ book focusing on (The) 17 Tendencies In (Of) Architecture (Optical Wall/Permeable Structure/Sequence Shell/Landscaper/Urban Graft etc). The book never happened, weighed down, as it was, in its original incarnation by cultural ambition: Jamie Oliver talking about one tendency in the context of food (luvverly jubbly); another a travelogue through a building with Louis Theroux.

File under — We’re out of time/The pornography of detail/Autopoetry/Swarm Tectonics.