www.pleasestateyourproblem.com: The Talking Cure – A Practicaltioner’s Guide to Dreamwork [or The Decorative Art of Tomorrow Today]

Abstract

This thesis begins with a fourfold provocation: 1. Architectural space is the space that precedes architecture before it is the spaces produced by it. 2. Architects are the avant-gardeners of these architectural archi-spaces before they are the designers of buildings. 3. Architectural agency reflects the cultivation of these collective gardens within which architecture is continually tested, contested, and produced before its evaluation by the marketplace of investors, users, and consumers, and as such, must be the anthologist of its own criteria. 4. In the absence of such a common understanding, architectural meaning is rapidly exhausted by non-architectural commodity metrics, like exchange value, which in turn become the dominant code for evaluating architectural products, exchanging architectural subjectivity, and determining collective architectural action. Observing the joint sublationix 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 alternative national institution (NZIArchitecture.org); an architectural design studio and public relations start-up (The Architectural Compensation Corporation™); a psychoanalysis chatbot, publisher, and event planner (ELIZA©); a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2106 (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe WorldLtd), and a collection of essays, lectures, and multimedia presentations (Help!, Exodus Redux, What is Criticism?, How to History, The Shower of Perception, and How is Architecture?) – each designed to inflect one or more of these categoriex in such a way as to invoke the re-emergence of the hypothesised absent architectural archi-gardens that would otherwise nurture and sustain them. In doing so, this thesis is necessarily contrarian, frustrating, and equivocal. However, these nominal traits belie four cogent propositions that comprise both its point of departure and final determination: Architecture is the process of entering its field; Architecture is a reality producing fiction; Architecture is a joint; Architect