Please note that Diploma Unit 15 is on sabbatical for 2010/11 and will not be running.
Antique Futures II
Francesca Hughes and Noam Andrews
I should like to describe the novel and unusual things I noticed during my stay on the moon.
Verae Historiae, Lucian (AD 120–180)
Back to the Future
While nineteenth-century Grand Tourists were visiting Pompeii and the Pantheon by candlelight, Charles Babbage’s analytical machine, Wallace Farmer’s electric dynamo and Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope (precursors of the computer, the lightbulb and the movies) were being unveiled back home, within the purposebuilt pyramids and pantheonic domes of the London, Paris and Philadelphia World Fairs. The artifice of the antique has always been embedded with mappings of the present’s desired futures and, conversely, the future has often dressed itself in antique trappings.
Two supercontexts – Antiquity and The Future – are again engaged with this year via the vehicles of the Grand Tour and the World Fair, focusing on the extraordinary nineteenth-century moment when the two coexisted. If, as our research last year demonstrated, the Grand Tour can be understood as a generative cultural infrastructure connecting a set of technological, cultural and natural contexts which organised and reconstructed our relations to the Antique past, then the World Fair similarly reorganised our relations to the technologically promiscuous future, transplanting and centralising a set of destinations, events and technologies into a hyper-condensed, singular event – such as an entire Madagascan village for the Human Zoo exhibit (Paris Fair, 1889). The future and its relations to the past were never more multiple than at this contentious site of empirical performance, scientific quackery and seemingly promising technologies.
The political visions of the twentieth century were the undoing of The Future as an effective category: architecture no longer knows how to use it without burdening it with (now vacuous) utopian or ideological content. The unit’s continuing research into the performance of post-digital ‘context’ and the instrumentalisation of its role in contemporary architectural production and epistemology takes us this year to the artifice-laden fabrication of Antique Futures. We will mine the ancient past for alternative models to both the failed heroics of the twentieth century and the dubious historicism of the nineteenth in order to evade the cul de sac of ‘future now’. The acrobatics of historicity will be our trade, its saturated artifice the nemesis of the instrumentalist rationale. The unit maintains relations with structural engineer and historian of civil engineering, Matthew Wells.
Francesca Hughes joined the AA in 2003. She has lectured internationally and served as external examiner both in the UK and abroad. Author/editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press, 1996), she is currently completing a book entitled False Economies: The Architecture of Error. Hughes Meyer Studio is a multidisciplinary practice whose work has been published by AR, ANY, Art Forum, Merrell and Routledge.
Noam Andrews is director of Wunderkammer (wk-studio.com). He previously worked in New York and Paris, including spells at Studio Daniel Libeskind and Atelier Seraji, and is currently writing a dissertation at the London Consortium on space in parametric design.
