The Pop Vernacular
Sam Jacob, Tomas Klassnik

The unit will explore the idea of architecture as a media form (communicating through the languages it employs). In order to get to grips with architecture as culture, rather than architecture as technology, we need to engage with the idea of image or, more specifically, with the way the ‘image’ of architecture addresses issues of taste and meaning in contemporary culture. We might term this approach Pop Vernacular – pop in the sense of a collective, shared, contemporary folk; vernacular in the way it surrounds us, in the way the everyday landscape is altered by the imprint of surface media and information.

Pop Vernacular draws on time and space – it’s both a graveyard for the superseded and the spawning ground of unexpected futures. The studio will pursue what Busta Rhymes calls ‘spectacular vernacular’ – a radically reanimated zombie postmodernism. To do this we will unravel the mechanisms of pop vernacularism – or how repro, neo and knock-off are used to create something that seems to glow with optimism and freshness where, as Douglas Coupland puts it, ‘nostalgia is a weapon’. We will use varied graphic techniques to develop a language that becomes a significant and speculative architectural act, extending the possibilities of architectural representation.

Techniques of collage, juxtaposition, overlay and montage will be employed to precipitate hybrid graphic languages. The exaggerated stylisation of cartooning will also become a means of heightening communication. Equally, model-making will be a significant element in the unit’s activities. It will be used first at a small scale, to explore the strange transubstantive nature of Pop Vernacular, where ‘wood’, for example, comes in a thousand different flavours or ‘gold’ represents an idea rather than a chemical element. Secondly, large-scale modelmaking will construct explicit and expansive proposals, such as dolls’ houses with narratives that extend from the nostalgically domestic to confront complex issues of identity and meaning. These models will become tools that resist the idea of architecture as abstraction. Borrowing from vernacular modelmaking techniques (model railways, craft kits and so on), the constructions will synthesise an iconographically rich, spatially complex idea of architecture.

To complement these studies, the unit will visit model villages and utopian towns where the relationship of image to ideology is made explicit. These will become the sites first for research and then for proposals, through which we will suggest how programme, typology and language can combine to address specific social and cultural issues.

Bios
Sam Jacob is a director of FAT (fat.co.uk/) and a contributing editor to Icon and columnist for Art Review. Current projects include the design of schools in the UK and The Netherlands, an interior for Selfridges, London, contributions to exhibitions at Arc en Rêve and forthcoming Rotterdam and Shenzen/Hong Kong Architecture Biennials.

Tomas Klassnik is director of The Klassnik Corporation (klassnik.com/), a design practice focused on architectural speculation. Recent projects include proposals for a superheated London in 2035, fantasy bus stops and an arts strategy for the 2012 Olympics. UK correspondent for Deutsche Bauzeitung, he has also taught at Chelsea College of Art and the RCA.