Blablablarchitecture is going on air! Joe Public will be talking buildings once a week on Chicken Town Radio! The ideas include getting the everyman (the local butcher, the Hackney fashion bike shop retailer, the kiwi fascist coffee connoisseurs, the London Pearly Kings and Queens singing to raise money….) and the everyday to talk, or sound off, about the built environment and user occupation. What does building mean? If buildings could talk what would they say? Heck, we will probably start with the roots of blablablarchitecture and open with Mister Ed, the 50’s American sitcom of a talking horse who only spoke to his owner, an architect. The discourse of architecture is fantastically dense yet inappropriately opaque, so perhaps blablablarchitecture on Chicken Town Radio can break it all down…
There is an Antipodean precursor to architectural criticism as talk-back radio: check the dulcet Aussie drawl of: Radio Architects on Melbourne’s finest Triple R.
And beyond radio, “Living Architectures is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture which turns away from the current trend of idealising the representation of our architectural heritage. Through these films, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine put into question the fascination with the picture, which covers up the buildings with preconceived ideas of perfection, virtuosity and infallibility, in order to demonstrate the vitality, fragility and vulnerable beauty of architecture as recounted and witnessed by people who actually live in, use or maintain the spaces they have selected. Thus, their intention is to talk about architecture, or rather to let architecture talk to us, from an «inner» point of view, both personal and subjective.” The first project of the Living Architectures series was Rem Koolhaas’ Maison à Bordeaux from 1998. The film lets the viewer enter into the house’s daily intimacy through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building. Pungent, funny and touching.”