Architectural Aesthetics

Recently, I decided I was going to renovate my room. Not just peeling off the bamboo-print wallpaper, or replacing the rose-embossed ceiling tiles with something less reminiscent of your mother’s lonely friends whose homes stink of cat piss and sugar-free cookies. No, this was going to be drastic, mostly just because I can. I pay no rent, I pay no mortgage. I co-own this house by virtue of the work performed on it. Legality can eat shit and fucking die. I am done with arbitrary human laws, those enforced by either the police or social control. The project I am planning will exist as a testament to that.

This project is also serving as an outlet, a way of using the energy that is no longer consumed by processing alcohol, and as a way of channeling my desire to build and create. Yes, I have other modes of creation that are serving me well, but those work on different parts of my mind. This project will work on a primal level, like the monkeys slaughtering each other at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, both in its conception and its finished form.

I am building a black monolith in the middle of my room.

Not like a monument, honoring the tool-building section of the brain. It will be more like it has fallen from the sky and has crashed through my ceiling and through the floor. Practically, it will function as a divider, separating the sleeping half of the room from the desk I will install. As inspiration, it will serve as a reminder of the ingenuity that struggle and survival demand. But why a fallen monolith in the middle of the room, instead of, say, a motivational poster featuring the World Trade Center exploding?

Because I think it will look cool.

Seriously. That’s the basis and the root of the project. In my experience, too much of architectural talk is spent avoiding that truth, making up bullshit featuring words like “paradigm” and “synergy” just because it would be professional suicide to admit that one just likes how something looks. Any prole could say that; it takes a terminal degree to figure out how to say “I like it” in 1,000 words or more. And, yes, I have a terminal degree, but you know what? I still just like my idea anyway.

For those that care to learn more about this project, I’ll be posting pictures and analysis* here [link working soon-ish!] as they happen. Funds are low right now [about ten dollars to my name, and that's before I go buy hot cocoa mix], but inspiration and motivation high. Announcements will be posted as they happen.

*Yeah, yeah, yeah. Analysis. Even after all that I just wrote. I believe that nonsense is fine as long as you recognize it for what it is: a methodology for exploring innate responses to shifting paradigms that simultaneously exist within and without our realms of understanding related to the passage of cultural trends. You know, bullshit.