dutch tweet: Calvinistische Guurheid

It started to hurt the urgency to address real social problems (inequality and homelessness) a long time ago. Some faculties should reconsider the effectiveness of their role in society. If you think that this sounds like a right-wing talking point, please think (and observe) again.

A bit more rigour in science and academia would help. Some spatial planning and architecture faculties are expert in rebranding, recombining and repackaging what has been conceived before, but have difficulty to go beyond 'bricolage' and reproduction production.

My point: we still have 'some' work ahead to create consensus to address social and ecological sustainability as a single issue. Everytime someone comes up with new semantic distractions, it doesn't really help. We need real solutions, real agency, not fancy new packaging of old concepts.

Oswald Mathias Ungers and Peter Riemann, Final archipelago drawing for Berlin: A Green Archipelago. Urban Planning Manifesto, 1977. Pen, ink and colour pencil on transparent paper, 675 x 635 mm. UAA Ungers Archiv für Architkturwissenschaft, Köln.

drawingmatter.org/drawing-a-me...

In retrospect the biggest intellectual shitshow around must have been Baudrillard. 'What are you doing after the orgy?' was a memorable pick-up line but the idea that the state of our culture is subject to cyclic movements is an absolute fallacy for the inertia-perverts among us...

the new buzz-words between architects and landscape architects with a focus on #sustainability and #sustianabledevelopment are #conviviality and #regenerative living environments. I think we should wait for #AGI to clean up this mess.

AI 2027 A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

ai-2027.com #AI #AIfutures Predicting February 2027: "With new capabilities come new dangers. The safety team finds that if Agent-2 somehow escaped from the company and wanted to “survive” and “replicate” autonomously, it might be able to do so. " The essay is from April 2025.

"somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, the collected works of Thomas Pynchon."

Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America “Shadow Ticket,” Pynchon’s first book in a dozen years, unfolds its conspiracies in Depression-era Milwaukee and beyond, but it lands in a moment when reality seems to have caught up with his fictions...

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Attempting to discuss the concept of incongruity with a LLM…
What a waste of everybody’s time

#chatGPT

Oh. That clarifies everything. Correlation saves the day.

There's a big piece on resistance to AI and Luddism in the New Yorker — pleased to see @jathansadowski.com's great book and This Machine Kills get shouts, as well as a nice nod to Blood in the Machine.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

And by the way, you don't have to bring a passport if my understanding of spanish is correct...

Old time favorite travelling options for cross border travel between Mexico and the US - conceived by the artist Javier Tellez

Why Marine Le Pen should be allowed to run for president Punish the offender without also punishing French democracy

Surprised to see @economist.com on the ‘politicians should be allowed to do crimes without consequences’ team. www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

Either author has more background info than willing to share or the entire @economist.com staff just returned from a nasty ski resort. Incomprehensible bends frame trias politica as obsolete. Why not simply observe that this particular law could be up for revision, considering the impact on society?

In the 1930s, thousands of central Europeans landed in Britain. From architects like Erno Goldfinger to sociologists like Ruth Glass, our book of the week shows how émigrés injected modernist energy into a drab, insular culture.

By Owen Hatherley

buff.ly/ZghV82r

Or, like an acclaimed architect 25 yrs ago phrased while curating the Venice Biennale: 'Less Aesthetics More Ethics'. In retrospect a blatant confession that the profession facilitates the greenwashing of all dubious moral highgrounds, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America's unbeautiful suburban sprawl | Alexander Hurst I drove 2,000 miles with a French friend across my home country – and saw the endless nowhere land that is the crucible of Trumpism, says Guardian Europe correspondent Alexander Hurst

Nihilsm is a perfectly coherent aesthetic paradigm, what's the problem here?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The writer Owen Hatherley with a background showing span housing in Greenwich

📢 Introducing InterCities – Owen Hatherley's new podcast for Open City travelling through time and space to a series of buildings, spaces and historical moments across London, Britain, and the world. First ep: Greenwich with Ana Francisco Sutherland 🎧https://shows.acast.com/opencity

Spies and socialists in Belsize Park | Apollo Magazine The Isokon Building has become an architectural icon, but its own history is full of scandal and Central European emigrés, writes Owen Hatherley

The Isokon Building in Belsize Park in London has become an architectural icon, and its own history is full of scandal and Central European emigrés, writes Owen Hatherley

Herman Jessor (1894–1990) - The Architectural Review <p class="p2">The unsung architect of New York City’s ‘co-operative commonwealth’ designed housing that put people before profit</p>

‘In Co‑op Village, Rochdale Village, and the mammoth Co‑op City, Jessor’s work combined the cheapest materials, severe repetition and a consistent concern with the quality of interior space,‘ Owen Hatherley wrote in the AR.

Read more about Jessor’s work in AR September 2023: Property:

Thank you, Herman Jessor Thank you, Herman Jessor presents work by the late New York architect Herman Jessor (1894–1990), a Cooper Union alum who designed more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing throughout his sixty-yea...

Herman Jessor is the most important radical architect you’ve never heard of. Now, The Cooper Union is staging an exhibition dedicated to the 40,000 co-operative housing units he designed for New York City from the 1930s to the ’70s.

Waiting for the second revised edition...
www.theguardian.com/books/articl...

Eminent Domain: I grab your land if it's in the public interest. Autocracy Inc. on ketamine: hold my beer, and by the way, what is public interest?

"The same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities’ ultrawealthy backers. These are going to be cities..without democracy, without workers' rights, where the owners, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power..anti-freedom cities.”

"freedom cities could also be used as manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, allowing builders to bypass the environmental review process" You would assume the US has ample experience with laissez-faire urban developement. Next level of 'what could go possibly go wrong?'

The Memoirs of Louise Michel (in English) - Louise Michel The complete translated Memoirs of Louise Michel, free to read online. Read Louise Michel biographies, 1871 Paris Commune and Louise Michel quotes here!

louisemichel.com/the-memoirs-...

Move over Milan: property investors set their sights on spruced-up Rome Rome is in the sights of professional real estate investors after Milan took more than half of their investments in Italy in the past five years.

Having made property investments in Milan, Italian architect Giuseppe Pezzano is now looking for a place in Rome to set up a second home and studio, as the Italian capital's underdeveloped real estate sector draws fresh attention reut.rs/4b9GBGa