Welcome

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Man would seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between monkey and building. Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly dominant. From the very outset, in any case, the human and architectural orders make common cause, the latter being only the development of the former. Therefore an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man. Currently, an entire earthly activity, and undoubtedly the most intellectually outstanding, tends, through the denunciation of human dominance, in this direction. Hence, however strange this may seem when a creature as elegant as the human being is involved, a path traced by painters – opens up toward bestial monstrosity, as if there were no other way of escaping the architectural straitjacket.  – Bataille

The city as well as the society is often thought of as something we should be able to control. But what atmospheres and societies are we supporting when we expect order to be reached and when keeping order (any order) as an ideal? We see conservative protectors of dominant and so called traditional orders seemingly having perfect conditions to grow and flourish and I want to discuss how this perfect growing conditions are created and maintained. I wish to question the need for order and discuss the qualities of the uncontrolled.

Dealing with the uncontrolled is to be dealing with monsters. Monsters are never controlled or tame. They are in a state of constant change and therefore also frightening (they are never still long enough to be known). But monsters are more than frightening. With the words of Jonnie Eriksson, the monster is “the concept of the new concept, the idea of the open idea”. Instead of aiming for an extinction of monsters could we possibly aim for a monster conservation of sorts? Where we create and find home in an atmosphere of change & transformation?

It is a poor recipe for producing monsters to accumulate heteroclite determinations or to overdetermine the animal. It is better to raise up the ground and dissolve the form. – Deleuze