Form Follows Fable

"Form Follows Fable"
A Futures Salon with Bryan Boyer
Friedman Room, Saunders Hall 624
2pm-330pm, Wednesday 1 April 02009

Once all the zoning laws have been cited, the richness of the site exposed as constructed, the minutia of fabrication turn out to be simply minutia, the algorithms run their course, the discipline disbanded, and the history books pillaged bare and then burnt... what is left to stand on? What tiny, shoddy piece of ground may the designer find to plant their feet, grab hold of their bootstraps, and make manifest a project? There's no ground left at all; we're all astronauts orbiting a toxic earth, a hunk of rock on which we find it increasingly difficult to agree upon anything. The boundaries and edges that architects have been trained to exploit - between cultures, places, ideologies - are vanishing with the breathable air of our atmosphere.

Finding themselves floating, the architect now awakens and does what any sufficiently bored person would: they dream up stories that explain the universe, their place in it, the things around them, and their own output. In its best moments, architecture, much like a fable, operates as an alternate reality engine by giving shape, texture, and orientation to the vacuum. Letting Form Follow Fable yields a rich architecture of mysteries and clues that is designed to be legible to the client, the public, and fellow architects alike...

BRYAN BOYER is a designer and writer working at the intersection of architecture and politics. Equally at home in the worlds of critical design theory and practice, since 02004 he has been Senior Editor at the online architecture hub, Archinect.com, and he is currently in residence at the Finnish innovation agency, Sitra. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boyer's internationally-noted Master's thesis project critically and controversially reimagined the United States Capitol building.

The FUTURES SALON is an occasional colloquium series held by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and has previously featured author-activist Bill McKibben, Jamais Cascio, cofounder of Worldchanging and research affiliate at Institute for the Future, and Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation.

This event is presented with the cooperation of the UHM Department of Political Science.


[Images from Our New Capitol courtesy of Bryan Boyer]