blablablarchitecture is talking buildings. In Soundbite 1, we listen to the strange language of architects talking architecture.

As Ike Ijeh reported in BD, the insular language architects deploy is utterly unintelligible to the uninitiated layperson and even to the fellow professionals. This issue appears to be widespread among the avant-garde and within academic echelons. Ijeh cites that with the fall of modernism, architecture lost the rather prosaic discourse say evident in Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture.  The supplanting of the singular grand narrative of  modernism with the multiplicit textural layers of post-modernisms created a context of divergent discourse, which at its worse became a pseudo-intellectualism of misappropriated literary reference. Peter Eisenman’s wholesale appropriation of the work of Jacque’s Derrida as a means to legitimise his own projects comes to mind. The result was a culture of aesthetic complexity: opaque prose accompanied by hieroglyphic representational systems to lend integrity to ideas that had been discredited in the real world.

On the other Zaha Hadid’s straight-talking response to the BBC’s Sarah Montague provides an aural counterpoint: https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/dame-zaha-hadid-walks-out-of

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