After church on Sunday, the young men gathered around for their weekly penis-comparison. This doesn’t take the form of us grouping in a corner and comparing sizes. Instead, sophisticates that we are, and nerds that we can’t help but be, we end up arguing over whether PCs are better than Macs. We have an older gentleman who owns a PC but acts as if he is a Mac owner. He purchases products based on how they look and other silly non-criteria like that.
In the midst of a full frontal assault on the “pretension” that is Mac-ownership, one of their number, their would-be leader in fact challenged me in a way I couldn’t respond to on how I can disregard the aesthetic qualities of everyday tools (I love my PCs but they are tools and I don’t choose a hammer based on how it looks and even its ergonomic qualities are subsumed within price considerations) when I am so nutty about architecture.
I didn’t have an answer for him then. So I resorted to the preacher’s first line of defence and may have proclaimed something about architecture being art in three-dimensional space (apologies to any sculptors out there) or some other high-minded rhetoric designed to woo the impressionable. But in the shower this morning I figured out why architecture shouldn’t be included in a discussion about mass-produced consumer goods. My brain works slowly, see. Its a classic case of not knowing what to say in the moment and then having a slap-your-forehead eureka moment once you leave the situation as just the right witty retort rises out of your subconscious.
Architecture is without any exceptions I can think of in the time it takes me to eat this this banana, is a one-off response to a one-off set of design demands. Starting with my least strong case: I live in a large housing estate in an outlying suburb of Dublin in a cardboard mansion. There are a dozen such mansions lining the big park in the middle of our road but they (the entire development) as a whole are a response made with care and diligence by a team of architects and engineers to the constraints presented by this brief. These houses look not a lot different from any other paper-thin space-maximising “executive” housing in and around Dublin but they are different.
This is even more clear in the huge amount of architecture that is done in Ireland that is one-off developments. The church we one day hope to build for example, will be quite unlike anything ever made before. It will be so good that they might copy it or take bits of it here and there and use it elsewhere but it will be a unique response to the needs of our community played off against our budget and set in the scene that is our location. My laptop however is a grey plastic device that was probably produced in a batch with 600,000 twin sisters and shipped all around the world. I think that is great because as a result my laptop was really cheap but it isn’t in any way designed uniquely for me. Even my i-pod which I got given as a gift at Christmas that has my name laser emblazoned on it is the same as a couple thousand other ones but just the letters engraved are different.
This realisation in the shower was brought to you by a Dell Inspiron 510M, a table from IKEA and the unique mind of Zoomtard that was catalysed by God a long time before you realised that buying a computer didn’t actually make you any more creative.
Your Correspondent, Using a banana as a phone