Pre Dystopia and Post Structure.

The Lure of the City.  Hugh Ferris (1925)

I am fascinated by construction and buildings, but not always the complete, more so the failed aspects of it.  I certainly do not buy into the feverish property booms that the world has had in a synchronized manner.  Most of today's buildings are rubbish to look at, prefabricated into modernist designs.  Cheap and poorly built.  A scam via lower interest rates, developers buying up released government land, banks and pensions funds - awaiting China to buy everything amidst trade and new cold wars.

Very pre-dystopia, despite the term being over used.  As we have no idea what a dystopian breakdown will look after it blows up.

So we lie and wait.

In 2014 I wrote a story called "Professor Daimon" (from the novel "When Times Ends, the Seasons Begin").  This could be said, if anyone cares to know, the beginning of presenting a society and its human aspects that transfuse within time and matter.  Simplicity and complexity as one.  But, the question/s remain.  How do we leave our mark or legacy within the natural construct?  Do we work against time?  Structure, fundamentally should be a testament to human endurance.  But rather they are made as though they have already (metaphorically) collapsed as soon as they've been built. With its attached weakness, most architecture today holds very little structural interest to me, unless it is visually reconfigured.  Through the imagination and/or fiction.  What is ever is created and becomes within my line of sight, I change it and make it mine.   Within that chapter I created a fictional architect being interviewed.   Excerpt below:    

"An image appears of a man in his late forties being interviewed as he walks through the streets of Paris.
 “You see, the building is man, his structure, his ideals, his life...his future.  But the thing is, this...”  Pointing to a Art Norveau style arch that sits over the entrance of a small Paris cafe.  “...it outlives man.  Because it is supposed too.  You design to create an impression of life that transcends away from the very existence of life.  That at the same time absorbs and sustains life. The question, for the designer, architect is;  Are we creating life? Is a building alive?” He then points to the jade like Art Noveau ceramic work around the early nineteen hundred's arch.  “...This is alive, organic. Beautiful. Do you see?”
The footage then shows shots of vast skyscrapers built in the middle east, China.  Next we see Schlémil sitting at a table in front of him are small blocks of wood in various shapes, in which he is aligning in different forms.  A voice of the interview is heard in the background.  “What do you think of modern architecture?  The designs of today?”
“Horrible, they are a travesty...We are living in a time of illusions, you cannot completely blame governments, or institutions, religion...Or whatever.  We are partly to blame, I say that generally.  We aspire for an equality of wealth in a system of exploitation.  You are then sold a cheap substitute for your gullibility.  Right now, the buildings that are created, it is like...Potemkin Villages, a facade, they are lifeless, dead...Nothing.  That is the creations of today.  That is the architects of today, they built an already doomed structure which is, like I said, that is dead, it is not alive.”
“I read a piece you wrote for an art magazine a little while back, you mentioned that architecture should build structure in time for a trans-humanism existence...This is tied into your theory of dead and alive buildings.”
“Yes. Do we build a disaster waiting to happen? A dead realm, or do we build, now, for the postworld, a post-humanistic existence?  We must transcend into our structures, as they find form, the architecture then transcends into us...It is the need of becoming one with our creations.  Only then, within the material world, we can exist beyond the material world.  Humanity is in desperate need of this, you see this now, with the wars, our failed concepts of stability, the corruption on human strength an values via superstitious beliefs...”  The footage then shows a closeup of  Schlémil as he looks into the camera.  “...Maybe god did throw the dice one too many times...”  He begins to laugh Wilstrom stops the clip and leans back onto her couch."

From: Professor Daimon, "When Time Ends, the Seasons Begin. (2014)"
Author Adrian Glass