Tim Waterman’s The landscape of utopia: writings on everyday life, taste, democracy, and design

"Hole in Space" (1980), by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, linked New York and LA with a satellite feed.

This collection of essays, all authored and curated by Tim Waterman, foregrounds the entangled nature of utopia(nism), landscape (aka landship), design and imagination, where ‘everything is connected, everything is inseparable, everything can have different meanings and purposes in different contexts’. Food, politics, anarchism, the commons, emancipation, idiocy, conviviality and moral economies all come together in an exercise of (and on) taste as the ability to ethically situate and orient ourselves among a complexity often surpassing academic discourses and practices.

Book review: The landscape of utopia: writings on everyday life, taste, democracy, and design
by Tim Waterman, Abingdon, Routledge, 2022, 218 pp., £25.59 pb, £120 hb, ISBN 978-0-367-75915-5.

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20.05.2023 [Research]

Traces of almojábana(s): FOODSCAPES’ infrastructural semiotics

Foodscapes - Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale

Almojábanas used to be a very popular sweet food in Al-Andalus. These fritters were made from a mixture of water, flour, and cheese, the fried in oil and coated in cinnamon and honey. In current day Spain, we can find its Colombian derivation in many cities as well as local variations in Valencia, Aragon or… View Article

10.01.2023 [Writings]

Digital Doubles: The Major Agency of Minor Bits

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, A paradoxically accurate 43% of blurred uncertainty, 2022. Google’s Cloud Vision API applied to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The tower of Babel (c. 1563) confirms that there is a building in the image with a 57% certainty.

In a world that seeks to describe, codify and quantify everything, and particularly our viscerality and its interactions with our actual and digital environments, can we find interstitial spaces, currently unseen, unobserved and unlegislated, where we might be able to create minor architectures capable of blooming? Published in Architectural Design’s Special Issue:… View Article

14.09.2023 [Teaching]

Minoring Architectural Research

A theoretical and practical reflection on the possibilities, positions and methodologies of a minor approach to architectural research will reveal key concepts and tools to establish a critical position, build a situated architectural investigation and produce research materials otherwise. Minor architectures are an open repertoire of spatial practices and know-hows based on the immanent differentiating… View Article