Serendipity

An old friend sent me this via Messenger the other day. He discovered it when he was moving house. Well it's something I did when I was doing my diploma back in 1987 at PCL. It's an appropriately fragile, tiny, bit of residue, but precious for that of course, and I was amazed it popped up just now, electronically, because as a consequence it can go straight in to next weeks CC3 lecture on 'Populism'.
The statement and demand seems as pertinent now as it did then, but the outcome of pondering it might be rather different. At the time, and in retrospect, it repudiated (along with another project my old friend reminded me of: 'Billboard as a Very Thin Building') those concepts of both both 'space' and 'meaning' I didn't (and still don't) understand. Further, it precipitated (eventually) a long period of time 'studying' Las Vegas.
Now, we wonder at the viability of consumption/consumerism itself as we choke within it.
And it's not been that long a time frame; less than thirty years. Is that time of life or time of man?
I was re-reading one of the essays I wrote on Las Vegas only yesterday: The Landscape of Luxury from Jonathan Hill's book 'Occupying Architecture', a real time capsule from 1998. I was actually looking back at Jane Rendell's essay also caught within, but thought maybe I should look at my own too; only fair if you like. I was shocked; we were all, if you like, just so busy throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But it was a good thought to have had, back in the day, and back then a project could be just an A4 sheet of paper, and whats more it had far reaching consequences (at least for me). So the moral of the story must be something close to 'be careful what you wish for'; it will certainly come and bite you in the ass. Or perhaps, keep on asking the big questions, they might just carry you along.
Meanwhile I wonder how I made it, there were no computers or anything.