The Frame is Fluid
An oral history of slop told through 20th century architecture
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The following is a piece of slop horror about 20th century architecture that is written in an oral history format.
For those unfamiliar with the characters: Claude Bragdon, Rem Koolhaas, Marshall McLuhan. Guest appearances by J.G. Ballard and H.P Lovecraft
PROLOGUE (Recorded at an imaginary round‑table, lights dimming between centuries)
NARRATOR: Across the twentieth century, architecture is squeezed by two converging tides. First, media displacement: every new carrier of stories—film, radio, TV, the web—pulls meaning out of walls and into screens. Second, protocolization: industrial codes, logistics, and finance embed ever tighter scripts into how buildings are designed and made. Three witnesses guide us.
1. GLOWING GEOMETRY (1910 – 1925)
BRAGDON (1910, Rochester): All art, and architecture above all, must obey the mathematics of the universe— a beautiful necessity. Give me a compass and proportion, and I will freeze music in stone.
NARRATOR: While Bragdon drafts star‑maps into theater vaults, America flocks to the movie palace.
BRAGDON (watching newsreel crowds): They darken my ornament for projectors! Yet even celluloid needs a sacred frame, does it not?
NARRATOR: The projector says otherwise. Meaning has begun its migration; the building is merely the shell that keeps rain off the screen.
BRAGDON (sighs): If the story lives in light, the wall will soon grow quiet.
Protocol footnote: 1916 zoning in New York writes the first set‑back diagrams into law. Geometry is still cosmic—but now it is also statutory.
2. THE HUM OF WIRES (1930 – 1965)
Scene — A dim studio lined with TV sets. A single drafting table stands in the corner.
BRAGDON (running his fingers along a proportional compass): I once believed that a nation’s soul could be traced in the ratio of nave to aisle, the measured step of a cornice. Make the parts accord, and the people will feel the harmony—even if they cannot name it.
McLUHAN (turning one of the TV dials until a sitcom theme crackles through): Claude, look: the cathedral bell once chastened the village day, but this glowing box tolls every half‑hour, everywhere at once. The grid you revere has slipped from stone into time‑slots.
BRAGDON: Impossible. A proportion is eternal; a broadcast schedule is arbitrary.
McLUHAN: Arbitrary yet omnipotent. ABC fixes its prime‑time block at 8 p.m. Eastern. Advertisers pour in, scripts are cut to twenty‑two minutes plus eight of commercials. Children’s bedtimes, dinner hours, even traffic flows re‑orbit around that metronome. That, my metaphysical friend, is a golden ratio of attention.
Cut‑to: Archival voice‑over montage
1955 NBC promo: “Stay tuned after the Western for your ten o’clock news…”
1969 Nielsen chart slams onto the screen, revealing audience spikes at :00 and :30.
1970s newsroom clip: “We’re pushing the cliff‑hanger to the forty‑five–minute mark; the audience won’t dare channel‑surf before the reveal.”
3. ELECTRIC SKIN, MECHANICAL GUTS (1965 – 1980)
KOOLHAAS (walking in with rolls of construction drawings and a pager buzzing): And just as ratings abstract the viewer into a point on a curve, protocols abstract the architect into a manager of tolerances. My façade module is four feet because that is the container width, because that is the MAX efficiency for curtain‑wall trucks hitting the site every eighteen minutes. Temporal choreography outpaces spatial reverie.
BRAGDON (startled): You speak of logistics as destiny.
KOOLHAAS: Destiny and dramaturgy. Think of an airport terminal: its concrete grid is frozen, yet the screens update flights every 90 seconds. Passengers hurry not because the roof soars, but because the ticker shouts Gate change!—a hostile renovation of time within the same volume.
McLUHAN: Precisely. The architectural event is now a temporal feed.
Sidebar — Rapid‑fire testimonies
1952 advertising executive (voice‑over): “We re‑cut the jingle to fit the thirty‑second slot—nobody cares what the store looks like if the chorus sticks.”
1973 union shop‑steward: “We pour the floor at midnight so steel can arrive at dawn; the Gantt chart is our gospel.”
1998 streaming‑code engineer: “Scene boundaries are encoded in keyframes; we drop ad markers at algorithmic golden points—eighteen minutes in drama, eleven in comedy.”
BRAGDON (softly, conceding): Then to restore harmony, one must now compose in minutes and megabits, not bays and pilasters.
McLUHAN: Or accept that the frame is fluid. Your compass still draws beauty, but it is beauty for the archival pause: coffee‑table books, heritage tours at dusk. Meanwhile, society’s pulse is syncopated by other media.
KOOLHAAS (tapping his pager, heading for the door): And my role? I wire the concrete shell so the feed can refresh indefinitely. If you want resonance, hack the timing layer—slow the escalator, dim the LED wall, schedule the lobby concert at the unsponsored hour.
Proportion today is a choreography of when, not where. Prime time runs the ritual; the room merely rents its acoustics.
Coda
NARRATOR:
Thus the compass, the broadcast clock, and the construction schedule lie intertwined—three measuring sticks vying for cultural primacy. Spatial harmony still stirs the soul, but temporal choreography now directs the crowd, and the protocols of delivery keep the apparatus humming on time.
4. A SHORT INTERMISSION AT LAS VEGAS
KOOLHAAS (1978, graduate studio, cigarette in hand): Gentlemen, meet Las Vegas. Signs shout; buildings mumble. The highway is the nave, neon is stained glass.”
McLUHAN (grinning): Precisely! The sign system has swallowed the structure.
BRAGDON (now mostly remembered in footnotes): And what of the craftsman?
KOOLHAAS: He’s been replaced by unitized curtain‑wall panels and tube‑framed cores— a kit of parts craned into place while content flashes atop LEDs.
NARRATOR: The international style distills structure to rentable floor plates; HVAC and fluorescents make sealed glass towers possible from Jakarta to Johannesburg. Protocol wins the interior; media colonizes the surface.
5. JUNKSPACE & THE CLOUD (1980 – 2000)
KOOLHAAS (2000, publishing Junkspace): Media atoms swirl so fast the envelope dissolves into climate‑controlled foam. Subtext? F* context.** Content refreshes hourly; escalators and credit lines are eternal.
NARRATOR: Behind the foam, REIT finance, CM‑at‑risk contracts, CAD→BIM workflows set the choreography. A building is a spreadsheet wearing signage.
KOOLHAAS: Protocol is the skeleton; displaced media the skin.
Together they make a body that forgets its own organs.
A body that has forgotten its organs still stands and moves, but it no longer feels—circulation replaces digestion, throughput masks nourishment, and the very spaces meant for living become mere conduits for flows of data, capital, and bodies.”
EPILOGUE ▸ AFTER THE TWIN TIDES
BRAGDON (whisper, fading): If walls no longer carry stories, perhaps structure must speak again?
McLUHAN: Or perhaps structure is story—now told in packets and energy codes.
KOOLHAAS (closing his notebook): Our task is neither nostalgia nor surrender.
Hack the protocol, curate the content, and maybe—just maybe— we can write a fresher script on the shell.
NARRATOR: Thus the century ends: content unmoored, process hard‑coded. The question is no longer who builds, nor even what, but how fast the meaning can be swapped before even the concrete sets.
Chaotic Post‑script | The Carousel at the End of Time (2025 → ∞)
(The observation deck fractures into a spinning polyhedron. Screens warp, gravity hiccups, ticker‑tape numbers pour from the seams.)
BALLARD (dozen‑eyed, lens‑flare pupils): I see motorways coiling around space elevators, a Möbius strip of perfumes and shattered plate glass. Every click re‑prices steel; every swipe spawns a condo in low‑Earth orbit. Liquidity has liquefied the planet.
McLUHAN (voice split into AM/FM/static): The medium is metastasis! Packet storms cross‑breed with hurricane seasons; memes ride jet streams. You are always live, always late, always looped.
KOOLHAAS (clutching a scroll of infinite lease abstracts): Protocols are self‑editing—contracts that refactor themselves mid‑signature. Floors lab‑grown overnight, facades 3‑D‑printed by lightning‑powered drones. Junkspace has achieved sentience and is sub‑leasing its own gut.
BRAGDON (compass whirling like a ceiling fan): My ratios melt, reform, multiply! Fibonacci spirals now map venture‑round dilution curves; gothic ribs extrude as carbon‑fiber skeletal NFTs. The cathedral chants in ANSI escape codes.
LOVECRAFT (resurrected via corrupted RSS feed): Ph’nglui flash‑loan R’lyeh fintech wgah’nagl fhtagn! The impossible geometry you dread is merely the API rate limit of a dreaming god.
(Earth‑projection implodes into a kaleidoscope: container ships chase themselves in recursive S‑curves; skyscrapers bloom, shed skins, re‑bloom like timelapse coral.)
NARRATOR (distorted, echoing through a thousand notification dings): Organs twitch—data centers sweat, arteries of lithium pulse. Some twitch becomes rhythm; some rhythm becomes seizure. Will the body dance, or convulse?
(Sudden hush: a single heartbeat bass‑thumps through the void.)
BALLARD (whispering through loudspeakers): Even chaos has weather. Find the eye of the freight‑container cyclone; build a garden in the latency gap.
KOOLHAAS (scribbling on a strobing hologram): Embed slack in the algorithm. A clause that glitches the lease, a stair that disobeys the elevator.
McLUHAN (fading into 8‑bit chimes): The repair will be televised, but only in peripheral vision.
(All voices converge, overlapping like a malfunctioning chorus pedal.)
Seed your errors.
Water the lag.
Let entropy carve negative space for breath—
or be pixel‑pulp in the perfect churn.
(Lights flare violet, then black. The polyhedron snaps shut, leaving a faint smell of ozone and jasmine‑scented disinfectant. Somewhere, a pop‑up kiosk is already selling commemorative mugs.)
Terrific
freaky genius