Call for Submissions - Pidgin Issue 19: Magic
Register/Submit Deadline: Monday, Jan 5, 201511:59 PMEDT
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Call for submissions of original written and visual work for Pidgin, Princeton University School of Architecture's student-run journal:
Architecture has historically been a locus of entanglement for the spatial and the spiritual, the rational and the ritual, the concrete and the metaphysical. If in our Adorno-inflected modernity “art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth,”(1) is Architecture also inculpated in this disenchantment of the world? Have we lost the magic?
Disbelief in magic may seem fundamental to our institutional and social structures, but today the boundaries between reason and wizardry are increasingly unclear. The newly elected chairman of the Senate environmental committee prophesies global warming to be The Greatest Hoax(2), while opponents consider his science to be “like Harry Potter for people who thought Harry Potter had too much science in it.”(3) If, in dark periods of war and unrest, belief in the paranormal, astrological, and magico-mythical multiplies, it would seem that Architecture also resorts to charms, sacrifices, and divinations.
Architectural magic takes many forms, neither black nor white. The veil between rendering and reality waxes and wanes. Alchemic architects transform systemic inequalities into grandeur and monumentality. Technological incantations promise the impossible. Recognizing that in the illusory spaces of the discipline every question is ostensibly a trick question, it is here that we ask: Do you believe in architecture?
Submit to [email protected] by January 5, 2015.
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 143.
- See James N. Inhofe, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2012).
- The Colbert Report. November 6th, 2014. US: Central Productions.
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