At first glance, architecture, continuing its slow descent from its 20th-century heyday to today's rather marginal pursuit, has rarely appeared so denuded and impotent as when engaged in pop-up architecture. For a trade once predicated on mighty civic investment, to see architecture scrabbling around with leftover materials in the leftover gaps between leftover buildings is a little disappointing. Many pop-ups resist the idea of architecture altogether, simply taking place in whatever spaces are available; those that engage in new building are generally small parasitical entities, clinging on to the hulk of the existing city, or left alone to grow in the cracks between buildings, like weeds. Yet just as a weed can be thought of as a perfectly reasonable plant caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps these interventions could be useful elsewhere, at another point, when reframed in an entirely different way? Judged as architecture, through the traditional lens architecture is judged by, 'there is no there there'.1 But with a different conception of architecture in mind, as a medium for the production of social effects, these pop-ups and pavilions could be a kind of sketchbook for the city, a form of R&D for civic space and for architecture itself.
展开▼
