mattwagstaffe

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	<title>mattwagstaffe</title>
	<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com</link>
	<description>mattwagstaffe</description>
	<pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2020 20:12:17 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Suburbs Design</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Suburbs-Design</link>

		<pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2020 20:12:17 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Suburbs-Design</guid>

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	SuburbsThe post-war American suburb is relentless in its pursuit of 
normalcy. Turn left, turn right, there’s the same house, with the same perfectly pitched roof, tracing the same slightly curved street modeled after
the same picturesque garden path. In the mornings the patriarchs pull
their identical station wagons out of their identical driveways en route to
their interchangeable white collar jobs in the city, leaving their wives to stay
behind and tend to their mass-manufactured built-in kitchen wares. By
evening’s end, the pot roast recipe from that week’s Good Housekeeping
has materialized, just in time for the returning fathers to gorge on before
tucking in their 1.5 children. Sweet dreams, little ones—but how could
their dreams be otherwise, in this environment of anodyne perfection?
Of course, hiding behind this facade of ordinariness are all sorts of hidden
sins. The suburbs’ glitzy consumer products and shiny automobiles are in
reality guzzlers of gasoline and stompers of carbon footprints. Those spic-
and-span homes attain their magazine-readiness at a cost, namely the un-paid labor of claustrophobic housewives suffering from the “problem with
no name.” And the suburbs’ sunshine-y sameness? Lurking behind the
homogeneity are exclusionary FHA loans and racist redlining practices.
Altogether it’s a wallop: social conformity, environmental degradation, government-sponsored disenfranchisement. Maybe those sweet dreams should’ve
been nightmares after all.
While it took the general public some time to realize that the land of white
picket fences ought to have us screaming in fright, horror makers did not
suffer from the same delay in understanding. Almost as soon as Levitt &#38;amp;
Sons set up their supply chains, Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the
Wall imagined suburbia as a small-minded murderous enclave. Then came
Carrie’s high school horrors, Carpenter’s wordless knife-wielder, Levin’s
robotic Stepfords, Craven’s dream-invading psycho, on up to Laura Palmer’s interdimensional domestic tormentor and the as-yet-to-be-imagined
tract house horrors of the future. In these works of suburban gothic our
fantasy of pastoral bliss is torn asunder. While these frightmavens may not
be consciously evoking the more academic critiques of suburbia adumbrated above, their primordial narratives of killers-amidst-trimmed-hedges
sure as hell give voice to them.
If horror directors have these intuitive powers, what of their location
scouts? Each haunted house and site of grisly murder was first just an
ordinary suburban house—it was only the prescient eye of the location
scout that crowned it host to narrative terrors. This poster series seeks to
discover what physical properties deem a house fit for playing such a dark
role. Can formal analysis reveal any shared qualities underlying cinema’s
most notorious two-story detached houses? Can we read suburbia’s sins
in its facade design? Did the makers of the suburbs mass-produce evil
mystical geometries alongside inequality? Is suburbia’s rot communicable
via elevation? As this poster series expands, perhaps these mysteries will
be solved. We wait, with bated breath, for the frightening answers.

					&#38;nbsp;
A collaboration with Hyung Cho and Nicholas Miller. &#38;nbsp;Suburbs is the first poster series of &#38;nbsp;Familiars
Strangers, a small&#38;nbsp;press dedicated to venturing outside of
traditional knowledge networks to explore what lessons nonprofessional
practioners—with an emphasis on experts in horror and other speculative
genres—may have for designers of the built environment.

				
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		<title>Bookstore Designs</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Bookstore-Designs</link>

		<pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2020 17:31:43 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Bookstore-Designs</guid>

		<description>
.

	Bookstore Designs
When Larry McMurtry (alongside Diana Ossana) received the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2006, he made sure, in his thank you speech, to
single out a group of people that typically don’t receive much recognition
on Hollywood’s glitziest stage: booksellers. “Remember,” he told the audience, “that Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie. From
the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops
of the world, all [booksellers] are contributors to the survival of the culture
of the book—a wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.”

					
As a former bookseller, I, of course, loved McMurtry’s speech. I loved it,
however, not for its simple book-aggrandizement—any fool can make a
pat endorsement of the value of literature—but for its accuracy: there is
something fundamentally true to his description of bookselling as a practice that is engaged in the business of keeping a culture alive. It captures,
contrariwise to conventional understandings of bookstores as sleepy places for quiet reading, the radical activeness of bookselling. Yes, booksell-
ers sometimes read at bookstores (if they are lucky), but they also debate
and argue and rip price tags off books for returns, they scramble to the
receiving door to let in the UPS guy before he goes to his next delivery,
they clean a customer’s spilled coffee and then recommend that same
customer a book, they fend off an angry phone-caller, they tease their
co-worker and steal a soda from the cafe, they drink so much coffee that
their heart flutters and then they use the caffeine and the palpitations to
rapidly shelve books, they still have to hum the alphabet to themselves
when they do so, but most of the time they know the location of an author’s
oeuvre by muscle memory, of course, good luck getting to the shelving
destination through the rush of customers that crowd the place on a Saturday afternoon. And this is just one shift.

					
As a bookseller at McNally Jackson for five years, I did all of the above,
alongside specialized duties as a designer and window-dresser. I made
the store’s event posters, its in-store displays, its website logos and its
windows. The pace was very fast and the work was often stressful (McNally Jackson is no “humble paperback exchange”). But it was just as
often fun. This page gathers together some of the graphic design work
I produced during my time there. While I value some of these pieces for
their design attributes, above all I am proud that they have contributed to
the survival of the culture of the book. It is, as McMurtry says, a “wonderful
culture” indeed.

				
	Event Posters

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Display Signs
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Window Dressing
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</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Suburbs</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Suburbs</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:08:37 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Suburbs</guid>

		<description>

	
Suburbs


					The postwar American suburb is relentless in its pursuit of unblemished
normalcy. Turn left, turn right, there’s the same house, with the same per-
fectly pitched roof, tracing the same slightly curved street modeled after
the same picturesque garden path. In the mornings the patriarchs pull
their identical station wagons out of their identical driveways en route to
their interchangeable white collar jobs in the city, leaving their wives to stay
behind and tend to their mass-manufactured built-in kitchen wares. By
evening’s end, the pot roast recipe from that week’s Good Housekeeping
has materialized, just in time for the returning fathers to gorge on before
tucking in their 1.5 children. Sweet dreams, little ones—but how could
their dreams be otherwise, in this environment of anodyne perfection?
Of course, hiding behind this facade of ordinariness are all sorts of hidden
sins. The suburbs’ glitzy consumer products and shiny automobiles are in
reality guzzlers of gasoline and stompers of carbon footprints. Those spic-
and-span homes attain their magazine-readiness at a cost, namely the un-
paid labor of claustrophobic housewives suffering from the “problem with
no name.” And the suburbs’ sunshine-y sameness? Lurking behind the
homogeneity are exclusionary FHA loans and racist redlining practices.
Altogether it’s a wallop: social conformity, environmental degradation, gov-
ernment-sponsored segregation. Maybe those sweet dreams should’ve
been nightmares after all.
While it took the general public some time to realize that the land of white
picket fences ought to have us screaming in fright, horror makers did not
suffer from the same delay in understanding. Almost as soon as Levitt &#38;amp;
Sons set up their supply chains, Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the
Wall imagined suburbia as a small-minded murderous enclave. Then came
Carrie’s high school horrors, Carpenter’s wordless knife-wielder, Levin’s
robotic Stepfords, Craven’s dream-invading psycho, on up to Laura Palm-
er’s interdimensional domestic tormentor and the as-yet-to-be-imagined
tract house horrors of the future. In these works of suburban gothic our
fantasy of pastoral bliss is torn asunder. While these frightmavens may not
be consciously evoking the more academic critiques of suburbia adum-
brated above, their primordial narratives of killers-amidst-trimmed-hedges
sure as hell give voice to them.
If horror directors have these intuitive powers, what of their location
scouts? Each haunted house and site of grisly murder was first just an
ordinary suburban house—it was only the prescient eye of the location
scout that crowned it host to narrative terrors. This poster series seeks to
discover what physical properties deem a house fit for playing such a dark
role. Can formal analysis reveal any shared qualities underlying cinema’s
most notorious two-story detached houses? Can we read suburbia’s sins
in its facade design? Did the makers of the suburbs mass-produce evil
mystical geometries alongside inequality? Is suburbia’s rot communicable
via elevation? As this poster series expands, perhaps these mysteries will
be solved. We wait, with bated breath, for the frightening answers.

					
A collaboration with Hyung Cho and Nicholas Miller. Sold by Familiars
Strangers

				
&#60;img width="1594" height="2321" width_o="1594" height_o="2321" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db53275ae926464fc45241bf4ead4bfff8479d77fa16d22d4e987f2346b0762f/suburbs-image.jpg" data-mid="81567158" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/db53275ae926464fc45241bf4ead4bfff8479d77fa16d22d4e987f2346b0762f/suburbs-image.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="980" height="1426" width_o="980" height_o="1426" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0dcfa8534a80bee07af727bc36d9fb7fb71146e5efbced57de003abbde7b89ca/suburbs-poster-2.png" data-mid="81867705" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/980/i/0dcfa8534a80bee07af727bc36d9fb7fb71146e5efbced57de003abbde7b89ca/suburbs-poster-2.png" /&#62;

&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;


</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Architecture of the Indimensionable</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Architecture-of-the-Indimensionable</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 14:33:42 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Architecture-of-the-Indimensionable</guid>

		<description>

	
Architecture of the Indimensionable
Architects are nothing if not prodigious dimensioners of space. Their
drawings take the unruly world and submit it to the disciplinary hand of
metrology: twenty foot column bays, sixteen inches on center between
studs, details specified to the millimeter. All that dimensioning serves a
purpose. These carefully orchestrated measures form an inside and an
outside; follow the seal of a window detail, nothing is getting past that line.
Or so architects like to think. But as even the most casual of horror fans
knows, such security is only ever an illusion: the more pristine your house
in the suburbs, the more ghastly is its past; despite your barricades, the
ghouls are smashing through the windows; and that dead body you’ve
hidden beneath your floorboards will rise up to haunt your dreams.

					
For despite architects’ allegiance to the hard logic of lines and tape mea-
sures, there is an indimensionable aspect to space—and in the indimen-
sionable, not all is as it seems. A door is not just a door but a creaky
threshold between worlds. A corridor does more than cut into a building’s
rentable space, it provides passage for who knows how many unwanted
travelers. Turn the light on in your basement, the darkness is gone but not
its undead inhabitants. What do you see there, lurking in the boiler room?
Rulers aren’t useful for charting out the indimensionable; instead one must
pay attention to gut feelings. And arm hairs. Are they standing straight?
That shadowy corner may have just inexplicably become a hell mouth, you
better get out of this building quickly, its plans have changed.

					
This book explores these horrific spatial unknowns. It gathers together a
collection of essays, interviews and drawings sourced from experts in the
indimensionable: haunted house designers, ghost hunters, horror writers
and those rare architectural practitioners who aren’t afraid to cast their
eyes towards terrors they cannot meter. It has a page count and a table
of contents. It is exactly 4.625 x 7 x .75 inches. But we can never truly
dimension the horrors that will spring forth from its pages . . .

					
A collaboration with Hyung Cho, Nicholas Miller, Stephen Rodriguez and
Ethan Zisson. Architecture of the Indimensionable is the first product put
out by Familiar Strangers, a small press dedicated to venturing outside of
traditional knowledge networks to explore what lessons nonprofessional
practioners—with an emphasis on experts in horror and other speculative
genres—may have for designers of the built environment.

				
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&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;

	
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	<item>
		<title>Perspecta 55</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Perspecta-55</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 14:59:13 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Perspecta-55</guid>

		<description>

	
Perspecta 55
Increasingly, contemporary architecture practice has become dictated by
projections of the future: our truss systems are modified to account for
worst-case-scenario wind loads, we raise our machine room floor heights
in accordance with 100-year flood projections and we choose our mate-
rials according to long-term carbon footprint prognoses. If utopian archi-
tects of the past sought to impose a future through visionary form, today
the relationship has been reversed: first, a future is anticipated, then the
architect designs her building in its image. The problem is, depending on
who you talk to, the future is a radically different place.

					
The algorithmically-inclined believe that through our ever-expanding store-
house of information we are re-entering an era of divination. Like actuarialists on steroids, these big data evangelists deem themselves capable of
highly accurate predictions. We only need to accrue enough data—more
sensors on our buildings, more plug-ins for our digital models, more predictive simulations—and the future of our built environment will be optimized like never before.

					
Others see great uncertainty in the future. A number of theorists argue
that our current state of techno-industrial development has produced a set
of potential catastrophes—from nuclear fallout to human-induced climate
change—without historical parallel, and thus without an archive of past
events from which to make reliable predictions. Our only hope in the face
of these unknown future disasters is to be prepared for everything: our
walls must be able to withstand category 5 hurricanes, our cities have to
be planned with an eye towards a nuclear attack, and our data storage
centers need emergency backups.

					
Meanwhile, as omniscience and uncertainty face off, other disciplines get
in on the futures action: business strategists roll out Herman Kahn’s scenario planning method, and financial specialists create ever more arcane
tools of speculation, creating a market in a financial instrument literally
called futures. Clearly, the future is contested territory. Architects, however, are content to be oblivious to these wars of anticipation. We blindly design our buildings in relationship to whichever prognosis has been handed
to us at the moment: we take the disaster planner’s advice, we kowtow to
the Revit plug-in, and we parrot rhetorics of resilience unthinkingly.

					
What we lose sight of in our subservience to these various futures is the
fact that every form of prediction has its own social and political histo-
ry, and thus its own highly specific set of values. Moreover, in our lack
of curiosity, predictive methods with a range of validity are given a level
playing field: complex climate models, which are the result of painstaking, decades-long work by the global scientific community are presented
alongside more performative architectural diagrams that merely mimic the
representational styles of scientific research.

					
Perspecta 55, slated for publication in 2022, will perform a much-needed
analysis of these contrasting techniques of futurity, to discover their implic-
it biases and the way they shape architectural practice. Specifically, we
have identified eight futurological modes as having a direct impact on our
discipline—scenario planning, disaster preparation, resiliency, science
fiction, data mining, and repair—and have asked a number of thinkers to
provide critical commentaries on these forms of future-making and their
impacts on the built environment. Without an analysis of these techniques
of forecasting and the values they contain, we are doomed to cater our
projects to imagined futures whose worldviews may not be our own.

					
A collaboration with Lani Barry, Jeff Liu, Nicholas Miller and Ethan Zisson.

				
&#60;img width="916" height="1430" width_o="916" height_o="1430" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/de2b73448b5b802a14e4503dd29f833e9baf272f7b4fc8db03316ab9e82cdd6e/Screen-Shot-2020-05-06-at-2.56.54-PM.png" data-mid="81622836" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/916/i/de2b73448b5b802a14e4503dd29f833e9baf272f7b4fc8db03316ab9e82cdd6e/Screen-Shot-2020-05-06-at-2.56.54-PM.png" /&#62;
&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;


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	<item>
		<title>Haunted Wall</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Haunted-Wall</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2020 15:44:20 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Haunted-Wall</guid>

		<description>

	
Haunted Wall
In a nod to accreditation boards and its own self-regard as an institution
that values the practical as much as the theoretical, the Yale School of
Architecture mandates that its second-year students take a fabrication
course, during which they are required to build a full-scale mockup of a
either a wall sample or small spatial design. My team, seeking to truly understand the basic materials of architecture, wished to construct a simple
wall made of brick and concrete masonry units. Our bank accounts already denuded by tuition and the high cost of model-making supplies, we
could not have been happier when we came across an abandoned lot full
of the exact materials we needed. We did not hesitate. After a perfunctory
glance around, we quickly loaded the materials into my minivan and carted
them off to school in order to execute our assignment.

					Our victory, however, was short-lived. As we were attempting to build
our wall, we were beset by inexplicable disturbances: fully-charged drills
stopped working; we’d put an object down on a ledge only to have it immediately fall off; we all swear that we saw a brick rise up off the ground.
Could our pilfered materials be the culprit? Had we inadvertently brought
cursed objects into the hallowed halls of our school? Greatly troubled,
we investigated the history of the abandoned lot only to discover, scrolling
through archived New Haven Independents on the library’s rickety micro-
film reader, that our worst fears were true: the site had a ghastly past. The
bricks and CMUs we’d taken had once made up of the home of a young
New Haven family rumored to practice the dark arts. Under mysterious
circumstances—seance gone awry? Hell’s flames brought too close to
the earth’s surface?—the house burned to the ground, taking the life of
every family member with it. There was no way around it: our salvage was
cursed; we were building a haunted wall.

					Unfortunately, we arrived at this conclusion too late—the review was the
next day and we had no choice but to keep building. Though our materials
continued to hinder us—CMUs would suddenly burn hot, bricks seemed
to repel their mortar—finally, through sheer determination, we were able
to finish our assignment. We went to sleep tired and afraid, not knowing
what tomorrow’s review would bring.

					We awoke to a gloomy, overcast day. The design jury wore outfits of all
black. We stood before them with complexions sallow from lack of sleep.
Our minds feverish with fatigue and fear, we nervously narrated our project—its dimensions, its materials (leaving out their grim provenance), our
construction methods. As we droned on, the wall stood silent. We shared
hopeful glances with one another: perhaps we had hallucinated the whole
thing? Let our stress-addled minds get the better of us? A bit calmer, we
settled into our performance, now peppering our speech with the architecture buzzwords design critics devour. The intrigued jury leaned forward
when suddenly a spirit attempted to escape from the wall! All of its parts
shook with the might of a being whose anger at having his life burned from
him was still fresh! The jury screamed! The wall’s fury crescendoed and
then suddenly stopped. As we caught our breaths we all felt a deathly cold
pass over us. Its spirit escaped, our haunted wall was haunted no more.

					[Sadly, none of the above is true. We actually carved CMUs and bricks out
of foam and then glued them to fabric sheets pulled taut between frames
of 2x4s. In between these panels were two rods adorned with offset
cams. The rods were connected to a motion-sensor-activated drill. When
someone approached the wall (say, the intrigued jury), the drills would
activate, rotating the cams and making the fabric sheets ripple as though
possessed. We hope to sell this product to HauntedProps.com one&#38;nbsp; day.]

					
A collaboration with Kate Fisher, Iven Peh and Ethan Zisson.

				
&#60;img width="850" height="1316" width_o="850" height_o="1316" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a301638d90c738c8554eff585cf3ff62f16bd6b9488963d5e30a9096bf408fef/haunted-wall-image.png" data-mid="81798915" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/850/i/a301638d90c738c8554eff585cf3ff62f16bd6b9488963d5e30a9096bf408fef/haunted-wall-image.png" /&#62;
&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;


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	<item>
		<title>Shooting on Location</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Shooting-on-Location</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2020 15:48:34 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Shooting-on-Location</guid>

		<description>

	
Shooting on Location
Starting in 1945, the LA-based magazine Arts and Architecture sponsored
the design and construction of a group of forward-looking housing proj-
ects known collectively as the Case Study Houses. These were no mere
exercises in design for design’s sake. At the moment of the program’s
inception, the US was suffering a veritable housing crisis: thousands of
GIs were returning home from their war service abroad but commensu-
rate housing stock had yet to built. The magazine’s editor, John Estenza, a
staunch promoter of modernist culture and values, believed that by giving
carte-blanche to the finest minds in architecture, novel solutions to this
pressing question of shelter would be found.

					
In large measure, this utopian project has not aged well. While certain ar-
chitects took this opportunity to attempt a radical reinvention of US hous-
ing stock—from proposing new spatial arrangements to advocating for
industrial construction materials—given the advertisement-rich spreads
they received in Arts and Architecture, along with the wealth of their cli-
entele, the Case Study Houses are today associated less with their social
ambitions and more with a certain 50s-era aesthetic of consumerist en-
nui. No Case Study House, however, suffered as dramatic a fall in grace
as Case Study House 17. Designed by the architect Craig Elwood, the
house began its descent almost immediately after its inception: the sprawl-
ing home—a single-story U-shaped arrangement of rooms nested around
a shared courtyard and its obligatory pool—was designed for a large fam-
ily, but these intended inhabitants found Elwood’s modernist deployment
of glass and steel so off-putting that they sold the property within a year.
The new buyers were the nouveaux-rich personified: Joe Swanson, a ris-
ing screenwriter fresh off a great success at Paramount, and his aspiring
actress wife Nora.

					
Shortly after buying the house, the husband’s creative energies ran dry and
along with them his income. To make ends meet, the couple began renting
the property out for film shoots. As they became increasingly financially
desperate the productions grew seedier and seedier. Soon their domestic
life was commingled with these bottom-of-the-genre-barrel stagings: their
pool become host to soap opera marital fights, software pornographic
theatrics, and countless B-grade action movie shoot em’ ups. The cycling
shoots imposed increasingly déclassé alterations to home until Elwood’s
high modernist, materially-reductive aesthetic had been papered over with
ornate wallpaper and Plaster of Paris columns.

					
This architectural degradation was matched by a psychological one. Smit-
ing from some minor spousal disagreement, one day Nora shot her hus-
band dead. He fell face-forward into the pool where his body streamed out
a ribbon of red that no filter could ever clean. Apparently, the commingling
of fantasy and reality had proven too much for Nora: whether knowingly or
not, this murder was an almost spot-for-spot remake of the fictional murder
that occurred in the 1978 film The Stone Killer, shot on location at Case
Study House 17. Modernist purity had never been so badly stained.

					
The Case Study House 17 Media Archive gathers all documentation of
this architectural descent—from location release documents to movie
posters to a New Yorker profile of the home. The posters are particularly
revealing of the house’s debasement: high-budget productions feature a
minimalist poster aesthetic more in keeping with Elwood’s original design,
while the later posters’ gaudy graphics dovetail with the crass redesigns.

					
The above, unfortunately, is largely untrue. While Case Study House 17
was sold quickly by its original inhabitants and subsequently re-decorat-
ed in Hollywood Regency style, it never became home to countless film
shoots and a ripped-from-celluloid true crime tale.

				
&#60;img width="524" height="752" width_o="524" height_o="752" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/610cc6ecbc1b13f15fe05b8ef5047bcd733703088ab1d00c64f10fe8f1090a3d/shooting-on-location-image.png" data-mid="81799166" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/524/i/610cc6ecbc1b13f15fe05b8ef5047bcd733703088ab1d00c64f10fe8f1090a3d/shooting-on-location-image.png" /&#62;
&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;


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	<item>
		<title>Seeds of Revolt</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Seeds-of-Revolt</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 17:02:59 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Seeds-of-Revolt</guid>

		<description>

	
Seeds of Revolt


					In the far far north, amongst the frigid cliffs of an arctic archipelago, 
below an icy crust of permafrost, are buried thousands upon thousands
of seeds. Here, on the frozen Norweigan island of Spitsbergen, lies the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, one of the largest seed repositories in the
world. The creation of a consortium of governments and international scientific bodies, Svalbard is our world’s biogenetic backup: if climate crises and rising geopolitical unrest destroy much of the planet, at least the
globe’s plant species will be safe, secluded in the natural refrigeration of
this northerly library.

					
While not all seed banks are quite as grandiose as Svalbard, the scale of
its backers—governments and international bodies—is typical. The prob-
lems seed banks address (loss of planetary crop diversity, the obligation
to preserve a nation’s genetic heritage, the need for raw plant material for
use in the elaborate experiments of mega agrobusinesses ) are of a large
scale, so large that they can only be addressed through the cooperation
of great political and technological might.

					
The necessarily grand scale of seed banks made the Yale School of Architecture’s first studio prompt—the design of a seed vault for an individual—a curious one. What megalomaniacal individual would take on the
enormous challenge of a seed vault on her lonesome? This individual, I
decided would have to be opposed to the standard power-bearers that
otherwise bring seed vaults into being. She would be a slightly deranged,
off-the-grid, revolutionary type, distrustful of political and technoscientific
institutions. Such a person would see current civilization, and in particular
advanced agriculture, as being beyond rescue; the only way to halt the destruction of the earth by genetically engineered farm products, according
to this world view, would be through violent revolution. This person’s seed
vault would be a kind of Noah’s arc, storing the pure seeds by which one
can remake the world in the wake of its revolutionary destruction.

					
Inhabiting this mentality, I produced a zine that contained the radical writings and plans/instructions for a structure that would allow one to carry
out this individual’s revolutionary aims. The structure is a simple shack: on
the ground floor is a shelf for storing heirloom seeds and planting imple-
ments, while on the hidden below-grade floor, there is a space for con-
structing home-made bombs from fertilizer. Ideally the zine would recruit
like-minded individuals to its cause, resulting in a network of these shacks
across the country. When activated, this network of radicals would produce bombs en masse and launch a coordinated attack on Monsanto, the
global head of genetically-altered seed production. Following this destruction, the network would then release their heirloom seeds, resulting in a
brand new, ecologically pure world order.

					
Critic: Trattie Davies

				
&#60;img width="1990" height="1470" width_o="1990" height_o="1470" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a81fdba5f1b750a564db90798d9a18cbc1f96d2e4ad0f1475939214d8dbda03/seed-vault-image.png" data-mid="81623506" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a81fdba5f1b750a564db90798d9a18cbc1f96d2e4ad0f1475939214d8dbda03/seed-vault-image.png" /&#62;
&#38;lt;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;gt;


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	<item>
		<title>Walter Pater</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Walter-Pater</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:08:37 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Walter-Pater</guid>

		<description>


	&#60;img width="2000" height="2551" width_o="2000" height_o="2551" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c242e961677e6c1660576645169e70f8dd816569faf60ea3a1477f20cc5bf3a9/g.jpg" data-mid="81566751" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c242e961677e6c1660576645169e70f8dd816569faf60ea3a1477f20cc5bf3a9/g.jpg" /&#62;
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WP / 1873
From Studies in the History of the Renaissance 
&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.


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001a

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001b
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	<item>
		<title>Thomas Kuhn</title>
				
		<link>https://mattwagstaffe.com/Thomas-Kuhn</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:08:38 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>mattwagstaffe</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mattwagstaffe.com/Thomas-Kuhn</guid>

		<description>3. Thomas Kuhn &#38;nbsp;


&#60;img width="3000" height="2000" width_o="3000" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fccb86a6577cd820d076bd1aa30988e58eb612d51328b83a1ad610280dd158cb/2.jpg" data-mid="81566756" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fccb86a6577cd820d076bd1aa30988e58eb612d51328b83a1ad610280dd158cb/2.jpg" /&#62;

TK / 1962
From The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists. 

&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; The practice of normal science depends on the ability, acquired from exemplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question, “Similar with respect to what?” One central aspect of any revolution is, then, that some of the similarity relations change. Objects that were grouped in the same set before are grouped in different ones afterward and vice versa. Think of the sun, moon, Mars, and earth before and after Copernicus; of free fall, pendular, and planetary motion before and after Galileo; or of salts, alloys, and a sulpuhur-iron filing mix before and after Dalton.


&#60;img width="3000" height="2000" width_o="3000" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81cbeaaf1cb94c3394f999c2487775d300f3de4d20b1ab9527db0c75ac1c7377/1.jpg" data-mid="81566755" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81cbeaaf1cb94c3394f999c2487775d300f3de4d20b1ab9527db0c75ac1c7377/1.jpg" /&#62;

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