PLAT 12: Divine
PLAT 12: Divine
To divine is a vehicle whereby the field of architecture can manifest diverse places of difference and reconstruct narratives of the past, present, and future. From the most religious to the most secular, from the mystical to the ordinary, from the individual to the collective, the intertextual links in this volume orchestrate a journey that unfolds in three acts: divinings, divinations, and divinizations.
In the first act, the diviners dissect the meaning of the word “divine” itself. Their meditations on ethereal concepts reveal parallelisms with the practice of architecture. These ruminations eventually wrestle with the realization of ghastly profanities—even the divine cannot escape commodification. Against this disconcert arises a collective desire for the reclamation of meaning. The search for resolve in our material and tectonic cultures vis-à-vis this capitalistic milieu immerses us into a journey within.
In the second chapter, diviners excavate meanings and processes for architectural futures and worldbuilding from various sources: faith, pop culture, traditions, and shit. Building into this interface to divinize the profane and to profane the divine, they yield fertile ground for cultural critiques on the deceptive desires we have come to uphold as sacralities.
The third act explores the calcification of humanity’s derailed priorities into the absolutist religion of global capital, and the subversive determinations to recover virtues worth celebrating. They show that the delight of meaning may coexist in spite of, within, and around mounds of commodification. Throughout these acts, encounters with spaces, words, and bodies reveal new parts of an infinite waiting to be divined
Co-Editors: Maximilien Chong Lee Shin & Tasiana Paolisso
Team: Alice Bian, Luke Blair, Elina Chen, Andy Entis, Sarai Huamán, Andrew Jiao, Kexuan Shang, Elliot Yamamoto, Juchen “Ignis” Zhang
With contributions from:
Igor Marjanović—Timeless and Timely
Maximilien Chong Lee Shin & Tasiana Paolisso—diviners divining divine
Jake Deluca—Echoes of Divine Nemesis
Stephanie Choi—Worlds Within : A visit to the Menil’s Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision
Amir Halabi + Christopher Sanders—Which Afterlife? Transmigration and a Pause from Binaries
Evan Pavka—“The Girls” and Their “Church”
Vivien Sansour—Seed as Vessel
Civil Architecture—Sunpath, Rajab to Shawwal 1444
Brendon Carlin & Maria Paez Gonzalez—Architecture without Categories : On Divine Economy and Sympathetic Magic
Carlos Jiménez—In Search of the Divine
Besler & Sons—Screen Fatigue
Sabrina Chou—Divining the Sewer
Kordae Jatafa Henry—Monster
Lesley McIntyre—Artifacting Geomythology in Rútshellir
Léo Figuet & Telmo Escapil-Inchauspé—Katechon : A State (of Exception) of European Architecture
Tsuyoshi Tane—Old as New : Archaeology of the Future
Khoa Vu—Grayscale : Architecture of Fog
Sumayya Vally—Gathering Home
Ece Duran & Oğul Can Öztunç—Reimagining Everydays of Divine Space with Taksim Mosque
Kyle Dugdale—Divine Office
Alex Yueyan Li & Will Fu—Outlet Fervor
Timothy Wong—Making Sacred : Underground Suburban Homes in Postwar America
WAI Architecture—Think Tank Monument to the Victims of Capitalism
Jeffrey Zhenhua Liu & Haylie Chan—Woven Veil 團結
Rachel Chapman—Sk8 Liborius
Anoushka Mariwala—Larger than Life : Ritual Performance in Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi
242 pages, published Spring 2024.
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