Architecture wanders. It’s got legs and though we don’t live among a landscape dotted with moving cities, it’s still notoriously hard to pin down. Part of the problem is that we talk about buildings, not to mention architects and Architecture, with relative ease—even and maybe especially when we know nothing of the places from which they come. We’re surrounded by buildings, but architecture is more likely to found in books, the places architecture can get closest to its own ideals. So the liveliest buildings live almost as comfortably on paper as they do rooted to the ground. And those of us interested in architecture compare buildings in northern Europe to those in New York, swerving steel forms rising above docklands to cantilevered concrete set amidst a sea of parking. The comparisons aren’t so casual; they’re tied to the extensive hagiography of the architects and to the classifications of style, materials, and building technologies. On the page buildings are involuntary participating in someone else’s arguments about them. Exciting buildings today look like this says one article. Architecture looks like this says another. But a little screensaver application I found recently has got me wondering if it hasn’t side-stepped the most judgmental parts of my own field to get at the good stuff underneath. Slickr, an add-on to the popular photo sharing site Flickr.com, streams a series of downloaded images selected according to “tags”, or search terms of your choosing. Type in architecture and you get all those images that someone felt compelled to label that wy. The algorithm doesn’t ask for a reason, and doesn’t judge quality. It’s wonderfully removed from five hundred years of academic wrangling. A construction site in Beijing is followed by a plantation era mansion. Time, location and style melt smoothly into each other, assisted by the soft fades and slow zooming motions across each of the images.
What I like best about Slickr is what it finds its way free from and the patterns and behaviors that still manage to emerge as I keep watching the stream of images. The screensaver provides a snapshot of architecture today. Each image is part of a story but one only accessible in parts. Watching them, I can't help but give the stream of images associations better rooted to places I've visited. I imagine myself sifting through a street seller's boxes. Not post cards—these images are more personal—but family snapshots of unfamiliar relatives and family celebrations that aren't quite like my own. Funny, now, to be caught in New York and in Paris, imagining a street scene only as a context to try to explain the impact of these images.
But thinking of my own vacations and the wandering I've done trying to wander towards architecture feels about right, because the photos on Slickr are snapshots. They're memories of places visited by others. They're buildings people traveled to see. And it's here that I sense culture creeping back in. The pictures on Slickr are often of monuments and they are in places introduced by guide books, magazine articles, and travel programs. What someone takes the time to visit, take a picture of, and categorize as "Architecture" has most likely already been labeled that way by someone else. So Slicrk doesn't really escape the categorization of architecture; it just manages to acknowledge how many different voices are out there trying to make themselves heard.
But still, I like that Slickr presents only the evidence and not the argument of those decisions. I can imagine but not really know which art history classes individual photographers might have sat through. Which of the documentaries on major architects someone might have seen. And which magazines, books, even songs someone listens to while travelling. All I can really tell is that each picture is something that someone thought interesting enough to try to remember and something close enough to their own idea of architecture to give it that name. The lack of certainty feels right. Slickr's a collection by a collector more interested in the objects she has found than in the organization of her collection. The collecting is fun. The objects are what's important, and Slickr gets at the joy of being in the world and seeing something surprising. It's why I would take a picture, or draw a sketch, or write down a note about what I had seen. But, I think, it's also why I would build—to add something for someone else to see, touch, and move around in. To be a part of something that might find its way into the collections of someone new.
