Paradigm Weekly
Paradigm Weekly creates collective experiments with visual architectural culture, and engages the millennial and superficial sensibilities of the personae that are part of it—artists, architects, thinkers and policy makers.

Architecture’s rapid shifts in mediation have happened over the heads of its worker bees. We have pushed architecture into a pornified version of itself—a grotesque neomodernism in drag—and reduced our ability to project meaningful futures to a constant utterance of rendered microfutures. Bigger pictures are out, and behind the pictorial legacy lies nothing. Architecture has plotted its own obsolescence—slow, incompatible, nepotistic, expensive. Architecture = images. However, as much as we could have come prepared to survive the visual turn as experts, its flattening drag immobilized us. Stuck in the render trap, we are bypassed by more organic, more malleable, faster means of communication. Our disciplinary foam deflated in ffwd, and its soapy bubble puddle seems not a good space to be in. We cannot but declare the rendered image as architecture’s bottom line product and the blogosphere as its rabbit hole. Are we cool with such an after-fact treadmill culture for practice as the way out*?

Paradigm Weekly is about finding ways to ‘not deal’ with '*' in terms of criticism; to assemble, let surface, ferment, collide, massage different attitudes and different contexts as embodied in the work of its contributors.
Paradigm Weekly believes we are critical agents, and produce questions rather than answers. But we also believe this benefits from a rather cool approach. To combine these would be the core of our work: Cool Criticality.

PW's MISANTHROPOZINE is a 10-issue cool-critical journal, kicking off in 2019-2020 with the inaugural TANTRIC URBANISM. PW also offers Architects Without Qualities, a Masters in Architecture design studio, currently taught at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture in Brussels. Collective performance and field work collide in our investigative SPEED TRIP probes, executed from Beijing to the Nevada desert.

Paradigm Weekly is conceived by Pieterjan Ginckels, and runs in feedback loops with his visual work as PJG and SPEEDISM. The mothership of PW is RADICAL SATURATION, Ginckels' landscape of shortcuts and loopholes—also a PhD—that uncovers Radical Saturation as the problematic condition that he also falls in love with. RS is a sort of bildungsroman, picturing loops, methods and instruments to search for meaningful existence within changing society; how to survive, or thrive, at the surface.






Partners:
Art Paper Editions
CIVA
KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture
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