Elements of Architectural Memetics

A new genre in architectural criticism is born: architectural memetics. Active on Twitter and Instagram, accounts such as @blank_gehry, @dank.lloyd.wright, and @form_follows_memes, among others, are practicing architectural memetics as an aggressive and incisive form of commentary over architecture and its contemporary political economy. These accounts operate as collective agents of enunciation to propagate radically anti-capitalist content: campaigns to decommodify housing, report of exploitation and precarity in design offices, surrealist provocations (“nationalize Autodesk”), and direct attacks ridiculing architects with neoliberal agendas and cultural institutions considered responsible of reinforcing privileges and established power relations. Despite its immediate agency, memetics is also an initiatory practice, which requires solid previous knowledge to be interpreted or produced. Memes recombine a wide range of information which is recursively encapsulated and transformed in each iteration, presenting their content in stratified formations. Understanding and making architectural memes requires a
deep understanding not only of the art of memetics with its forms of expression, but also a knowledge of architecture, its history, and its languages. For this reason, memetics is not only a tool for architectural criticism, but it might also become an instrument of architectural pedagogy.
On the plane of expression, memes are based on ready-made, collage and détournement, going beyond the purified aesthetics of established architectural imaging and publishing. In this sense, architectural memetics is the digital heir of the aesthetic guerrilla performed by the historical avantgarde and by the neoavantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s. This article will sketch some preliminary notes towards a history and a theory of architectural memetics, proposing its languages and techniques as a form of architectural criticism for the 21st century.