Tom Emerson: “Never Modern”
Never Modern is an evolving talk explorating of the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of London based 6a architects finding affinities between the architecture and Bruno Latour’s notion that contemporary society has entered into a pre-modern age. The talk will trace an approach that favour of metis, an ancient form of intelligence combining ‘flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, varied skills, and experience’. In the work of artists, Richard Wentworth as in that of Sempé, in Tati there is a fundamental optimism and a fascination with the resourcefulness of people as they get on with their lives. Like contemporary society at large, architecture is fundamentally a work of bricolage drawing from the debris of history and the comedies of everyday life in the world that surrounds us.
