Scapegoat: Architecture Landscape Political Economy: 05 Excess
September 2013
By Scapegoat Says (Author), Etienne Turpin (Editor)

 

Ours is unquestionably a time of excess. While currencies and commodities continue to circulate, reifying segregation and inequality throughout the global political economy, excess leaks out in all directions, sometimes fostering movements of resistance, other times permitting improvisational opportunism among often neglected actors, and still at other moments irrevocably damaging ecologies and environments which we humans precariously but ruthlessly inhabit. The pleasures and perils of excess cross divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality, while also reinforcing aspects of these and other identities. Can we design for, or among, the excesses of contemporary culture? How do practices of architecture and landscape architecture, as well as adjacent practices of art, curation, philosophy, and typography, suggest ways to amplify, capture, or redirect excess? In EXCESS—Scapegoat’s sixth issue—we explore the productive, resistant, and imperiling aspects of excess as an attempt to advance our project of emboldening theoretical and historical modes of inquiry, scholarly research, and design practice. It is a vast conceptual terrain, but one that offers many compelling perspectives.