Now that images posted here are no longer doubly constrained by borders and sidebars, we've got all this negative space to play around with.
And we are playing, first with these beautiful typological studies of some of India's famous cultural landscapes. There's the Adalaj Stepwell, the Ajanta Caves, the Diwan-i-Khas pavilion at the Red Fort and even an iconic boxshop.
They were produced by students at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville for This is India!, a Summer 2009 exhibition documenting “a journey through its Greedy Streets, an approach of its Furnished Cities and a walk though its slums where Mess is More.”
That's about the extent of what we know about the exhibition, so if you were one of the students, leave us a note.
Meanwhile, the text, as you can see if you're reading this on the blog, doesn't have to be confined to a single column anymore. In fact, the sequence of text and image in Blogger's single post format can be reconfigured to approximate the front page of a newspaper, complete with floating newsflashes of Lindsay Lohan's impending incarceration in anticipation of county jails and rehab centers perhaps becoming the celebrity architecture du jour again.
A single post, in other words, can be a mini-zine, a corpus of half-narratives, counter-narratives and pata-narratives. Rather like these illustrations in some ways.
Feed readers, unfortunately, will see a much messier clutter than usual and have to work harder to make sense of it. We don't think our readers expect the clearest, most straightforward narrative from us anyway, so there really won't be much out of the ordinary. And besides, we think you're already used to posts (not just ours) demanding that you complete the narrative, that is, to click on the links, to reread an earlier, related post, to come back for updates and postscripts, to decode the thousand words embedded in each image, to add additional meaning and interpretation, to do backflips. Like how the internet works.
Of course, we can just not even bother with readability at all. Screw the grid! Fuck 'best practices'!
Because “mess is more,” right?
---
“This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans.”