Ickles, Etc.
By (Author) Mark Von Schlegell
By (author) Louise Lawler
Sternberg Press
Sternberg Press
5th September 2014
United States
Professional and Scholarly
779.092
Paperback
172
Width 108mm, Height 152mm, Spine 15mm
666g
It's the late twenty-first century. Technological, environmental, and social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape forever. But in what remains of the international urban scene, architecture still refuses to admit it hasn't been modern since the early twentieth century. Enter Ickles, Etc.
Helming Los Angeles's most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, "the man without self-concept." Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s.
In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell's fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of "speculative aesthetics." A collection of interconnected comical sci-fi stories written for various exhibitions, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET. Occupying New Los Angeles, visiting the Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam, and 1970s St. Louis, the practice finds selves embroiled in very spicy mustards indeed, redefining info- architecture and jettisoning the burdensome "self-concept" of the Western tradition in the process. Just don't expect a visit to the ruins of Disney Hall!
Mark von Schlegell's stories and essays appear regularly in underground newspapers, zines, art books, and amateurist periodicals the world over. Venusia, his first novel, was honor-listed for the 2007 James M. Tiptree Jr. Prize in science fiction.