#0108 a_MacGufiin...

Publication/Exhibition
White House Redux:
123 Ideas for a New White House
Storefront for Art and Architecture
New York City
Date
2008
Author
Mirza Mujezinovic


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In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" about a man, Pierre Menard, who intended to write Don Quixote, again. Mr. Menard ended up writing exactly that same story of Don Quixote as Miguel de Cervantes did in 1605. Borges concluded: "To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings - among them. To mention only one, that same Don Quixote."

Consequently, to compose the White House at the end of the eighteenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twenty first century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that two hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings - among them. To mention only one, that same White House.

Nevertheless, this proposal is an attempt to re-tell the Story of Architecture through a MacGuffin called "The White House Redux", an intelligent machine that enables future encounters between people and power, and between architecture and ideology.