MISANTHROPOZINE #1

Editorial

Misanthropozine #1:
Tantric Urbanism
Architectural Magazine
2020

“Now wait a minute, y’all, this work ain’t for everybody” drones Matylda Krzykowski to the tune of Push It by Salt-N-Pepa, referring to the deadline culture in architecture. How absorbed you can be in a practice that has 24/7 deadlines and demands a workaholic discipline from newly graduated interns. “C’mon dears, let’s go show everyone that we know how to become number one in a hot museum show. Now push it…” Offering a dogmatic ‘exit route’ can be taken literally: sweeping together perspectives, attitudes towards work and organisational cultures that keep architecture locked in, and by extension all sectors that rest upon hypercapitalism, digitalisation, development and repurposing.

Text by Pieterjan Ginckels

More than 20 international authors have contributed to the first issue. They offer a cool critique of the generic urban environments in which we, or at least our loved ones, end up. MISANTHROPOZINE #1: TANTRIC URBANISM walks you through a series of computer images made incarnate. From hip twenty-somethings to early retirees, we know the renders, with their recurring render-people, textures and symbols, that conjure up visions of a ‘tantric life’ in today’s city. Tantric is derived from ‘tantric sex’, which aims at prolonging and eluding the climax. We are the actors playing a part in the ballet that planners have devised for us. With a designer soap shopping bag in hand, we arrive in our plasterboard bubble. Only the skating teenagers disturb our tantric experience.

Editorial team:
Pieterjan Ginckels
Tine Holvoet
Andrew Kovacs
Cédric Libert

Founding editors:
Pieterjan Ginckels
Tine Holvoet

ISSN: 2684-4745
33×24 cm, 112 pages