Origamicity

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
With a growing technological progress in construction industry, easy access to exploitable labour and economic surges that allow for baroque extravagance, gone are the days of "Rome was not built in a day". Cities are no longer fixed geographies that will accumulate palimpsests of history, culture, people, flora and everything else to slowly form sediments of experience, memory and history, flourishing, thriving and decaying; But on the contrary the new Archigram cities are designed products, passed, made, sold and resold all in a day with deliciously pop-plastic-flavoured history of genuine intent to embody sustainability (imagine surgically beautified Gaia in D&G). With climate and economy following patterns of extremities, high property values that reduce life span of buildings to as little as 30 years, the process of urbanization is played in fast forward from conception on a tabula rasa site to its demise like the redundant empty American suburbs or some cities in the Middle East.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
As people who from time to time envision ideas with regards to great design and save the world schemes, we may actually need to entertain the nightmare of designing single serving (say for a brief period of 50 years or in accordance to the bank loan schemes for housing) use and throw cities. Cities with no history, only props and people!

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
Cities made of paper that open and fold and disappear or get recycled (to be politically correct). When I came across works of Ingrid Siliakus, I was happy to find that origami, art and architecture had folded together so well to create complex spaces and forms through just cuts and folds.

(image of origami works by artist Ingrid Siliakus from his website)
This single- serving (Rem Koolhas: Generic city) city opens up ideas of temporal nature of architecture and cities, as Bruno-designers catwalk their styles along the flavour of the season (dainty designer proclaiming, “oh! Sustainability is so in! I laaav grass”). But the works of Ingrid Siliakus certainly provide some hope to have beauty in these single-serving difficult times and a regular supply of work for architects. We may even see the ephemeral nature of design reflected in design drawings somewhat similar to these images by another artist Simon Schubert whose folded paper space drawings are one of the most beautiful works I have come across, subtle, delicate and precise.