Blue Monday

Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies
Kazys Varnelis, Robert Sumrell

Blue Monday features three moments in modern culture that offer glimpses into our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture, cities, and objects through a lively mix of philosophy, photography, architectural drawings and models, as well as new media. The first section, Ether, explores a Los Angeles telecom hotel, One Wilshire, a 39 story building of utter banality and complete mystery. The second, the Stimulus Progression, looks at the strange story of the Muzak Corporation and the invention of a culture of horizontality. The third, Quartzsite, Arizona, visits a desert town of some 3,000 people in the summer that swells to over a million residents every year as a horde of modern nomads descends upon it in their Recreational Vehicles. This is the first book by the Architecture Urban Design Collaborative, AUDC founded by Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis of Columbia University.