Of course, everyone is going bonkers over the iPad, announced today.   This post isn’t about the iPad, it’s about me.

Bryan Boyer, representing the editorial staff at Archinect.com, put out a call for ideas.

To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment, we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?

Your task is to design a deployable minaret that can attain full presence, visible from a distance, during each of the five daily calls to prayer.

A good prompt, in my mind merging the contemporary impulse of architecture as activism and some older psychedelic probes into the form, function, and agenda of architecture.  I produced two entries (really a variation on the same theme) called Mini-rets.

First, I denied the need for a “brick-and-mortar” mosque that a minaret would necessarily tower beside, insisting that the Mullah and observant Muslim themselves were all that were necessary to create a holy space.  Presumably, the call to prayer could take place over a cellphone network, with a cell tower the de facto minaret. This, however, misses the subversive aim of the competition, which is to undermine a legal change with (at least in this case) a guerrilla architecture.  In Mini-ret I, the Mullah wears a telescoping tower topped by loudspeakers and a crescent moon, which pushes into the sky five times a day for the call to prayer, wherever the Mullah may be.  The aural broadcast of a minority culture does not amount to a threat to the majority, instead it is a statement of a shared identity for the minority in strange land.

Lucky me, Mini-ret I was featured on the “results” page, with Archinect editor Heather Ring noting, “architecture already seems anachronistic – this mobilizes a collective call to prayer through a wearable network.”

Mini-ret II is more playful. It proposes that the Mullah is to hold an Alphorn upright (as if it were a periscope) to project the call to prayer.

I assume that Bryan wrote the introduction to the call for ideas result page; it at least fits with remarks he’s made previously about the architect’s potential position when so much of his or her historical duties are being apportioned away (and indeed his current position within Sitra, as far as I can tell)(I’ve been an avid consumer of all things Bryan Boyer on the internet for at least four years now.  I ran into him in person only once outside the RISD architecture building in Providence.  I wasn’t sure it was him until later…):

At the core of the Call for Ideas was an implicit question about the efficacy of architecture in the realm of politics….what does a specifically architectural mode of resistance look like? Is there even a useful specificity or perhaps architecture in the hands of an architect is nothing more than a brick – an object of resistance only inasmuch as it’s hurled forcefully into the world. Some of the entrants to this Call for Ideas are asking bricks what they want to be and hearing a much different response than Kahn could have ever dreamed.

While many of the entries are snarky (mine included), it is heartening that we at least are staking our position as inventors and innovators within a constraining condition.