The name of this journal, Fresh Meat, is a reminder: we at UIC are the sole rightful heirs to the legacy of the Union Stockyards. It is our responsibility, our duty, our privilege, to welcome with open arms the country’s cattle, steer, and hogs, and to corral them, disassemble them, and grind their organs into a fine, homogenous paste. The title of this edition, Contamination, is also a reminder: like our unscrupulous blood-stained progenitors, we can’t help ourselves but add a few (benign) adulterants to our fine product. It’s in our nature. Out on the east coast, our Ivy League friends are tiring themselves out ringing alarm bells. Architecture Theory is All-Wrong: too elitist, too exclusive, too out of touch, insensitive to the global struggle. As such, they have since embraced norm-core. It seems like the future of architecture criticism is about accessibility and capturing new audiences outside of academia. The pluralist mission is not new, but up until now, the strategy has been to appropriate language from other disciplines: sociology and psychology but also (regrettably) marketing and economics. In doing so, architects have subconsciously absorbed their philosophies, leading to a frustratingly unproductive disconnect between word and image. Increasingly, however, critics are no longer borrowing legitimacy from other fields, they’re just using plain language to talk about everyday architecture. The recently published Log 64: Toward a Newer Brutalism explicitly proposes discourse built around literal descriptions of semantic-less “undecorated sheds.” 

This sounds great for UIC. We are proudly cheap, quick, dumb, meat-and-potato based, contented in our coarseness, and above all, normal. UIC is a public university: founded to educate Chicago GIs, many of whom were children of Stockyard workers. To this day, the School of Architecture enrolls a greater proportion of lower class and immigrant students than the vast majority of programs of its stature. It has a legitimate claim to being one of the most effective engines of upward class mobility in American architecture. Our constituency is aggressively plain, consummately banal: in this sense, it is the perfect hypothetical audience of contemporary architecture critics obsessed with reality. Alas, there are some complications (or opportunities, rather) to our anointment as vanguard party of the normal people. First, our ideological project remains a projective one. Reality is what we make it, and reifying it is a conscious act. We follow Baudrillard: the map precedes the territory. We can call this the hyper-real. Additionally, our conception of reality is similar to the poststructuralist Real. It consists of defamiliarized, empty signifiers and floating simulacra. At UIC, we understand “reality” to be fundamentally contaminated with strange synchronicities, and we can call that the schizo-real. These complications result in two categories of projects at UIC: the strangely familiar and the commonly weird: piles of stuff and little creatures, respectively. See if you can spot them walking around our halls. To repeat, UIC is the school of meatpackers. We are particularly adept at absorbing the cultural and technological ephemera of America (from little red barns to Amazon logistic networks), processing them, and stuffing the resultant visual goo into delicious meat tubes of info-tainment. It is incumbent upon us to do so in a way that is vaguely irresponsible and downright unserious.