Meme Studies

“I know Architectural Record says I am the godfather of memes, but they are nothing new—the internet just had a new way of understanding them,” said Ryan Scavnicky, a self-described “architectural influencer,” during a talk at the Kean School of Public Architecture. After a preamble about the pre-internet history of architectural media (in which “the horrible Leon Krier” featured), he parsed memetic scholar Limor Shifman’s definition of the form (“a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance which were created with awareness of each other and were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users”) before setting off on a rapid-fire tour of his own ample meme production. Scavnicky is rumored to be the original mentor for the anonymous mods of the Instagram architecture meme account Dank Lloyd Wright (102k followers) and is himself the very not-anonymous author of sssscavvvv (16.2k followers), where now the architecture dunks share the grid with photos of his newborn. (“You make memes then you have a bab…