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 baby and everything changes and you just make presentations about memes,” he said of his transition from godfather status to fatherhood.) He had saved the memes for last, but the same punchy humor and efficiency of communication ran through the whole talk, which covered the work of his practice, Extra Office, and teaching, such as an architecture studio themed around Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: “Rather than having [students] look at some building in France they could never go to, I [had] them draw the buildings they are constantly running through in video games.” Pin-ups were staged on Twitch, with those in the chat acting as the jury. If, as he claimed, memes thrive on the bits of arcana that form the boundary between in-groups and out-groups, his audience was clearly among the former. When a student project that involved a dancing avatar appeared on the projector, the crowd lost it. “Omg, are we laughing at this? Okay!” said Scavnicky, surprised and clearly delighted.