function, and contributes to the making of world culture.”71 Here, architecture (or the process of architecting) can become highly beneficial as a form of experimentation. For Boym, this experimentation isn’t about a reification of hierarchy (system-building), rather it is “about life and art as project and adventure.”72 It is the suggestion that potential futures exist through new perspectives: “The architecture of adventure is the architecture of thresholds, liminal spaces, porosity, doors, bridges, and windows. It is not about experiences of the sublime, but of the liminal.”73 The architecture of adventure is the search for a part of us that seems far removed, estranged from us through time. This adventure is a way of exploring all of the branches of time not usually seen or understood; all of the potential futures nipped at the bud and cut off from traditional realization. From those ashes, the off-modern reveals a nearly infinite space with which to interact.
In respect to the long history of architectural movements, this diversity allows individuals to explore past divergences from the predominant narrative of architectural history. If that narrative is just one set of divergences built up over the millennia, there are infinitely many places to find adventure. As Boym points out, these influences do not have to be found merely in the same field, but the very notion of the adventure can lead away from one discipline and into many others. This adventure may even look at radically different cultural phenomena. “In Eastern Europe there was a well-established tradition of paper architecture- an architecture of radical projects done during the “era of stagnation” that were meant for architectural competitions but never built. … This kind of architecture is not immaterial: rather it redefines the relationship between materiality and viruality in the broadest sense of the word…”74 The early 20th Century Russian Avant-Garde movements were only beginning to flourish, but, as Joseph Rykwert noted in 1970, “the curtain was about to go down on the whole marvelous
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Svetlana Boym, “Architecture of the Off-Modern”, page 5 Svetlana Boym, “Architecture of the Off-Modern”, page 6 Svetlana Boym, “Architecture of the Off-Modern”, page 6 Svetlana Boym, “Architecture of the Off-Modern”, page 8