Adam Smythe
‘How to Find the Moisture Content of Aggregates’, publication, 2011
Adam Smythe’s ‘How to find the moisture content of aggregates’ also deals with systems and presentation models of logic and knowledge sharing. The publication borrows the narrative from Ballard’s ‘The Concentration City’ in which the protagonist, M, attempts to find ‘Free Space’ in a fictionalised world contained within a modernist city. Smythe has disrupted the narrative with the insertion of other pieces of literature from diverse texts such as ‘Concrete Quarterly’ and Le Corbusier’s writings on architecture. Whist disrupting the narrative the insertions serve to reinforce the nostalgia of the outmoded architecture lamented in Ballard’s narrative and in doing so reinvigorates the past forms.