What is Strangeharvest?
Strangeharvest is a blog/archive/hoard of (mainly but not only) writing by Sam Jacob. It began as a hand coded html web page with very tiny reviews of everyday things. It evolved (technically) into a slightly more sophisticated CMS, has migrated platforms, crashed, been dormant, resurrected and otherwise put through the digital mill (and has the scars to prove it).
It has, over time, worked as a scrapbook, a diary, a promotional device, polemic and love letter. All of that is still here, alongside proper bits of writing originally paid for by others that no doubt infringe some kind of agreement but well ... sue me.
Strangehearvest developed alongside Sam’s work in practice first with FAT, then as Sam Jacob Studio. Sometimes it has documented design projects, or provided widescreen views of curatorial projects. At other times, it's been an escape from practice.
It's been a companion while teaching at the AA, Yale SOS, UIC, HKU etc. And it's also sat alongside his writing and journalism (as columnist for Architects Journal, reviving Reyner Banham’s The Shape of Things column for Art Review, as Architecture Editor for long defunct magazine Contemporary, as Contributing Editor for Icon magazine (and, for my sins, Dezeen's first opinionator). However, Strangeharvest was originally supposed to be an obscure online shop. Maybe it will get there one day.
It’s origin (or lets say my own origin) is in the mid-to-late 90’s, when the big architecture and design magazines of the 1980s were still around but were kind of spent. It began in the spirit of Mark E. Smith’s quote ‘ the vision was to make music that didn’t exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.’
For a while Strangeharvest was a node in the network of blogs that became a kind of bubbling, just-below-the -surface form of ‘discourse’ before everyone got bored, or got proper jobs, or became disillusioned with the give-it-all-away-for-free spirit as the internet became whatever it has become.
It has been driven by, to various extents and at different moments: Frustration (with, you know, life in general or the slings and arrows of practicing architecture; By the sheer ignorance and idiocy of - some but not all -clients); By sheer enthusiasm; By love (the second best reason to write); And by revenge (objectively the best of all reasons to write). In other words a 400000 word subtweet.
What is Strangeharvest now? Perhaps an archive? Or a self storage unit? Maybe it's a long winded epitaph? Or just something to be scraped by big tech and tossed into the mixer of an LLM. I mean who even reads websites any more?