profile

Sorina Dumitru

do people take your jokes seriously?

Published about 11 hours ago • 1 min read

Radical Architecture of the 1970s

Dubai really took that seriously.

While I was in Venice last month representing Vlad Nanca's work, I got reintroduced to Superstudio. The guys were on that political discourse of taking functionalist architecture to the extreme. It was supposed to be a joke.

Well, here we are in 2025, with a city like Dubai that took Superstudio's joke superseriously.

Read more about that here:

Superstudio

Get familiar with their concepts for radical architecture taken to the absurd, from the 1970s. Meaning their little joke on modern architecture and hyper-functionalism, leading to the vanishing of architecture itself. It's funny!

Dubai Architecture

See how the United Arab Emirates did not read the room properly and took Superstudio's joke superseriously. Well, when you think about it, they DID want hyper functionalism.

Vlad Nanca's Work

See Vlad's artistic work 2003-2025. Look for the white ceramic tiles. Look for the grid. Look for Vlad's joke on conquering the natural environment with equal subdivisions. Look for his jokes on communism, too!

I love that we live in a future depicted by Pekka Himanen in The Hacker Ethic, where jokes become serious and serious things become jokes.

I also love you.

15 Northside Tower, Marasi Drive, Business Bay, Dubai 0000
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

Sorina Dumitru

architect PhD | writer | I reverse engineer experiences

The topics will be mostly about architecture, economics, and some personal development (so you don't have to learn the hard way, like I did). Yeah I was in Forbes but that was a long time ago.

Read more from Sorina Dumitru
Aldous Huxley Doors of Perception

Last weekend was magical. I know you felt it too. Don't forget that feeling. I was meaning to send this out last weekend. You were supposed to get this on Monday morning instead of Sunday because I know you had a good time last weekend. There is something magical about the summer solstice, isn't it. It's the longest day. Most of us spend this day outside as much as possible. Here's some Instagram stories I screenshoted because I knew you guys were having a magical time: I like seeing people...

7 days ago • 1 min read

Happy Easter Here are some bootleg books for you. This morning I woke up and saw the date - April 20th. I had the feeling it's an important date. Maybe someone's birthday. Maybe I'm forgetting something really important. And then it hit me. It was 420. If you know, you know. Jah is the most important being in Rastafari and they associated him with King Selassie, ruler of Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974. Jah is one of my favorite leaders. He opened up Ethiopia's economy to the rest of the...

3 months ago • 1 min read

Personal Brands suck. Seriously, don't build one. I just read a Forbes article about a guy who sold his e-learning company to private equity. The article mentioned the powerful combination between the PE firm's 'financial might' and the guy's 'formidable personal brand'. What even is that. The company was faceless and the PE was only interested in net profit and number of active recurring clients. Moreover, the guy exited. Who cares about his personal brand. This idea of a personal brand...

3 months ago • 1 min read