As the good, clean rain falls on this otherwise inglorious day—has the town ever looked more dour? has there ever been such a superabundance of long faces?—we interrupt the current ellipsis with a grab at some extremely low-lying fruit. In an email plugging an arriving show, the Storefront for Art & Architecture has finally joined the Watch™.

The project FASCIA unfolds as a series of live performances, video recordings and drawings, that engage in a visual dialogue with Steven Holl's and Vito Acconci's renowned design of the Storefront for Art and Architecture facade. Like Acconci and Holl, she challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside. FASCIA departs from the definition of the membrane-wall as both a marker and an embodiment of space.

Not exceptionally stupid, we know. That's why we weep.

· Upcoming Shows [Storefront]
· Storefront for Art & Archispeak: Party On [The Gutter]
· Gutterland JargonWatch™: Precrime Edition [The Gutter]

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Folks, it's worse than we thought—if by "it" we mean the state of the craft of writing within Our Blessed Profession. Writing's like when you string words together in a line so people can read them. And you try to say something totally cool and new. Like, interestingly. And stuff. So—you guessed it!—people will actually want to read the words you strung together in a line for them to read!!!!

Here are the stirring opening grafs from the winning essay in this year's ArchVoices competition, "Research, Invention, and Collaboration" by a Mr. Erik Kath of New York City:

Let me tell you about our firm.

We are primarily concerned with the continuous advancement of the field of architecture and, inherently, the enhanced quality of the built environment. As lofty as it sounds, we want to improve the world. We do this through research, invention, and collaboration.

Before I begin, I should tell you why we started this practice in the first place. You see, we were not satisfied with the status quo. We asked ourselves why we continued to see costs escalate in making buildings at a rate exceeding the cost of living. We were constantly forced to make design decisions on the basis of cost that result in less choice, less customization, more standardization, and less quality. We were faced with numerous quality issues at the end of the construction process, solved only by reams of paper and countless hours of time. Compounding our frustration was the drive of our industry professional organizations to limit our involvement with the means and methods of construction.

Dry as death. And original as sin. But don't miss this gem among the honorable mentions:

Why is "Taco Bell" training so important to us as a teaching firm? Much like a dancer practices repeatedly to the same music to become fluid in the steps, we train with Taco Bells. Each Taco Bell is similar in size and scope, yet different as it is placed into different parts of the urban fabric.

Just a taste of the caliente to be found in "Taco Bell: A Teaching Firm Treasure."

· ArchVoices Essay Competition 2006—Honorees [ArchVoices]

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Mind you, there's been no drought in Jargon since last we raised the Watch™. But our minds have been on other things. So we were thrilled to see that Justin the Good has taken over the usually sensible screens of Design Observer to promote a particular view of the beauty of wind farms—as if seeing MI3 wasn't enough—and he does so with a particularly insidious form of academy-derived design-speak. Rather than employing neologisms to make the point that he doesn't really know what he's talking about (or, alternately, that what he's saying is stone cold simple), he's chosen plain language that simply doesn't track. Good fun!

· What is Beauty? [Design Observer]

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Crossing our reality over the weekend, this mysterious post:

On Tuesday SFMOMA will announce its new architecture and design curator (Joseph Rosa recently left the museum for the Art Institute of Chicago.) MAN hears that SFMOMA will hire a Chelsea gallerist whose recently-shuttered, self-named gallery had a special interest in architecture. (Duh.) The museum knows the word is out but refuses to confirm anything.

Well, re that "duh," let's see. The Max Protetch Gallery, upon our last stroll down 22nd Street, appeared alive and, alas, all too well. And we thought Henry Urbach, though "appointment only" since last fall, was still kicking. Maybe not. Probably not. Definitely not. We're gonna go with Henry. Even though Max has more friends.

· Coming Soon to SFMOMA [ArtsJournal]

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We're not so caught up in our martial moment to forego a party. Any party. And we'd love it if you would join us. So while you're prepping and primping for tomorrow's no-holds-barred Bachelorama—perhaps a quick chemical peel?—consider, if you find yourselves in town, a wee drinky spin by the recently decapitated Storefront for Art and Archispeak. The powers that are managed to keep the jargon in check in their release for the event, a party to celebrate boy wonder Eric Schuldenfrei (who left dbox under the very darkest clouds) and his lover Marisa Yiu's installation of electronica—gee whiz!!!!—in Chinatown, but we're sure it (the jargon) will be flowing freely, with the acidic white wine, at 8:00 this evening when Storefront throws open its many doors and panels and greets the spring as only dufus hipsters can. In black.

· The Gutter Salutes: Sarah Herda [The Gutter]

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It wouldn't be a properly observed Good Friday without a nod towards those more inclined to make it a Bad Friday. Or, more accurately, a Jargon-riffic Saturday. To get you started, the Gutter is pleased compelled to present these latest "sentences" from Broken Thought, straight from the concept-machine's mouth itself, affixed to a charming invitation, and pimping tomorrow's opening of "The New Weapon: ecstasy and threat, coldness and whisper."

A dramatic synthesis envisioned and executed by the Center's two founders, Dean Lukic and Jason Mohaghegh, "THE NEW WEAPON" is a veritable chaos-poem that sets words and images—no less than existence itself—on fire.

The Center for Broken Thought is a concept-machine whose purpose is to proliferate and produce ideas that are visceral and sharp. By initiating a movement called "The Breaking," the Center for Broken Thought emerged in September 2005 at Columbia University with the urgency to innovate concepts and modes of experience that emanate force and desire.

· Events of Broken Thought [Broken Thought]
· Existential Movement Debuts on Campus Life [Columbia Spectator]

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A Reader identifying (we're assuming) himself only as "Agitator" directs us to the following choice jargonry offered up by the Architectural League in celebration of this year's Young Architects Forum:

Whether a cyclical recurrence or a phenomenal outburst, INSTABILITY agitates the normative groundings underlying current economic, political, moral and climatic paradigms.

Young architects? Instability? Never.

· Young Architects Forum [Arch. League]

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This just in from the Department of Precrime, news that tonight's showdown at the Center for Architecture is slated to be a "dialogue" between "dj" DJ Spooky and "architect" Lebbeus Woods (It's a drawing! It's a city! It's...experimental architecture!) The program? "Resonating Frequencies with Lebbeus Woods and DJ Spooky - an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between architecture and music." The point? Unsure. And, unfortunately, all our in-house correspondents will be tied up at a Dewars tasting, our intern's got a bad case of the clap flu, and, frankly, this event sounds fuck-off boring. Which means that just as much as the Department of Precrime needs its crimes, we'll be needing your reports.

· Lebbeus Woods and DJ Spooky [AIA]

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What's alarming about this tidbit, submitted by trusted reader BS, is how utterly normative normal it is likely to appear to those of you, poor souls, reared in the academy and toiling in the field. No efforts at willful obfuscation, no obvious phantasmagoria of blather, no overt attempts to mask with words an idea that simply ain't. No, the boilerplate nonsense you will read after the jump—a description of UN Studio's Holiday Home installation at the ICA in Philadelphia—is your quotidian jargon, straight-up, insidious in it's banality. Nevermind that the firm employs the lovely Caroline Bos to serve as an "in-house critic [and] all-purpose debunker," one line is the finest intellectual get-out-of-jail-free card we've read in some time: "The interplay of what is real and what is virtual transpires on a number of levels touching on ideas of collective memory and phenomenological perceptions."

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The JargonWatch™ never stops. And today it brings us to Dublin, where one of our export Pritzkerians, Thom Mayne, baffled even the architects in his audience during a recent talk:

The talk was as complex as Mayne's buildings and some architects were happy to glean what they could from it while others thought it just a verbal mess....One architect complained that it had all been pretentious rubbish while another thought Mayne was a complete chancer. Another said that the talk was full of cliché-ridden archispeak and that Mayne came across as a pained, self-conscious intellectual. So, genius or spoofer? The Pritzker judges obviously think that the former is the case.

Read on yourselves for Mayne's ideas on "the concretisation of the world" and "reconfiguring our world." Then gasp at the hubris: "I'm redefining the notion of logic and how we interpret the world."

· Complex...But Just What Did Mayne Mean? [Irish Times, via ANN]

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