Inside the Twilight Exit, Alex Barr is blowing my mind.
“A lot of people see architecture as a progression of buildings,” he explains to me, our bodies tucked into a lone corner of the beloved Central District bar. “The way I understand architecture is a way of seeing and thinking and questioning the world around you. What is the weight of one decision? How does that change your structural system, your material costs, your aesthetic of the building, the purpose of the building?” As a neophyte to the design world but no stranger to the musical one, Barr’s words enthrall me. They guide my eyes to the tiny details of the bar that I’d normally overlook. There’s nothing quite like it in the area; its surreptitious alleyway entrance guards a cloistered cluster of timeworn tables and benches, their dark confines glowing under the faintest of orange incandescence. “A good building,” he continues, “is a nice, sexy piece of shit that serves its purpose.” The term he uses is “vernacular”: domestic, functional, and of substantive use to the layperson. “It's something that the neighborhood can give a definition. It’s not you giving a definition and then people trying to make do with it.”
In contrast, he skewers the brewery on Broadway and Union formerly known as Optimism. The Olson Kundig design certainly has research involved; once a dealership for luxury cars, Kundig’s team was “able to retain the ambiance of the original masonry building while still incorporating necessary energy and structural upgrades.” But such ambiance perhaps does not befit a communal gathering space and Barr recalls being in the brewery with his architect friends, all of them chafing against the sacrifice of utility for the sake of aesthetics. “That space is way too fucking loud,” he says. “It's an assault. You can’t hear shit in there.” Barr’s currently speaking to an audience of one, but in Telehealth, the band he leads with his partner Kendra Cox, he extends his love of architectural theory to tens of thousands more, and counting. Last year’s debut LP Content Oscillator found fast fans at legendary local establishments like radio station KEXP and record label Sub Pop, both of whom caught on to the album’s combination of accessible new-wave pastiche and dense intellectuality. Ever since then, the band has toured multiple times across America and discovered legions beyond Seattle who connect with the music, and the messaging. You don’t need to be a student of the field to appreciate the band, but it helps decode the inside jokes embedded in songs like “Hyper Tech Green Investment Guy” and “Taliesin Grid,” the latter an ode to Wright’s cursed utopia.
The music behind those lyrics — cerebral post-punk a la Devo decorated with squiggly synths and bearing the subversive edge of Sparks — also feels perfectly aligned with the detail-oriented design realm. In the music video for their latest single “Mindtrap,” two nervy guitar lines mesh over a claymation portrayal of working professionals cranking out products and whiling away idle time with their pocket toys. The characters, each lovingly crafted by Kelton Sears to be of different colors and shapes, are forced to adhere to the rigid standards of the workplace. Yet though it could be about any corporate environment, the fragments of astroturf cranked out by its captive workers point somewhere a touch more specific. The idea for Telehealth stemmed directly from Barr’s Master of Architecture degree, which he initially pursued out of a quarter-life crisis but quickly found to be a catalyst for his love of architectural theory. Though he loathed the real-life application of the pursuit, the University of Washington program turned him on to the works that resonated with his artist’s brain: Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, Jill Stoner’s Toward a Minor Architecture, and the holistic fastidiousness of Frank Lloyd Wright. For his graduate thesis, Barr constructed a sprawling multimedia work of videos, an interactable website, fabricated wearables, and an art installation involving feedback loops that took place over three days. Advised by Nicole Huber, the thesis represented his first exploration of architecture through the lens of art. “I started to think of architecture that way,” he says of the thesis, “where it’s not really buildings; it's this act of becoming and questioning and thinking and performing.” Such tutelage informed the conscientiousness with which Barr treats every element of Telehealth. “There's a term that Wright used a lot: gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art,” he says. “His whole thing was that he wanted to create every element.” It’s not just the music and the lyrics; it’s the album art, the videos, the social media captions, the outfits and accessories, everything. One merch item, a shirt with a burning condominium with the words “This Is Telehealth” underneath, speaks a thousand words. Another, a lime green hoodie laden with monumental imagery and dollar signs, says a thousand more. The color green, in particular, overwhelms the band’s aesthetic. It’s all over the band’s album artwork and music videos, and its members rarely play shows without being bathed in a viridescent hue on stage. Thematically, the color pulls double duty. It’s an ironic commentary on the penury of contemporary musicianship, but it’s also a scathing critique of the obsession with sustainability that plagues today’s architects.
Barr encountered that obsession firsthand during an internship at Miller Hull, the firm that designed Seattle’s world-renowned Bullitt Building. “Architects buy into it like it's cocaine,” he says. “It makes them feel good at justifying the fact that they are maybe one of the biggest ecological harm businesses in the entire world, as far as resource mining and utilization.” The whole time we’re sitting, Barr never passes on an opportunity to express vexation at the egomania plaguing the field of architecture. “In the design world, ego is everywhere,” he says. “In architecture, it is very defining. It's terrifying.” Yet if his version of ideal architecture minimizes the self, then how does he reconcile that with how much contemporary art (and especially music) values ego? In today’s musical climate, to play music is to essentially sell your personality. Perhaps that’s why Barr performs in the band as Alexander Attitude, a nom-de-guerre that allows him to explore that tension without cracking under it. It affords himself an ego to sell without it being his own. But besides that, it’s also a way for Barr to play with a sense of scale. “Similar to Prince and Bowie,” he says, “It gives you a lot of freedom. You can be larger than the restrictions that you give yourself.” Through Telehealth, Barr (or Attitude) intends for a constant conversation with the practice of architecture and its crossroads with culture. “I’m trying to take the narrative of architecture outside of books and classrooms and bring it into these types of conversations, or even outside of art exhibits. If a million people listen to our song, and they start researching what Taliesin West is, that's pretty cool.”
