Seán Kangataran

Ask The Dust

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:21:19 +0200

On the 29th of July I lost one of the most important people in my life. Glen was an older brother, a guide, and a very dear friend. The outpouring of grief and stories of how connected people felt to him and his work have been overwhelming. I wanted to share one small story that nearly connects the beginning and the end of our time together, it’s a story that inspired so much adventure and even led me to leave Ireland and make a home in Los Angeles (attached below).

glen-hansard–john-fante.pdf

North side spaces

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:23:42 +0200

Milan is insufferably hot in the summer. It was a shock to me when I moved here in June 2025. Like most of Europe, the buildings are made to keep heat in and because the humidity is surprisingly high I found it harder to adapt than anywhere I’ve ever been, including Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. In addition the endless cars (Italy has one of the highest rates of car ownership and usage in Europe) and exposed concrete ensure that the urban heat island effect is maximised.

Despite this, Via Teodosio & Via Ponzio, densely tree-lined and running north to south through the school, is a microcosm of what’s possible even in the center of this. The street is noticeably darker than others. Mosses have come to grow as a photosynthetic compass marking the shady north side of every tree. Mosses (bryophytes) are one of the most primitive plants we have. They don’t have vascular tissues so they are dependent on being connected to each other, to water, on being sheltered, and not being disturbed.

AI & Pinterest references

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:01:00 +0200

There’s a joke about how you spend years in architecture school designing things that already exist. It’s true. And it would be absurd to say there isn’t value in browsing references (but that’s a topic for a much longer discussion). That said, one of the most challenging things about studying at Polimi is the automatic use of Pinterest references and AI generated images.

The students here are bright and extremely motivated, but they’re overworked and stressed. If we imagine that architecture studies are some variation on a cycle of thinking and making, and at this school, because the greatest emphasis is on the final product, then thinking (and even a lot of making) becomes non-essential. Any shortcut that allows more and better output is superior to understanding, process, and experimentation. Design failure is wasted time. When one group of students are having their “product” evaluated directly in comparison to all other students, then not using shortcuts is inherently expensive in time and energy. It also pits students against each other in a bizarre technological war where they must use these resources to keep up but they must also contain and protect that information. Sharing information is strictly a disadvantage. As a result everyone is using different arrangements of the same tools, understanding less than they ever have (even in relation to how the tools might be used), and being incentivized to not help or teach anyone their process.

We’re at a very uniquely troubling place in the history of education, we’ve never had a tool arrive that we could truly outsource our thinking to, and here we are as students, all maniacally using it in parallel with “don’t ask don’t tell” policies just to survive the classes at the expense of so many opportunities to learn.

Viper Room 2011

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:01:43 +0200

Apparently, it was 15 years ago when we played the Viper room as this line up. It always felt like a strangely solemn place to play, it’s impossible to not think about River Phoenix when you’re there. He passed away on the sidewalk you have to load in and out from.

It’s easy to be negative about how cutthroat and high paced the strip is but compared to the east side, we were always surprised by how good the sound was and how gracious the promoters were.

Edit: I was just told the venue closed this year for demolition, Los Angeles is the only home I know and I barely recognise it anymore.

One year in Milan

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:44:18 +0200

One year in Milan today. It’s wild to think that this time next year I’ll be packing to leave. So much about what it means to study in Italy is eye opening, I didn’t know education like this existed. I’m looking forward to analyzing it in future research. AI and architecture are on a really interesting collision course and our means of measuring anything are all going to have to be reconsidered.

V. Sklovskij, Art as Device, 1917

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:08:28 +0200

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously-automatically. […]

Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been. […] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious”.

After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of “recognition”. An object appears before us. We know it’s there but we do not see it, and, for that reason, we can say nothing about it. The removal of this object from the sphere of automatized perception is accomplished in art by a variety of means.

V. Sklovskij, Art as Device, 1917

Window: subject, window: object

Fri, 22 May 2026 11:33:05 +0200

Most of what we learn at Polimi is technical, vague, and frustrating, but sometimes we get to do things like this.

model-kangataran-sean.pdf

Contact - a visual essay

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:04:40 +0200

My favourite class during this semester has been one on design theory. This is something I got to create for it.

kangataran-sean-visual-essay.pdf

Birds

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:11:00 +0200

My Mum pointed this out a long time ago, but I’ve always had birds around me in different states of distress. Apparently there’s an old Irish tale about St Kevin and the blackbird as a symbol of patience and tenderness. This guy just needed a rest and was back in the air fifteen minutes later.

For some reason when they’re around it’s the only time Conor gets jealous.

Lambrate, Milan

Tell Me Everything

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:11:00 +0200

This poem by RD Laing reminds me of the daily experience of studying architecture. For a few years I baked bread daily. Pounds and pounds of dough and failed experiments. When I needed new ideas I could write to the best and they’d share, ideas, techniques, goals, everything.

See, bread is deceptively simple, it’s “just flour, water, and air”, but it humbles you quick. Architecture is impossibly complicated so it might take you decades to admit you don’t know anything.

RD Laing - Knots 1970

There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know, and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don’t know.

Therefore I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know but you can’t tell me what it is because you don’t know that I don’t know what it is.

You may know what I don’t know, but not that I don’t know it, and I can’t tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Susan Sontag - Against Interpretation

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:12:38 +0200

The object of art doesn’t matter too much.

“Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content.”

“This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us away from the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously.”

“Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.””

“But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality”

painting by Donato Creti, Bologna

Good Plants Bad Plants

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:04:32 +0200

In the park we walk each day, spring has arrived. Thousands of dandelion seedheads sprouted. No one planted them, no one takes care of them, kids play with them. On the corner there is a booth selling colourful plants wrapped in paper. In a few weeks men in orange jackets will come and mow down the uninvited guests.

Lambrate, Milan