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You may have heard about Serero Architects' proposal for a pavilion at the top of the Eiffel Tower, commemorating the 120th anniversary of the tower. You may have also heard that the proposal was a "hoax", dropped onto the media as the supposed winner of a competition hosted by the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE), the organization that runs and maintains the tower. And lastly, you may have heard Serero's denial that it ever claimed to win a competition - rather that the myth snowballed as a result of media mis-information, and perhaps even an erroneous, unauthorized interview with one of Serero's interns (described as a "foreign intern", which means that Serero thinks he is either unfamiliar with the SETE or just stupid - which most foreigners are).

Anyway, thanks to the handy combination of graphics tools, massive internet networkings and people with either too much analytical skill or time on their hands, someone finally organized the entire scenario and diagrammed it out for our comprehension.

Oddly enough, while some accuse Serero of self-inflating their image, shall we say "forging" their way to an international audience via an imaginary competition, others are hailing the stunt as a massively successful PR strategy, which did nothing more than expose an internal news-media breakdown as it devoured its own faulty information - like an internet version of the telephone game, information about went wrong at some point (either with the "foreign" intern or an early mis-informed news article), and this started a snowball of a myth that kept getting bigger and bigger.

Given our situation in developing an architectural thesis, however, I like to think of Serero's scheme as nothing other than an extremely convincing - and ideal - conjecture for architecture. So much so that everyone bought it, regardless of how it was being sold. It's good to see those in professional practice extend themselves into thesis-land every now and then, although I wonder how it can be financially viable. There's always family money, I guess, if you have access to such a thing. In any event, I don't have much of a thesis of my own to share here, other than the fact that I see a nice parallel between us and them. But to close, I also want to put out the question of how the rumor-mill's buzz will play out. The immediate effect is both praise and contempt - and all news is good news. But news dies fast, and it will be interesting to see how Serero channels their newfound celebrity, by either scamming the media once again (perhaps in cognito?) or taking the more conventional approach by adding the buzz to fire and gradually building its practice. I doubt my own thesis work could pull the same wool over the same eyes.