Idea: Component Cars

In CS250, we talked about the mass and the aerodynamic resistance of the vehicle being the two leading contributors to energy inefficiencies. What is the potential of a "modular" car, interchangable pods which can be swapped in and out as necessary? How do we build a "reducible" vehicle? Can we make a big/small car?

Engagemet between People and People Systems

Idea: Common culture is ever becoming less and less an engagement between people, but rather an interfacing of individuals with the abstraction of culture.

Implications: Value. Under the first condition, there is a value placed upon individuals: each individual is engaged with other individuals, and thus a rich and immediate connection between them. The second condition reduces individuals to the abstractions of the things they produce. Architects are reduced to the buildings they design. Contractors are nothing more than house-builders. There is so little enmeshing between people that they in a sense cease to mean anything to each other.

If people don't value each other, then why should they care whether the other survives or not?

The Economy and Empowerment
The Economy is the system which we interface with when we want to get things done. It's not access to people who have the ability to produce something, but rather the abstract and inaccessible system which, to most, magically produces capital for those that need it.

Loudness

Loudness: the volume at which the various elements of spatial experience communicate at. In a world driven by competition and the desire to differentiate oneself from the crowd (the image of desire) the amplitude one body exerts is paramount. Businesses make bigger, brighter signs, have wider doors, flashier products, project farther into the most public of spaces so that they may seduce possible patrons. A Genetic of Loud. If I can shout louder than my neighbor, the idea follows, people will hear me better than him.

This competition has contributed to the overwhelming shock value which contributes to the blase individual. The constant stimulation not only anesthetizes the nerves, but also conditions them to accept this stimulation as normal. Advertising becomes reality. Perpetual seduction is normal. Brought into our homes via the television, our computers, we are within ourselves as individuals, and yet at the complete mercy of an Orwellian system. The system is currently without much abuse, as far as we can tell. But the infrastructure for power is in place. The deafening loudness we experience at all times is translated to confusion in some, to fury in others, and complete comfort in more.

Planting Seeds

These two bodies begin as seeds, and within these seeds is contained genetic information which informs the growth of the bodies. Each body grows differently: The earthen body grows radially, like roots, in all directions, and slowly, methodically. The heavy masonry must be well planned, not reacting to the nuances of daily life, but rather reflecting upon trends and traditions, long-term trajectories, steady-state transformations.

The flying body grows more like an animal, fast and on the road to autonomy, constantly poking and provoking it's environment out of necessary curiosity. It darts about quickly, growing rapidly in some places, consuming what is no longer necessary and recombining it with immediate necessities. The flying body has the ability to change rapidly, based once again on an underlying genetic code. However, the speed at which these changes occur allows for a kind of instability, a temporality where nothing is reliable, nothing is for certain. Everything must be questioned, and it is the nature of this body that demands this kind of questioning.

But the way this body must grow is coded in an unfamiliar language. Here we jump to the construction techniques of this school. The formal conception uses extremely flexible material, lightweight, permeable and easily manipulable. The issue at hand is that the performance of this material does not maintain with scale. Actual construction materials are much stiffer, less flexible, heavier than those in the model. Thus, rather than being able to stretch where necessary, the full-scale material will have to be cut and stitched, much like that of a piece of clothing, in order to fulfill their formal requirements. These seams fall into three-dimensional space, and the performance of these materials at full scale are figurable in two ways: one, by experimentation, and the other (which fits wonderfully into our seeding concept) via the computer. The computer can calculate the patterns necessary to construct this flying school. Thus, the computer lab (at the center) is the seed which will allow the remainder of the school to grow out from. It is the RNA, the decoder for the genome.

Organization

The School of Wiser Maize is organized around this idea of two bodies: one characterized by lightness and motion, containing elements of philosophy, culture, literature, etc; the other is characterized by the earth, heavyness, labor, mechanics. These two bodies begin apart from one another, at first as separate identities. Organisms as they are, they grow: The heavy one as a plant's roots, slowly, and in all directions. The light body shoots around haphazardly, looking at things for just moments before rocketing off on new tangents. It crosses over it's own path constantly.

The flying one at one point travels farther out and collides with the earthen body. At this point there is both a physical as well as an intellectual exchange. The space created by this collision results in a space of mingling, of opposing intellects exchanging, interacting on any of many levels (lunch, performance, exhibition, play, etc.). Here in the rift the faculty find themselves centered, holding a position not as the authority-figures of the elementary school, but rather as the defenders of learning. Their offices are open to the flows of children, who my come and go as their curiosity allows. Discipline becomes a question of mutual understanding, of working through problems, rather than that of an ultimate authority over the incompetent serf.

Subversion

And then comes the end-of-project subversion.

Patrick picks up one of my models, fascinated with it, and showed me how it was connected back to the narrative. I wondered if that move was a bit loose, but it seems that the narrative is better for a spatial idea, just a blink of a starting point, rather than a resource to be referenced at every point of a project.

Second point, and maybe more importantly: Subtlety of expression. We talked about grand gestures, dramatic architecture (soap opera architecture?), epictecture, iconic architecture, whatever you might call it, and how these are all and great in themselves, but they are singular instances: they don't talk about repeatability, appropriatability (not a word), the ability for architecture to act not as an autonomous object, but rather as a prototype for future architecture. Precedence, perhaps. Isn't this what modern architecture has always been about? Setting precedence? Selling lifestyles? This is like MoMA propaganda which has happened (and still is) during the 20th century.

Repetition: This word makes me think about columns, windows, beams, levels, rooms, houses, grids. The effects of repetition include affirmation, a reinforcement of the idea that "this is what x thing is". Other effects may include inducing an idea of line, or run in multiple axes, a grid of sorts, or perhaps a banality of an element, where that element, becoming common, falls into the backdrop and becomes ground. Repetition reduces in the sense that it removes meaning from the object, allowing the meaning of the collection to be expressed.

Uniqueness: This word makes me think about objects, symbols, identities, the self, individuality, autonomy, statements with a period, punchline/headline, the ego. A unique object is the figure that stands out against the ground. It is meant to be understood. We talked about ethics, what role do these objects play in culture. Are they to be repeated? Are they to be used as models to be projected into the future? As architects we have to ask these questions. What happens in a culture without points of interest?

One train of thought comes in the words of Umberto Eco, from Places to Non-Places. These points marginalize everything around them by transforming the spaces in between these unique identities into circulation space: roads and sidewalks, not fit for rest, without pause.

Thus it is the responsibility of architecture to understand it's own desires of fame and fortune, the ascent from man-being into god-form, and that this ego may not be in the spirit of the community. The architecture exists first for itself, and second for the people it houses. It presupposes its own value over the value of those which it is built for.

This raises the question of Benin: what is the ethical responsibility of this school? Is this place being built to fulfill my own desires? Or is this place in the background to something. Architecture, as Tschumi stated, is the ground to the figure of living. Therefore, we should be thinking about what we need for living, and let those forms happen of their own accord.

That sounds nice.

Sidenote: Design Process

Every process needs a beginning, or a jumping in point. The first is to establish a ground, a foundation of research from which to build everything up. This research must include previously acquired knowledge, bookwork, and formal studies.

Round 3: Translating to Drawing

Currently in process of translating the story into drawing, although it seems that I am translating it literally, ie recreating the physical landscape rather than the social forces at play. The paper has been drawn on and sliced, peeled back to begin delineating a space contained by fissures (the rift). This project is about foreign influence meeting domestic condition, about figure as ground, and then being pulled into distinction. The ground and the figure in the domestic condition are in essence the same. But the incursion of the foreign causes a differentiation between building and landscape.

Round 2: Translating the Story

The story:

One body, focused decidedly on the future and all that waits ahead, is rocketing through the infinitude of time and space. It passes between places, absorbing, questioning, wonderingl; it is on a search for something phantasmal, at the edge of perception, that it cannot wholly conceive.

This flying body crosses a threshold, entering foreign territory. The foreign is a strange place, a landscape of open earth, devoid of any apparent activity. But there is a sense of life to the landscape. The flying body decides to investigate.

flittering above the ground, it notices another body, anchored to a landscape so tightly that the line between what is body and what is landscape is indiscernible. The passing body sees this anchoring in relation to its own freedom, and feels the need to break the anchored free. It races heroically forward.

Without questioning, the floating body grabs hold of the anchored and wrenches heavenward, trying to tear it from its earthly binding. The earthen body gives slightly, the line between body and earth cracking, splitting, leaving a rift between body and scape. But the foreign body cannot displace the earthen body entirely. The earthen body is clinging by its roots to the ground. It does not have any desire to be removed.

The foreign body, disbelieving, does not understand this. Why do you not wish to be freed from your earthen bondage? it asks. You seem poor in your condition.

The earthen body turns to the foreigner, and then looks around to the landscape. Why would I want to leave this earth which feeds me, and which I care for?

The foreign body wonders at this question, reflecting on all it knew of the universe. The connection between earth and body seemed faintly familiar, yet irreconcilably distant. But the foreign body returned to thoughts of the future, and told the earthen body of things which had happened in far-off places, things which were yet to come.

The earthen body listens, but can not take it all in at once. This foreigner speaks in the tongues of lore: of infinite expanses, limitless towers, bottomless pits. These things are impossible. How can this foreigner be? Why does he seek to rob me of place?

Then the earthen body notices it, just a glimmer of something familiar: the husks of roots, trailing behind the foreigner’s shifty movements. But the roots are frail and hollow, atrophied after eons of neglect. The earthen body, deeply saddened, says: Look! You, too, had roots which once nurtured you. You were a part of the earth once, but now, you can no longer be one with your home, your beginning. You are forever a wanderer.

The foreign body glances back and sees. So I did, it says, recognizing the empty husks overshadowed by agglomerations upon agglomerations of collected experience. I do not recall ever being concerned with home, a place to return to, it thinks. It has thought only of the ever-fleeting destination.

The earthen body then says, I cannot leave my land, for it is all that I know, and that which I hold sacred. Everything I believe is based on this land. To abandon this would be to lose it. To lose would be to lose myself. I cannot allow for this.

The foreign body deliberates for a moment, and looks over its vast accumulations. I have far more than I need, doubles and triples of some things. It chose several of them, things which it recognized as both personally significant, as well as intellectually informative and stimulating, and, breaking them off, gives them them to the earthen body. With these things, it thinks, the earthen body can break free of its own accord.

The earthen body accepts the gifts, and arranges them in the rift. Though foreign and unfamiliar, these are tools with which it can protect and reinforce its roots.

I have left you with things that inspire, structure, support, enable, things which you may use to your own ends, whether as I have used them or as you find new uses for. But these things are also a set of instructions, coded, so that when you learn to read them, you will have the option of ascending if that day's need arises.

The foreign body then remembers its journey into the sky, but thinking of its journey no longer as a quest for destination, but rather as a series of traces and mementos which had come to be the very definition of the flying body.

The earthen body watches as the flying body vanishes into space.

End Story.

Here is a breakdown of Actors, Actions, and Conditions

Actors first: Flying Body, Earthen Body, landscape (solid), sky(other, unknown condition), knowledge(information), awareness(learning), the rift (void)

Actions/conditions: Flying, Grounding (anchoring), questioning beginnings, creating the void, filling the void

What is the spatial translation of this story?

What is the processional (make 3) translation?

What is the social organization drawn up by this story?

Statement of Intent - This Is in a Permanent State of Change

This blog will be the digital dumping point for all that I find profound, pertinent, intelligent, extravagant; it will function more as a ground to reconcile all that I take in while I frustratingly enjoy my time in education. Hopefully, this will begin to build up towards something.

I will start by throwing down a few topics/themes from last semester and this semester: the diagram and its potential, ethical architecture, critical distance, semiology (the meaning of things), ontology (the meaning of it all)

Things not touched on so much are formal relationships, although these are beginning to come together. One strategy is to begin by drawing relational diagrams; these have intense intent. The next is beginning via the narrative: what is the story? These two approaches are perpendicular to the way they lead to spatial ideas. One begins with a predefined series of rules, while the other begins with a story that is either abstract initially or needs to be abstracted to understand the structure/embedded heirarchies and organizations.