Storage: Furniture to Spaces

"There's a squirrel in all of us:  storing something today so that we can find and use it tomorrow,  next week or next year, is a basic and admirable human impulse.  Few of our possessions are in use at at one time; the rest must be stored away in such as way that can find them at a moment's notice.  Care full storage conserves, prevents deterioration and saves money, careless storage usually causes damages, wastes time and might just as well not be done at all "
(Excerpt from Geoffrey Salmon's Storage c. 1967)

"It is little wonder than that many of the first furniture designs were developed as storage devices.  In the Middle Ages, people were not burdened with a great many  possessions, partly because there were not easy means for producing things in great quantity, partly because the powerful Church was hostile to unnecessary possessions and there were sumpturary laws that limited conspicuous private consumption.  Nevertheless, storage was an important concern.  What possessions people did have that we not in constant use were put away on the ground floor of the house in storeroom that shared the space with stables and perhaps an armory.  One all important piece of furniture at the time as the chest.  People carried entire household about with them as they followed the court or the hunt.  Nearly everything they owned went into a portable packing chests, and at each destination these chest became essential furniture-both for continued storage and for seating and tables.     Only when life became less itinerant and different rooms in the house developed specific functions did more elaborate furniture come into being."
(Excerpt from Melinda Davis' A House and Garden Book:  Storage in the Home c. 1978)

"The human squirrel will certainly think out new places and ways to store his possessions in the future.  One big question remains.  Will our homes be designed recognizing not only that our living activities have changed during the last decade, but that our storage needs will probably double during the next. "
(Excerpt from Geoffrey Salmon's Storage c. 1967)

enveloping explications

TBT:  envelope

D/A: explicative

While theorists such as Mark Whigley asks us to rethink ecological cocepts of the House (i.e. prosthetics), Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical ideas on space perhaps has an answer.  If Sloterdijk were to respond to Whigley’s call he would claim that, “we are simply not capable of continuing the old wolrd cosmology of ancient Europe that rested on equating the house and the home with the world.”  Instead of deep ecological undersrtanding of a human world constituting a shared house for all living creatures, Sloterdijk believes the universe is “made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere.”   

While one might think of Bucky Fuller’s geodesic strutures, Sloterdijk spherical spaces is more of an metaphor for how humans have sought to create specific kinds of protecive inwards looking enviorments that inevitably interact with one another.  In his Sphere Trilogy he further explores this endeavor taken up by humans:

“The Spharen project is about the creation of a specific human interior.  On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of existential space around themselves.  Urban spaces are a humanoied enviornment where nature is completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within cities that you might normally expleect to feel in nature.  In the 3rd volume o Spharen, in a long chapter titled ‘The Foam City’, I try to describe these multiplicites of modern life in terms of foam-making - all inidivuals live in a specific bubble within a communicating foam.”

Critical to Sloterdijk’s conception of space is modernity’s obessesion with explication.  This is the process whereby something which has been taken for granted is brought to the fore, made manifest, and open and fully described.  Science and technology work in tandem, which may appear to be a progressive tool for modernity to free itself from its own background of anxiety.  However, modernity remains trapped in a continual reliance on “innovative” technology for its explications.  This reliance in turn creates more anxiety and urgency to justify experiments though violent means that are euphemestically termed research and innovation- in other words, atmoterroism.

In Air/Condition, Solterdijk shows the parrallism between these atmoterroist explications of culture and technology.  Critical moments in modern aesthetic are Dali and the Surrealists, Kasimir Malevich’s art works, and Elias Caneti’s remarks on Herman Broch.

“Aesthetic modernity is a procedure of applying force not against people or things, but against unexplained cultural relations.  It organizes waves of attackes against all encompassing attitudes such as faith, love, and moral rectitude, as well as pseudo-evident categories such as form, content, image, work and art (79).”

Meanwhile, technological explications appear in the form of the 1915 gas wars of Germany.  Warfare is no longer targeted to combatants but also to non-combatants and their enviornment.  Atmoterroism makes no distinction betwen people, plants, animals but instead compromises a form of violence against the very human ambient enviornemnt (air, water, temperature) without which people cannot exist!  Extensions of this explication would later follow in beningn forms such as the chemical sprays for agro-industiral purposes but would later be militarized into nuclear weapons and Pentagon papers proposals for weather warfare.  Even more sublte examples of explication have infiltrated our lives such as weather reports, interior “air design” techniques (i.e., airconditioning, refridgerators, cooling fans), and global greenhouse effects.  Air conditions have now been made explicit in order to directly modfiy the mood of its airspace users.

What does all this talk of creatings interiors for spheres, atmoterroist explications, and  air have to do with architecture?  Sloterdijk would likely claim that modernity renders the issue of the house explicit.  If there was a difinitive moment of this kind of space making, he would point to Benjimin’s description of the rise of bougeoise culture in his arcades proejct.  The bourgeoise in their salons wanting to absorb everything that was exterior into their interiors.  Their aim was to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an inteior that contains their total world.  This is analogous to the way Sloterdijk talks of humans creating their own immunologies of bubbles, foams, and spheres that all inevitably interact with one another.  Humans are always trying to create and find a protective yet connective enviornment.  Thus, the evolution of explicative spaces starting from the the salons of the Flanuer, the primitive arcades of Paris, Paxton’s Cystal Palance, the Shopping Mall, to the Stadium. 

What does all this seemingly inward looking space making mean for the future of the traditional house and its relation to the city?   First, the apartment maybe the latest stage of sphere making evolution as everything is drawn into the apartment: the world and household blend.  If a one-person existence can succeed at all, it is only because of an architectural support that turns the apartment itself into an entire world prosthetic.  Perhaps more intimate and confined types of spaces are likely to arise in say cryogenic freezig pods, coffins, of even space stations.  

Second, the exodus of humans to the city will continue, as they move from its rural niches of natural air-envelope houses and re-settlement into cramped climate controlled apartments of the city.  The proces of explication with regard to housing has lead to concerns of the quality of the built envionrment which is all very usefull and beneficial.  However, the result has been an self-consciousness and attendent unease with our immediate physcial enviornment.  Inevitably, the people living in these apartments also begin to feel very strongly that their own protecitve spheres are endangerd by the prescence of too many other spheres which are pressed against each other and destroy each other.  At an extreme, explication can lead to alienation and a feeling of homelessness in the world.

Questions arising....

Other questions arise however over the nature of Sloterdijk’s explict.  Should we really be afraid of modernity’s obsession with explication if we are just as well a part of the process?  Even if modernity attempts explication, what if is not understood, not agreed upon, or simply wrong?  What if there are multiple and perhaps competeing or contradictory explications?

Are these series of quetsions then where the realm of polictics steps into support Sloterdijk’s other spherical realms?  Certainly Sloterdijk’s study points to previous readings with concerns of totalitairan regimes taking over the humanity of the individual.  If we are to be pessimistic, power is benignly given up by the individual for the service of transparency in many of the aging post-industrial democratic states of the world.  If we are to be optimistic, explication can lead to a more robust and participatory state.

As architects, are we drop the whole notion on in-out dichotomy and soley focus on the interior?  Isn’t there a similar profession that has corned the market on this area?

Finally, is it possible to make something implicit?

sources:

Terror from Air Review
Air Conditioning Spaceship Earth
Something in the Air

Sphere Theory

Book Interview with Sloterdijk

Book Review of 'Terror from the Air'

wielding with the wild

TBT: urban
D/A: polygenetic

The wild can be best described as a:

"new terrifying word for urban drift...spontaneous emergence of unruly and uncontrollable emancipation of self-organizing social forces from the rigid geometries of socially and behaviorally engineered urban space.”

The wild consists of an intuitive process, often times found in nature, where one can fluidly move between tactical and strategic modes in relation to fluctuating conditions. Examples of the wilding phenomenon in action and studied: a NY Times diagram of people "wilding" in the Harlem Ghetto, the wilding maneuvers of the Vietcong, the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity’s description of computer modeled bottom-up system of organization.

What then is a wild architecture? Instead of calling it architecture, Winter coins the term “polygenetic structures” to describe a hybrid condition of city and architecture. No specific examples are given, only parameters for what it could be: large, complex, and fundamentally open ended and unfinished. Examples that do come to my mind scale up from the street vending cart to the agglomerations of shantytowns, favelas, and slums have formed a relationship with the city. These structures are what makes the urban possible as its continued existence depends on the amount of work, information, and form made available.

As the world continues to urbanize, Sanford Kwinter thinks it becomes imperative for designers to follow in the same logic of how the “wild” self-organizes. How then does one use the logic of the wild to design the urban fabric? Digital technology gets hinted throughout the article with terms like reaching “computational thresholds” and algorithms to aid us in the process. From a legislative point of view, one could see more flexible legal devices employed besides grids, parceling, and zoning systems.

This then leads into my next question of what gives us the right, let alone the assumption, that we can influence such design outcomes with wilding agendas. Didn’t modern planning projects armed with their social sciences of yesterday end in spectacular failures of segregated housing and market driven isolated communities? Winter himself implies this with claims that “less than 5% of this [urban substance] will be designed or planned” in the traditional manner (191). Could the mere intervention of architects disrupt the logic of a truly wild urbanity or would our participation really help this process along?

For whatever reason, Kwinter thinks that the wild can be wielded so that “we will earn the right to call ourselves urbanists again.” What were we before then? Nomads? Dwellers? Villagers? Townies? Suburbanists? Jetsetters? If we were urbanists, then how did we lose this title? Were we ever Kwinter’s definition of urbanists to begin with? Why is it so important a title to reclaim? For him to make such a claim must be more than just a design profession’s intellectual and political justification of existence:

"Today's task is to induce, dare one say grow-these polygenetic structures, or more accurately, to program the systems that enable such structures, in their turn, and at a sufficient wild distance, to assemble themselves… Design today must find ways to approximate, borrow, and transform morphogenetic processes from all aspects of the wild nature, to invent artificial means of creating living artificial environments. We must learn to see design algorithms everywhere we look." (191, “The Wild” from Far from Equilibrium)

Why the necessity to adapt these wilding strategies? Is the wild a more natural, sustainable, or intuitive way for society and designers to function? Does this lead to new possibilities in our design endeavors? Or, is the call for wilding just another one of our knee-jerk Western impulses to impose control or perhaps an anthropocentric urge? Will wilding be more liberating for the rest of humanity than what’s been planned in the past?

Kwinter does imply some imperatives in the article’s footnotes, highlighting the potential for abuse of mis-wielding and misunderstanding of the wild. The scenario presented in the film Blue Thunder is an example of wilding lessons from Vietnam relearned by the government in its helicopter crime operations. In the U.S., apparently the urban is “under siege by laissez-fiare ideology and the new Republican-led feudalism that is striving to shape it (191).” The example echoes warnings by past technology critics of a world fostering totalitarian impulses.

As much as Kwinter calls out to designers to wield the wild, in practice, we architects have little political levers to pull. Even what he is advocating is a strategy, that more planners, urban designers, policy makers ought to listen to. At best we can only wield with the wild by maybe forwarding this article to the second floor.

Links: Far from Equilibrium Book Reviww

networking but not loosing short-site(ed)ness

TBT: network

D/A: eccentric

Keller Easterling's introduction to the 1994 book Organization Space:  Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America, is a brief preview of her application of network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats.  Concerning architecture, Easterling`s investigations suggests that the design discipline has yet to truly tap the full potential of the concept of the network.  She observes:

(1)"architects are typically more fluent in description of activity and relationship that result in artifacts or forms within conventions that favor the designation of site as single entity."

….Despite the design profession having accumulated a descriptive vocabulary on forms and geometries, there is a dearth of commonly accepted terms when describing spatial organizations with "active parts, temporal components, or differential change." 

An example of this is in the way the design profession conceptualizes the organization of a site as a singular entity instead of many entities distributed across a network.  According to her, the real power of the network organization is that each of those entities have a relation to one another and that are both "collectively and individually adjustable" over time.  In other words, architecture is but one of the many ecologies of a descriptive set of protocols or parameters that are established for formatting space over a given length of time (see also, development & planning).  She even admits that this complex ecology of space making is not always according to the plan as it is often improvisational and responsive to changing circumstances, anomalies, and even mistakes (4).  The resulting spatial conditions are thus truly `eccentric` in its diversity, circumstances, and incompleteness.  

Perhaps it is in these eccentric sites where Easterling offers up hope and opportunity for architects to be cognoscent of a network approach in their creative space making endeavors.  One might be able to see this kind of creative work already taking place in the areas of restructuring suburban traffic, stripmall churches, or the retrofitting of gray-malls as community-health centers.  At the same time, other players in the space making ecology (i.e., legislators, developers, planners, etc…) should consider what types of legislation and economic proposals can be leveraged in the design of an infrastructure that can host more of these eccentric sites.

Easterling`s observation suggests to architects, managers, and planners to not be so rash in our attempts to comprehensively label, affix, proceduralize, typologize any spatial complexities that we encounter as these will all change in its relative position and time.  Our impulse to `control` space may simply be an anthropocentric bias of survival to quickly know the unknown, solve a problem at hand, and then get on with our immediate lives.  It may also be more indicative of our current state of humanity that is still very engaged in the project of modernization.

Fair enough, Easterling has been descriptive of a holistic approach to how space making has taken place everyday.  However, from an ethical and pragmatic viewpoint, is it neither plausible nor just to design with this network approach for a future with multiple uses? The question is very similar to the way parents in these last hundred years have been confronted for the first time of how to go about raising children.  Aspirations of the parents to instill morality, persona, and behavior all eventually reached a point in human development where their designer baby goes out of their hands and has grown up (at least we hope).  Despite our good intentions, the needs and demands of the future generation may be quite different and the long-term view of networking approaches becomes burdens for future generations to come?  Analogously, we can see the development of infrastructure sites changing over time as it may have once served production of industry and transit, leading to abandonment and rediscovery of its informal uses into a fully developed park such as the High Line.

Also remaining unclear are what those common terms describing spatial organizations with `active parts, temporal components, and differential changes?  I think Easterling would hesitate to name a few without admitting a need for the existence of any kind of short-sighted anthropocentric definitions.  We humans still have a short event horizon that cannot possibly map all the rules for space making over time.  While the digital era has extended our ability see beyond this horizon by granting us access to large untapped information and wielding the computing prowess possibilities of a computer, paradoxically this has lead to an even more shortsighted event horizon than ever before.  In our endeavor to understand things or research before we enter the design phase of a project, we have all likely to have suffered episodes of pure information overload, utter confusion as to what is true, and an inability to keep up and organization information.  Inevitably, paralysis of our mind ensues as we resort back to certain basic human instincts of limiting our selves to flexible but consumable shortsighted definitions.

Easterling and other writers such as Kwinter would likely warn us of the danger of becoming entrenched in this short cited view of the network approach.  However, I actually believe this is some merit in such things as shortsighted definitions.  The paradoxical nature of necessity and aversion for having a broad networked horizon implies the need for designers to have two concurrent time horizons:  concrete short-term deadlines and a more flexible and reflective long-term deadlines.

Why not offer both the short and long-term deadlines?  While the long term is meant to sustain, the short term is the speculative R&D for the long-term future infrastructure!  It is exactly at this cross roads that we should be working at!

SOURCES: 

Actor Network Theory

ANTHEM- Actor Network Theory Heidegger Meeting

Article on Network Theory and Nature 

Learning about Network Theory

Easterling Interview

Easterling interview on Operation Enduring Freedom

what's the right monumentality of the future?

TBT: Landscape
D/A: Monumentality

Robert Smithson's photographic “meandering” essay of a post-industrial landscape reads like a clever a parody of a Western European’s expedition journals in the 18th and 19th Century (linke).  Writings from that time period come from a time when the Western engines of industrialization not only capitalized on the raw physical materials of its far flung colonies but also for its cultural materials.  The West’s fascination to understand the native culture began with their systematic, although presumptuous and haphazard, approaches of archiving and categorizing their ancient subjects.  These efforts would lead to collections, amateur archeology, and Egyptomania.

Parallel to this travel-literati culture were the works from visionary and utopian French Neoclassical architects such as Nicolas LeDoux and Etienne-Louis Bouullee. These architects were experimenting with monumental architecture that sought to memorialize great canonical figures of their past through expressive or metaphorical means, often times borrowing formal geometric language of the past (see Newton's Cenotaph).

One could start to argue then, that Smithson has similarly pieced together a highly choreographed writing of disparate memories of past artifacts, (i.e., monumental landscapes) from his happenstance day into a “sublime” tour that is equally metaphorically and expressive in its own purpose.  Can he be accused of being more than flâneur in not only his own home town but of his own writing?  Casual name dropping of critical contemporary art figures, insertion of literary titles into the piece, even casting and framing himself as a character fully aware of the cinematic experience taking place in the narrative  adds a touch of self-monumentalization to the intellectual discourse at hand

Aside from conjectures of canonizing oneself, the topic of concern here for Smithson is to unravel what effects time and history play within our perception of aesthetic sensibility.  Specifically, his case study deals with how a post-industrial landscape of Passaic, NJ can become monumentalized.  He speaks of his present day Passaic as:

"ravaged present that almost appears to be part of the past...the eternal city of Rome lives on in the burnt out shells of suburbia wasteland.... Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs."

So what then are examples of those monuments on tour? The highlight of the tour is the “Monument of Dislocated Directions” a rotating bridge over the Passaic River.  Smaller monuments ground themselves along the way of this industrial river site:  concrete abutments, prehistoric mechanical creatures stuck dead in their tracks, horizontal smokestack fountains, a desert sandbox, and a used car and parking lot.  The “monumental” landscape that one might experience on a grand tour of a riverfront civilization is stripped of all its grandeur, aesthetic, and sacredness of the site.  The tour does not reveal stereotypical Western monumentality of aggrandizement, hierarchy, of an identifiable political and cosmological authority (oftentimes embodied by a pharaoh-like figure).  Instead, they are of infrastructure and industrial production.  They are vast and decentralized, upholding a technocratic ideal of efficiency and mobility that owes no iconography to a particular figure or time.   The new monuments that are being built  causes us to forget the future by quickly bleeding into the mundane consciousness of our built environment.

What Smithson finds as beautiful is not so much the zeitgeist of political-cultural values (i.e., progress, nostalgia, sublime) that are attached to these post-industrial sites, but a more holistic appreciation of how these sites show the renegotiation of those values continually changing over time.  Assume that a monument is a creative act (sometimes physically built) to remember an event, person, or thing which has become important to a social group as part of their remembrance of past events.  Archeologists claim that the construction of social memory in the past existed just as it does in the present.  It involved creating links to ancestors and antiquity and often (re-)interpretations of monuments and landscapes. However, especially in instances of social change, individuals who belonged to multiple and overlapping social groups had to negotiate their economic and social status to the extent possible.  This would mean exploiting the ambiguities of inherited forms, evaluating their options, borrowing ideas from other groups, and creating new identities to answer to changing circumstances.

Similarly, Smithson exploits this grey negotiating area via his monumental landscapes.  Probably the best sites for his "Earthworks" are ones that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, and even natural disasters.  His masterpiece Spiral Jetty is the best example of a monument commenting about monuments.

If monumentality is about the act of memory making, why then resort to the medium of landscapes?  One could argue that the layers of earth keeps the best preserved long-term records of man’s evolving impact on his environment, but perhaps something more essential and dynamic could be used to show this:  air and water.  A grey area opens up for possibilities such as smog, acid rain, or meting of ice caps as more monumental than Passaic.  Quicker destructive forces such as nuclear fallouts, biochemical sprays, or even an accumulating belt of space junk are all candidates.  While these atmospheric examples may not initially be a deliberate or conscious act of monumentality, perhaps even the more physically removed and scaled down act of say writing or generating one more website through this website could!

Thus the expansion of monument making materials into the memory making act inevitably leads to the inherently socio-political driven question of matching intent and acknowledgement. Who decides what a monument is?  The original actor? The receiver of the monuments? The elites? The masses? Another group in the future?

Archeologists have certainly recognized these questions as they seek to reassess their early Eurocentric biases that favored large monuments which paid less attention to the everyday lives of the societies that created them.  As designers, our well thought intentions to create monuments (if we ever do) may never be acknowledged by society during our lives. Society not only misinterprets the intent but affixes different social meanings and redefines what constitutes a monument.

Realizing that potentially many actors in the past and present are up for acknowledging the intent of a monument, doesn’t simply mean that anyone can make a monument in their backyard.   At a minimum, monumentalizing is a two part act that requires a dialogue between two entities.  The actors can be living or non-living, as man has monumentalized mountains, rivers, and even trees.  A relationship evolves between the two when one of them becomes conscious of the act taking place. Then it is ultimately up to that awakened actor if they are to continue.

If we assume that monuments are a kind social-temporal act of memory making that occurs overtime, then the design possibilities seem to be endless and unpredictable! What then is the right "monumentality" we designers should carry into the future of monuments?

imagine my newly extended house, i think

TBT: prosthetic

D/A: extensive

Mark Wigley's critique Recycling Recycling is a historical reexamination of how the concept of the house has been shaped by a complex interplay in the ecology of images that have come to define it over time.  At the time of writing, he believes that much of discussion on ecology have already been recycled or discussed from a previous time.  Specifically, he wants us to understand the legacy of parallel discussions taking place in architecture and ecology discourses from the (1960s -1970s) with John McHale and Buckminster Fuller.

After the article’s exhaustive chronicle of yesterday’s discourse, if Wigley actually has anything new to say, he polemically calls for the discipline to “rethink the house rather than the simply recirculated generic suspect image (48).”  Wigley further claims: 

It becomes increasingly obvious that architecture is literally carved into the flow of images.  Ecological flows are more useful to the architect than ever before...(48).

For Wigley’s polemic to hold, we must agree with the two assumptions.  First assumption:  images  have agency (see parallels with Corner’s Eidetic Imagery).  Second assumption, the concept of a house was formed out of violence.  This might seem plausible at the primordial level of a human being taking refuge in dwelling from the ‘violent’ natural elements, people, and other species.  However, over time the concept of a house may have been forged during times of inequity or violence as a necessary socio-political deal that would likely have granted some sort of stability or prevention of further violence from occurring to the individual(see McHale’s post-political single family home).

Putting together these two assertions would mean that the concept of a politically correct house seems impossible.  Our recent imagery of what we perceive to be a house is likely to have been churned and recycled images of yesterday into what we might define as a house today.

Wigley ends the article with a suggestion that perhaps the architectural discipline can help in monitoring the dominating ecological-design debate structure that is more “imperialistic and patronizing” which does not promote equitable distribution of resources:

“...rather than simply reapply ecological discourses to design, some of the the perennial enigmas of the house that architects explore could be used to rethink ecology.  This discourse can be rewired (48).”

If architectural discourse on the house can actually impact the way ecologists talk in their discipline, what do we do!?  Do we simply do anything different from what Whigly has done by pointing out the latent socio-politically driven biases in ecological concepts of a house?

If we are to rethink images of the house, maybe James Corner’s new eidetic representation techniques are just what is needed.  His techniques can generate and extend other possible notions of the house.  In many ways, his eidetic images are extensive in its ability to function like a prosthetic device:  at once consolidating and dispersing images of the house.

However, this it can be presumptuousness to think that designers have a strong hand in the image creation process.  It’s true that we have agency in those printed glossy images of the house but this begs the question of to what degree?  The article clearly showed how the mass culture of internal and external technological extensions of the home have occurred without the help of the architect (see kitchen and appliances).  This starts to have professional existential implications for the designers to be deployed and influence images of house in the competitive visual media business of print, online media, and film (see expendable icon).  The task of influencing the image creation process then becomes at best, a journalistic endeavor takes up as the carrier of information as he seeks to write inspiring ‘truthful’ stories that can sell.

But I have to ask, why the house?  Is it because this is the most iconic and basic typology of architecture?  What about other typologies? If we are successful with rethinking house, does this mean other typologies need to be rethought of? 

Finally, why is that we forgotten the recent past then of this recycling, recycling?  Is an indication of our current state of society that is short sighted in memory or we simply visually overwhelmed by the amount of look-a-like houses out there?  Wigley in his lecture alludes to a cynical view, that of an institutionalized influence that seeks to keep the image of the house as a core topic in architectural discourse:  

Our job is to make sure that nobody looks at architecture too closely and the best way of doing that is by claiming to be looking at it while allowing certain things to slide on by. When faced with technological innovations, we make sure that the old image keeps going. We preserve the image of a secure house, for instance, which plays such a crucial role in the way our culture, let's say western culture, regulates itself. (Wigley Q & A lecture).

Sources: 

Understanding the House

Wigley Lecture Dictation

expanding the image

TBT: image

D/A: eidetic

Corner describes the conceptual and cultural meanings that are latent in the term landscape.  Critical to his investigation is the inseparable quality that imagery has played into shaping the definition.  Originating from the term landskip, Western paintings depicting nature were the first to imagine and influence the shaping of environments from gardens, estates, to vistas.  Corner points to this moment as having a lasting but dark legacy (see Foucoult`s visual regimes) where conventional landscape practitioners have come to assume pictorializing imagery- a method of representation that prioritizes visual and formal qualities.  

The limitations of such a representation technique range from its inability to represent concepts of knowing, belonging, and even experiencing landscape:

"landscape can often obscure from its occupants the ideological impulses that motivated its formations and instead foster in them the feeling that they are in possession of a beautiful and innocent past, that they have escaped from the inequities and problems of the present(157)"

Since Corner believes that such imagery practices exercises agency in the way we create landscape, he calls out to the  profession and discipline to reconsider, revise, enhance, and invent forms of representation techniques that might engender more engaging landscapes than the pictorializing conventions of contemporary practice (see his discussion on landskip vs. landshaft ).

If we are to agree with Corner that "imaging always exercises agency" (160) this inevitably asks of a designer, what kind of imaging approach could be developed and advanced?  Corner advocates the eidetic image:

"a mental conception that my be picturable but may be equally acoustic, tactile, cognitive, or intuitive...Unlike the purely retinal impression of pictures, eidetic images contain a broad range of ideas that lie at the core of human creativity.  Consequently, how one imagines these kind of images are more active than this, engendering, unfolding, and participating in emergent realities (160)."   

Such eidetic images are fundamental to creativity and invention as they do not represent the reality of an idea, rather inaugurate as its possibility (163).  Revisions in fundamental imaging techniques such as mapping, planning, diagramming, and sectioning effectively liberates the designer/planner from representation.  This does not mean the complete reinvention of the already established techniques nor advocation of a hermetic visual language,  rather they can derive subtly from the codes and techniques established from mapping, collaging, analytical and quantitative maps/charts, and orthographic views of plans and sections.  Furthermore, the designer's ability to "hybridize" or "composite" these techniques allows him to advance in landscape formations.  Layering, seperating, and montaging results in new technigraphics:  ideograms, imagetexts, scorings, pictographs, indexes, samples, game boards, cognitive tracings, and scalings.  This allows designer to project forward performative aspects as demonstrated by designers such as Koohaus, Tschumi, MVRDV.

The introduction of these new kinds of imagery techniques also means a shift in how we think about

about landscapes:

"shift from object appearance to processes of formation, dynamics of occupancy,….role of landscape architect is less to picture or represent these activities then it is to facilitate, instigate, and diversify their effects in time, then the development of more performative forms of imaging (as devising, enabling, unfolding techniques) is fundamental to this task (165)."

Corner's advancement of the eidetic imagery beyond our visual-aural sensing capabilities is appreciated, to what extent should this be pushed?  For example, Corner implies richer experiences to be gained at the cognitive level but what about covering all grounds of the other missing senses- taste and smell?  Imagine tasty flickering drawings projected on the studio walls with sprayed down with scratch-n-sniff adhesives.  How about imagining and representing other more subtle bodily sensations such as balance and acceleration, temperature, pressure detection, kinaestehtic sense, and even direction?  Cutting edge virtual reality simulations can achieve these sensations but this starts to question if these eidetic images any different than say dreams or hallucinations?

Can all this be alluded to, just by our 5 sensing limitations of a drawing? Inevitably, expanding representation techniques in architecture starts to imply a certain visual sensibility that a graphic designer might similarly hold in evaluating and prioritizing ideas are being communicated.  One has to ask, is there any real need to go beyond what we are capable understanding (i.e. the five senses)?  And to what end? In other words, how do we prioritize these senses in these representation technqiues.

Sources: 

Eidetic Memory

Textual Analysis of Geological History

TBT:  autocatalytic loop
D/A:  intensification

Manual DeLanda’s book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History is a rough outline of a neo-materialist philosophy in the tradition of Braudel, Deleuze and Guatari.  Rejecting prevailing attitudes that sees history almost exclusively in terms of texts, discourses, ideologies and metaphors De Landa traces the concrete movements, proceses, and interplays of matter/energy that have shaped human populations in the last millenium.  DeLanda’s main concern is not about re-writing the history of how these processes work out, rather creating a theoretical  apporach that provides a scientific investgation of the collective human behavior in relation to its physical and biological enviornment.

DeLanda explores these processes through an explicit engagment with complexity theory and utlimately views all historical processes as manifestations of the interplay or inorganic energy/matter.  According to him, we live in a world populated by a complex mixture of geological, biological and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history; itself driven by energy/matter.  

The most architcturally relevant chapter comes in his ‘geological’ analysis.  In this chapter he examines the origin of different types of cities, the building of states and the conduct of wars.  He explores these as patterns of complex processes embedded in the flow of energy/matter. Fuels, such as raw materials and biological muscle power, and the optimisation of its deployment, as well as the utilisation of the landscape (wind, ocean, rivers) are all addressed. The organisations and architecture of cities are interpreted as systems which consume, use and redistribute energy, while in the meantime generating products, people, and waste.  Importantly, the cultural, political and religious institutions and organisations are viewed as distinct from the intentions, desires and meanings that have traditionally been associated with them. Indeed, De Landa believes they come into existence much in the same way as minerals come into existence in a mountain.

Similar to previous authors in these Stormfront readings (Kwinter, Sloterdijk,) we again see themes hinting at totalitarian abuse.  For DeLanda, he see the excessive accumulation of hierarchies at the expense of meshworks to be problematic in the continous flow of energy/matter.  His bias is that meshworks are essential to keep the morphogenetic process going.  Anti-markets, industries, medical and educational systems resort to  linear routinization, standardization, and homogenization with predictable and controlable production which inevitably stunts the process in the long run. While various academic disciplines have come to realize the deadends of such linear modes of thinking, DeLanda believes the key lies in the restratification of such modes of thought.

When reading DeLanda’s history, inevitably assumptions made about the scope of time will come up in the criticism.  Why 1000 years?   Why not fruther back in time? Also, are we to assume that this system of flowing matter/energy procesess has been going on since the beginning of time?  Perhaps this system has always been preexisting.  Whiletemporal origins of matter/energy process are likely answered by findings from particle physicists, we still have to deal with DeLanda’s seemingly reductive conclusion of hiearchies being problematic to the meshwork flow of energy/matter.  This dominance of hiearchies is a relatively new phenomeon ( only a few hundred years) and may pale in significance to the next 1000 years to come. Delanda’s apporach is best when analyzing long term changes in society, but faces difficulty when analyzing short-term cultural changes and analysiscontemporary human societies.

Also, as much as DeLanda rejects the ideological and subjecive framework that have plagued  the social sciences, can a materialist approach really be objective?  For one, his theory gives priority to the energy/matter over ideas.  However, are those scientific conceptions of matter/energy and closed loop systems still working ideas as well?  Perhaps materialist approaches can be just as suspect as was aesthetic modernism’s choice of prosthetics.