2010.11.14 18:00
Verisimilitude
All architecture is artificial, even to the point where you can say that architecture is the most artificial thing on this planet. And if architecture is to be truthful, it can really only be truthful to its artificiality. Moreover, it is that architecture that most pushes its artificiality to the extreme/edge that becomes the best architecture.
I'm speaking here mostly of real architecture, designs that are built. Virtual architecture (designs that could be built but aren't) and post-real virtual architecture (architecture that was built but no longer exists) express their truthfulness in other ways.
2011.01.08 11:00
"On Criticism" an aggregate thread
...a virtual museum of architecture
collecting
a project
curation
critique
institutional critique, even (perhaps a virtual museum is what a real museum cannot be)
voices
continually reshaped
agendas
globally readable
cado coda
architecture as the delivery of content
2011.08.06 11:25
Quondam's Fifteenth Anniversary
Random Tangents Culture
I suspect Network Culture grew as quickly as it did because the field was already a fertile Random Tangents Culture.
Read this morning:
"...his "visible form" is based on the sensuous experience that emerges only as one moves round and through a building, that changes with ever step, and is effected by the position and intensity of the light sources. In earlier criticism, buildings had been characterized from the point of view of an observer standing motionless and looking at a façade or an interior from the position of a photographer might choose to obtain the most favorable single view. Frankl's innovation reconstructs the kinetic experience of the observer who arrives at a single image as the product of many partial images.
James Ackerman, "Forward" in Paul Frankl's Principles of Architectural History.
calendrical coincidence - culture - quick deletion - almost just as quick reconstruction - random tangents
Noticed this morning (for the first time I think):
Wolf Meyer-Christian, Design for architectural museum in Berlin (1964)
and
Michael Wagener, Design for architectural museum in Berlin (1964)
in Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodernism (1984/1988).
These are student designs from Unger's seminars at the Technical University in Berlin between 1963 and 1968, "they exerted international influence when they appeared in a series of brochures (starting 1965) edited by Ungers. Both designs incorporate the Villa Calandrelli (the Villa Calender?!?), and this adjacency feature reminded me of Stirling's Science Center in Berlin (which I also see as a virtual museum of architecture).
Right around now 10 years ago I received OMA/AMO Rem Koolhaas, Projects for Prada Part 1 in the mail. Along with documentation of one of my favorite (random tangents) building designs--Prada Epicenter Store, San Francisco--there is note of "Content Database" and "Ubiquitous Display" and "Media Stage".
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2011.11.21 08:40
how convinced are you?
Now I see how the virtual has been my escape.
Is theory an escape?
Is teaching an escape?
Is drawing an escape?
Is writing an escape?
escape
1. to slip or get away, as from confinement or restraint; gain or regain liberty: to escape from jail.
2. to slip away from pursuit or peril; avoid capture, punishment, or any threatened evil.
3. to issue from a confining enclosure, as a fluid.
4. to slip away; fade: The words escaped from memory.
5. Botany. (of an originally cultivated plant) to grow wild.
6. (of a rocket, molecule, etc.) to achieve escape velocity.
7. to slip away from or elude (pursuers, captors, etc.): He escaped the police.
8. to succeed in avoiding (any threatened or possible danger or evil): She escaped capture.
9. to elude (one's memory, notice, search, etc.).
10. to fail to be noticed or recollected by (a person): Her reply escapes me.
11. (of a sound or utterance) to slip from or be expressed by (a person, one's lips, etc.) inadvertently.
2011.11.21 14:00
how convinced are you?
The next time I file my income tax, under 'ocupation' I'll write e-scape architect.
e-scape expanded e-scape
theory e-scape theory
e-scape teaching e-scape
drawing e-scape drawing
e-scape writing e-scape
2013.01.07 10:52
LA TENDENZA at Pompidou Center
Don't forget the reality of the flip-side.
The cover of Lotus International 33 (1982), upside-down
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2013.02.14 11:22
14 February
Log 26 came in the mail two days ago; I read Scolari's "Representation" early this morning. In a somewhat typical way, he says some judgmentally naive things about CAD drawing like, "A computer delocalizes our memory because the entire information library doesn't belong to us, because it's not inside us; it has little to do with our feelings and our mind--that is with our memory." The name of every CAD drawing file I create is simply the date it was created, thus each of my drawings is a very precise, well stored memory easily shifted into random access memory.
Scolari does say, however, some nice things about drawing/not drawing Calvino's Invisible Cities. It got me thinking that what I've been doing for more than half of the last 30 years is drawing/not drawing an invisible museum of architecture.
2013.05.23 09:59
What are the cultural ingredients of architecture today?
Is FACTUM arte a possible proto-type of future architectural business? Like the architect could spec Duchamp Fountains for all the men's rooms to add some culture to the act of purgation.
Is the real value then in the 3D data file that tells the 3D printer what to do?
(Although I very much doubt I'll personally get to see it, nevertheless) Could someone that inherits all of Quondam's 2D and 3D file data someday in the future decide to 3D print it all out and thus make an actual Museum of Architecture?!?
note to self: rewrite my will to make sure I bequeath all of Quondam's data to an entity that has the money and operation to actually turn Quondam into a reality. I'm sure Disney could do it, but it would be funny to leave it all to China. Why am I leaning toward Dubai?
Next time someone asks me what I do, I'll tell them I'm very busy becoming posthumously famous.
2013.07.12 19:37
12 July
Just read this is Maurois's 'Preface' of Borges's Labyrinths:
(Schopenhauer, Borges remarks, has already written that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming.) In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams. "God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate with us." Nothing pleases Borges better than to play in this way with mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game becomes, the happier he is. The dreamer can be dreamed in his turn.
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