2013.10.14 13:04
14 October
...through a series of juxtaposed vignettes constituting... "a kind of mosaic, or better, a revolving stage that presents a multitude of scenes and characters which, taken together convey a sense of life of a given milieu and by extension give the tone of contemporary life generally."
"I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it might be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. . . . And, when one discusses an affair--a long, sad affair--one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real."
Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915.
...the latest edition of the Museum Trip series...
2013.11.04 19:29
Why won't you design what we (the public) want?
Was just inspired to write a 'historical' novel where Schinkel uses the 'influence' of the Crown Prince to get to do the designs he, Schinkel, wants. The Crown Prince figures out Schinkel's stratagem and thus starts changing his mind like every week or so as to what style a project should be designed in, just to drive Schinkel a little crazy, but also to see just how clever Schinkel can be. Schinkel, in turn, figures out the Crown Prince's stratagem and hence the architecture just starts getting more and more weird. [Wolfhilde von Schlittenfahrt, the sexy, new intern in Schinkel's office quickly becomes aware of the dueling stratagems and immediately starts 'busting' in her own stratagems.] Add to that that both Schinkel and the Crown Prince are obsessed with the life and works of Heinrick von Kleist and participate in a secret Von Kleist Society where all forms of strangeness ensue. Working title: Kohlhaas wo bist du?
2013.11.21 21:36
21 November
Read this earlier today:
At times, too, I've had the impression that I'd manage to feel quite at home in a life of vacuity. That the relatively painless boredom would enable me to go on making the usual gestures of life. Another big mistake. Prolonged boredom is not tenable as a position: sooner or later it is transformed into feelings that are acutely more painful, of true pain; this is precisely what's happening to me.
Maybe, I tell myself, this tour of the provinces is going to alter my ideas. Doubtless in a negative sense, but it's going to alter my ideas; at least there will be a change of direction, a shake-up."
That's how part one of Houellebecq's Whatever ends. I think it's a great passage, but I found myself laughing as I typed it here. I guess because it sounds so dark, but a sad, dull dark. Does it perhaps describe archinect/forum these days? I'm laughing again.
Modeling Ichnographia Quondam is taking a lot of time, and I'm promising myself that the model will actually be used.
Remember the ideas for filling up Independence Mall. It's always fun to act on ideas that occur to you while in the shower.
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2014.02.04 13:48
4 February
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.
Barthes
2014.02.28 20:05
28 February
Outline of the Pantheon chapter of Novel Architecturale
2014.03.09 21:52
9 March
further plot development of Novel Architecturale:
All at the same scale, just like reality itself.
2014.03.16 19:52
16 March
After reading "Postmodern or Posthistoire?" it seems that the notion of posthistory coincides with the hyperactive assimilating imagination over the better part of the next two centuries.
2014.07.11 16:42
Art + Architecture: Schumacher vs. Post-Net
Re: favorite book:
Thanks to the enormous scans within some really incredible online archives, I'm, just for about a month now, becoming very familiar with the volumes of post-Piranesi Italian archaeologists. For example,
The great multitude of drawings filled with all their fine detail just seem to fulfill some innate longing of mine. And I'm finding myself not at all bothered if some of the 'reconstructions' are not actually correct because I'm enjoying all the data as a unique and kind of atemporal/fictitious virtual environment.
And a book that I'm presently dissecting (literally) to discovery the full workings of it's 'anatomy' is Hejduk's Pewter Wings, Golden Horns, Stone Veils: xxxx xxxx so far.
And one of my favorite things to do, for almost 18 years now, is compose and publish 'books' via html and the internet.
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2014.07.11 17:22
How do humans perceive the built environment in outer space?
Apparently, in the future, some very special doctors will tell me that my frontal and prietal lobes and my hippocampus often operate in the exact opposite way they're supposed to. To which I will then ask, "So, instead of mentally reenacting an experience, they enact something that hasn't happen yet?" To which the doctors will all give me the thumbs-up! Hence: c0711
2014.07.11 20:44
How do humans perceive the built environment in outer space?
The drawings/databases range chronologically from 1999.11.23 to 2000.04.03, so contemporary with this...
Relatively like ancient history now.
2014.08.23 20:34
23 August
[see entire 23 August post]
Could the above be an outline for an architectural fiction or something?
un-science fiction
Maybe even a fictitious you will be in it.
"All the world's a next stage."
2014.08.25 09:56
23 August
What does concern me is the date stamp that every post automatically receives, thus whatever I 'write' here has a distinct point within the space-time continuum, and a lot of historical ambiguity is eliminated.
Contrary to what I just wrote, almost all of the passages above posted on 23 August 2014 were first written in past years, however, again, almost all the passages were first written within archinect/forum. You can see the dates of all the passages here.
2014.09.12 13:54
How to read like an architect.
I'm currently in the process of taking apart a 1823 edition of Durand's Précis des Leçons d’Architecture. It's never easy taking apart a book (literally and emotionally), but I'm doing it this time to optimally scan all the engravings.
When I'm done with the scanning, I could sell the engravings individually at eBay (and make back maybe 5 times the amount I paid for the book), yet I'll probably just keep it all and rearrange it with other (taken apart) books to create strange and new architecture books.
I never counted all my books, but it's a lot, kind of too much. What's weird now is what books I have more than one of:
SMLXL
Architectural Theory
Out of the Ordinary (one from the Free Library for 25 cents)
Adjusting Foundations
Pewter Wings, Golden Horns, Stone Veils
Lotus 19
Lotus 22
Letarouilly (two 1980s, one 1910s)
Buhlmann's Classic and Renaissance Architecture
Schinkel's Collection of Architectural Designs (both 1981 folio box edition size)
El Croquis MDRDV 1991-2002
Le Corbusier's Oeuvre Complete vol. 1
Le Corbusier's Oeuvre Complete vol. 8
Norberg-Schulz's Baroque Architecture (big)
Tafuri and De Feo's Modern Architecture/2 (small)
Architecture and Utopia
If I took apart all those 'extra' books and then rearrange them, that would be quite a new library of architecture books.
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2014.11.15
from How Fiction Works
If the book has a larger argument, it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities. That is why I have tried to give the most detailed accounts of the technique of that artifice--of how fiction works--in order to reconnect that technique to the world, as Ruskin wanted to connect Tintoretto's work to how we look at a leaf. As a result, the chapters of this book have a way of collapsing onto one another, because each is motivated by the same aesthetic: when I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries. (xiii-xiv)
Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. ...
The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented. (56-7)
I am now made to wonder about an aesthetically talented memory, whether there even is such a thing? I think artistry comes from aesthetically talented memories.
But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running--what he calls "getting a character in." He says that Conrad himself "was never really satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got his characters in; he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books." I like this idea, that some of Conrad's novels are long because he couldn't stop fiddling, page after page, with the verisimilitude of his characters--it raises the specter of an infinite novel. (96)
James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008).
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