novel architecturale

2015
Quondam as some strange un-scientific fiction architectur(al novel?)

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2009.06.06 20:18
how about thom mayne?
Quondam is my site. It's the first virtual museum of architecture, online since 21 November 1996. Earlier this year thingsmagazine.net described Quondam as "Stephen Lauf's epically impenetrable 'online collage', a real labyrinth of a website," and that suits me just fine.
Yes, Quondam is dense, and even I don't know where everything is, so I utilize site-specific google searches to find things.
The numbering system has no meaningful significance beyond its sequentiality; file names, that's all.

The specific image you ask about also has no intended significance in terms of how Thom Mayne may see things, but, as you've now demonstrated, it is capable of inspiring a significance. And that's more or less the point...


2009.06.12 08:36
please comment or destroy, thank you
"In German, a mnemonic can be fashioned from the literal meaning of the Latin word complicare. which means "to fold together (zusammenfalten)": the complicated, then, can be rendered graspable via unfolding (Entfaltung), because it thereby becomes simple (einfach) in a sense of naïve or ingenuous (einfältig). But the Latin word complexus means "mutual embrace," or, so to speak, the labyrinthine [emphasis added], the convoluted: here, simplicity already contains within itself the seed of all the complexity that comes to appearance through its own development. In cases of doubt, then, the complicated can be profitably reduced and simplified--but the complex, in contrast, cannot be simplified with impunity. To say that something is complicated means that the finite number of its determinations cannot be grasped directly. To say that something is complex means, by contrast, that the number of its determinations is simply infinite."
Clemens Bellut, "Ach, Luise, lass ... das ist ein zu weites Feld," or: The Gordian Knot of Complexity" in Complexity: Design Strategy and World View (2008).
Eternal Wrest ... really only the beginning?
"All the world's a next stage."


2009.07.07 12:44
Bilocation Syndrome
finally, after over 85 pages...
At the same time, in parallel...
"As if the Straits of Gilbraltar acted as some metaphysical junction point between the worlds. In those days to pass through that narrow aperture into the vast, uncertain field of Ocean was to behind the known world, and perhaps its conventions about being in only one place at a time. . . .Once passed through, did the ship take two tacks at once? Did the wind blow in two ways? Or was it the giant fish that possessed the power of bilocation? Two fishes, two Jonahs, two Agadirs?
"This smoke in here I've been breathing," said Kit, "this wouldn't be . . . um, hasheesh?"
As if she had exited her life briefly and been given the ability to travel on a parallel course, "close" enough to watch herself doing it, Dally discovered an alternate way to travel by land, port to port, faster than the ship was moving. . . . She sped, it seemed slightly above ground level, through the fragrant late-summer twilight, parallel to the course of the ship. . . . She would return to her deck chair out of breath, sweating, exhilirated [sic] for no reason, as if she had just escaped some organized threat to her saftey.
It's worth noting that the bilocations began just when Kit reached the ultimate depth of his exploration/discovery of the Stupendica as actually two ships. Indeed, he becomes trapped within the parallel time of the Emperor Maximilian, and hence nowhere to be found on the Stupendica. Note too how it's after searching all over for Kit that Dally actually bilocates herself.

2009.07.07
bilocation, finally
Some more on "Bilocation Syndrome":
1. Axis of Life / Bejamin Franklin Parkway.
2. my walk down the Parkway / Axis of Life.
3. the key to Ichnographia Quondam.
4. Pagan - Christian - Triumphal Way of the Ichnographia Campus Martius.
5. Temple of Janus; Arch of Trajan/Constantine.
6. Diana the Huntress/Nympaeum; Vatican/Life of Constantine tapestries; Gates of Hell; Logan Circle/Hadrian's Tomb; Intercourse building/Love.
7. Quondam / Museumpeace.


2009.07.14 20:38
inspiring Maya Linked Hybrid edge
...the Athenian master craftsman and inventor, Daedalus, was given a commission by King Minos of Crete to build a labyrinth, a prison for the man-bull monster, the Minotaur. Later, Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, in the labyrinth. The two escaped on wings made by Daedalus of wax and feathers, but Icarus flies too close to the sun, his wings melt, and he falls into the sea.
remembering "journey motifs"


2009.09.01 17:53
fashion tip (of the iceberg)
arbitration and arbitrariness blurred
reality being relative to the vastness of its container
arbitration and arbitrariness come into focus as instinct
realms juxtaposed
"the time it takes to do this" as continuum
i.e., "...to compose this novel in a real/virtual manner. Do you assume this intention needs support from the living?"
background music: ...sounds a blur (in a good way) between Saussure and the debunked Blavatsky, but to no surprise as I have heard the two in the same breathe before.


2009.09.03 13:11
fashion tip (of the iceberg)
It was the "post-mortem discourse" that rekindled the vertigo of the mélange. The thought was post-modernism as still life.
But the strange fascination of still life, isn't it also a fiction? Or indeed an ethereal necrophilia?
--The Man without Qualities
The only gesture possible would seem to be stillness, what "in painting is called Stilleben (still life), or in other languages... natura morta (dead nature)."
--ibid
Life is magically arrested in its impermanence: "objects, animals, plants, landscapes and human bodies frozen into stillness by the magic of art," in a sort of "demonical" mystery.
--ibid
The world itseld seems to be suspended in an unending instant, in a landscape like the "sixth day of Creation, when God and the world were still alone, without men"
--ibid
"It is extraordinarily simple, but also very odd," says Ulrich.
"We have found many contrived answers," says Ulrich, "but we have overlooked th simplest: that both may have the intention and the capacity to take everything of which they have experience only as Gleichnis" And "every Gleichnis is ambivalent for the intellect, but for the feeling it is univocal;" and therefore it should be possible to experience "as oneness that which be common estimate is twofold."
"In that instant there occurred to Ulrich the idea of a state of life in which the being here was Gleichnis of the being there, and the impossible experience of being a person with two distinct bodies might lose the thorn of its impossibility."
Gleichnis is never Gleichheit.
--overall Franco Rella
He found Renfrew in a hectic mood, as close to desperation as Lew could recall.
... Lew had the sudden certitude that right now in Göttingen some bilocational Lew was asking Werfner the same question...]
--mirror::rorrim
"magnigicent chaos of the museum"

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