i believe in god only i spell it nature (f.l.w)

they make it seem so simple

MVRDV

P.S. He threw himself out a window, eventually.

Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus."^[14] That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x'", and "x" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself.

blah blah blah blah blah

Louise Hopkins

People in glass apartments- visual clutter?

and another from the same place.. about visual transparency in architecture. and seeing too much.

"Just curiously bored"

from a review of Cooper Union at the always wonderful but awfully distracting, The Design Observer Group

Heather & Ivan Morrison

Their site.
Worth a long, thoughtful visit.

tile x puzzle = tiluzzle

click on the picture!

ACME in Weilburg, Germany

I know what I know, I'll sing what I said,

We come and we go,
That's a thing that I keep
In the back of my head









just sayin back at you (but really just an excuse to post a photo of paul simon in a turkey suit)

Step 1: we can have lots of fun, Step 2: There's so much we can do

The Julliard School / Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects

Oslo skate park/opera

Something simple, like a zig zag of vertical public space becomes more complex when it's not symmetrical--and that's what I like, that you have to see the building from a certain way to get a certain *parti* of the structure. And so, you can have a different and important building figure from a different point of access/experience/escape/etc.

Cooper Union

Thom deserves at least one serious look...

and the bottom level *is* transparent and deals with a lot of slope...

I like how we're talking about the internal volumes being reflected in the visible circulation, structure even... Stairs on the ceiling of a theatre, multiple stories of interaction with one space, constricted to certain types of access...yes, anyway--

keep it simple?

Two weeks ago...

Happiness was two dimensional:

Finally, a dialectic I can understand...

And I'll know my song well,

before I start singin'.

Just sayin'

ah-ha

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity
-Gertrude Stein

in honour of friday's crit

yeah, i google-imaged "confusion"

Relection, refraction, light, water, brilliance!

Glazed ceramic in Gaudí 's architecture
Gaudí 's architecture is characterised by colour. The master used to say that colour is the sign of life. It is for this reason that all of his architecture is intensely chromatic. Gaudí understood that colour is the effect of reflection of light on objects but that light has another property too: it is refractive. In other words, when rays of light hit a shiny surface, or water, the effect of refraction occurs causing brilliance or iridescence.

This led Gaudí to use glazed ceramic, which provided very bright colours as well as allowing him to incorporate iridescence. He then took his three-dimensional twisted surfaces and covered them with ceramic tiles.

Finding of course that it was impossible to lay tiles on a curved surface, Gaudí responded by coming up with one of his major inventions: "trencadís". He asked for the tiles to be broken and, with the pieces, created mosaic that was Byzantine in style yet had one peculiarity: it mixed fragments from different pieces, thereby achieving the surprising effect of a new, more lively and interesting composition completely unrelated to the original tiles.

Lost in geometrics

Victoria Haven

What we have in common is that we are different

Iran, 1187 AD

Remarks on Nature

What “nature” is in any given period and why it is what it is are variables that are wholly dependent on historically shifting relations between humankind and our environment. As such, nature will still be nature with or without people, as deserts and glaciers exemplify. The definitions, ambiguity and oppositions rest, so to speak, with us, constantly engaged as we are in exchanges and negotiations with our surroundings.

Marianne Krogh Jensen from article: Remarks on nature, super-ecology, life, production, position and other negotiations

Marjorie Rice, DIY mathematic theoretician...

http://tessellations.home.comcast.net/~tessellations/

Deep down the rabbit hole of tiles, proof, and chaos in mathematical lines.

Eliasson again, just as confusing/informing as the one before..

Eliasson is also concerned with sorting apart “the things that were commingled,” but—and this is what makes up his wit and verve—only in order to make an art of conjunctions out of these “commingled” things, that is: the nature in us and the nature outside of us. “Conjunction” derives from the Latin conjungere, meaning to join or to forcefully yoke together, and is a term used in both grammar and astronomy. (A) As different as these two uses of the term are, in neither case does a conjunction function as a leveler. A conjunction does not imply a value judgment, nor does it weight its relata on one or the other of its poles. It is rather the independence of both relata that gives a conjunction the power to discover something new in itself by way of the other.

Your engagement has consequences

1. Idea:
An idea or concept is processual.
2. Application of Form to the Idea:
In order to communicate the idea, I have to find a language for it. In this way, content finds a
form and – in order to keep this experiment simple – we can state that the form becomes the
‘carrier’ of the content (although the relationship between content and form is in reality much
more complex).
3. Communication of the Idea:
The form applied to an idea is not only the one that I myself choose. When circulated, every
idea picks up dimensions and meaning that I haven’t considered and couldn’t foresee –
regardless of whether they are productive to my original thought or not.
Forms are thereforetemporal, caught up in the tissue of exchange, constantly coloured by the ongoing negotiationsand renegotiations with their surroundings, and time adds relativity to the idea as it travels through the world.
4. Time is Individual:
The clock is not our only tool for the measurement of time. It seems more attractive to talk
about your time and my time; that is, the lived experience of time, instead of being concerned
with the universal construction of temporality that so many people take for granted. What is
fast to me may appear slow to you. It is not only our immediate experiences that are a
subjective matter; our memories and expectations also have a highly individual impact on our
perceptions.
5. Your Engagement Sequence (YES):
The relativity that temporal engagement inevitably introduces should, for scientific laboratory
purposes, be given a name: I suggest ‘YES’ (Your Engagement Sequence). YES attunes our
attention to time, movement and changeability. It makes relative what is often considered to be
true. Whenever a so-called truthful statement is made, you have to add YES in order to relate
to, see through and make use of the statement. By regarding YES as a central element of our
perceptions, you can negotiate the governing dogma of timelessness and static objecthood,
thus emphasising your responsibility for the configuration of the concrete situation.
6. Consequences:
If an idea only exists as a process, the traditional definition of truth and non-truth is shattered.
And when objects are relative to various factors such as context and engagement, even basic
communication seems to become a challenge, especially because the language in which we
usually speak and write is promoted by communication trends within modern society that do
not favour such relativities. If we accept and implement the relativity of so-called truth by
using YES, a general sense of responsibility in our relationship to our surroundings may be
achieved. In other words, engagement has consequences and these entail a heightened feeling
of responsibility.


woah...

--- Olafur Eliasson

scale of time

«Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eights of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It‘s time we gave this some thought.» - Buckminster Fuller (I Seem to be a Verb, 1970)

peeled architecture

Richard Galpin abstracts photographs of urban spaces and architecture, and transforms them into graphic fragments with a three-dimensional appearance, in pattern-like surfaces which reflect the formal repetition and dynamism of big-city architecture. Although formally Richard Galpin moves further and further away from the original photograph with every work he creates, the removal of many of the principal pictorial elements often highlights the perspectives and pictorial composition of the original photo.
The resulting spaces and structural clusters then appear like extracts from a reality which is visually entirely overloaded.

Continuous Cities 1

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed rubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbes, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tire, an unraveled wine flask, if it rolls toward Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighboring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, canceling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

tiles continued

Still ringing in my ears

Resist whatever seems inevitable.

Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the idea that architecture is a building.

Resist the idea that architecture can save the world.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the influence of the appealing.

Resist the desire to make a design based on a piece of music.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

Resist the idea that you need a client to make architecture.

Resist the temptation to talk fast.

Resist anyone who asks you to design only the visible part.

Resist the idea that drawing by hand is passé.

Resist any assertion that the work of Frederick Kiesler is passé.

Resist buying an automobile of any kind.

Resist the impulse to open an office.

Resist believing that there is an answer to every question.

Resist believing that the result is the most important thing.

Resist the demand that you prove your ideas by building them.

Resist people who are satisfied.

Resist the idea that architects are master builders.

Resist accepting honors from those you do not respect.

Resist the panicky feeling that you are alone.

Resist hoping that next year will be better.

Resist the assertion that architecture is a service profession.

Resist the foregone conclusion that They have already won.

Resist the impulse to go back to square one.

Resist believing that there can be architecture without architects.

Resist accepting your fate.

Resist people who tell you to resist.

Resist the suggestion that you can do what you really want later.

Resist any idea that contains the word interface.

Resist the idea that architecture is an investment.

Resist the feeling that you should explain.

Resist the claim that history is concerned with the past.

Resist the innuendo that you must be cautious.

Resist the illusion that it is complete.

Resist the opinion that it was an accident.

Resist the judgement that it is only valid if you can do it again.

Resist believing that architecture is about designing things.

Resist the implications of security.

Resist writing what They wish you would write.

Resist assuming that the locus of power is elsewhere.

Resist believing that anyone knows what will actually happen.

Resist the accusation that you have missed the point.

Resist all claims on your autonomy.

Resist the indifference of adversaries.

Resist the ready acceptance of friends.

Resist the thought that life is simple, after all.

Resist the belated feeling that you should seek forgiveness.

Resist the desire to move to a different city.

Resist the notion that you should never compromise.

Resist any thought that contains the word should.

Resist the lessons of architecture that has already succeeded.

Resist the idea that architecture expresses something.

Resist the temptation to do it just one more time.

Resist the belief that architecture influences behavior.

Resist any idea that equates architecture and ownership.

Resist the tendency to repeat yourself.

Resist that feeling of utter exhaustion.

unbuilt but not unrealized

the only Constant in architecture is...

Utopia?