The link above is to an article about the possible future of the Bozeman Armory in Downtown Bozeman, an old military facility constructed shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, designed by Bozeman most prolific architect of the early 20th Century.
4 billion screens – stats for intro
stat for immersion
stat for side , density and growth for immersion
coterminus or hybrid interaction, where the two meet – tactility – user control
occularcentrim – immersion – even less attention available
intro – why (push pull)
slippery slope – nihilistic future
why it needs to be brought into contextual and energy balance
disorienting flow – ???where does it go
whole understanding of information goes understand absrtaction section
related to understanding and pause, vs flow and counting
Technology as an enabler not as a focus of energy.
“An urgency to reconsider the possibility of a radically different ethics as a basis for all human action has come about as a result of the technological world we have created. This is a world where “we” control so much that we can effectively destroy decorous human life through gentetic engineering, or pollute the universe to death, while “we” individually seem to have in fact lost ground on the possibility of making efective choices about personal existence and destiny. In this context, we simply cannot afford to give up our quest to identify what constitutes a meaningful order for human life, the promotion and perpetuation of which has been the invetrate concern of architecture.” – page 9
Palasmaa, The Task of Architecture – “The timeless task of architecture is to create embodied existential metaphors that concretize and structure man’s being in the world.” – page 37
“Architecture enables us to place ourselves in the continuum of culture.” – page 37 (continuum ? tech)
“In memorable experiences of architecture, space matter and time fuse into one single dimension, ((an almost impossible task for the internet)) into the basic substance of being, that penetrates this consciousness. We indentify ourselves with this space, this place, this moment and these dimensions as they become ingredients of our very existence. Architecture is the art of mediation and reconciliation.” – page 37
“To advance towards these hidden experiences, we must penetrate the omni-present veil of mass media. We must fortify our defenses to resist the calculated distractions, which can deplete both psyche and spirit. Everything which is tangibly present must receive attention. If the media maake us passive receivers of vacuous messages, we must firmly position ourselves as activists of consciousess.” – page 41
“Modern commercial existence muddles the question of what is essential. As our technological means multiply, are we growing – or becoming stunted – perceptually?” – page 40
Objective versus Subjective
“Architecture, by unifying foreground, middle ground, and distant views, ties perspective to detail and material to space. While a cinematic experience of a stone cathedral might draw the observer though and above it, even moving ohotgraphically back in time, only the actuall building allows the eye to roam freely among inventive details; only the architecture itself offers the tactile sensations of textured stone surfaces and polished wooden pews, the experience of light changing with movement, the smell and resonant sounds of space, the bodily relations of scale and proportion. All these sensations combine within one complex experience, which becomes articulate and specific, though wordless. The building speaks through the silence of perceptual phenomena.” – page 41
“[to] fuse site, circumstance, and a multiplicity of phenomena, an organizing idea… a driving concept … is required. The unity of the whole emerges from the thread that runs through the variety of parts; whether it be one distcrete idea or the interrealtion of several concepts….Another cohesive strategymight be the condensation of an important programmatic element into a symbolic aim running through the entire structure. In a different circumstance a heuristic device, such as a music score, might be the organizing structure.” – page 119
“Within broadcasting, airing an event “Iive”-that is, at the precise moment of its occurrence-may be the last stronghold of auratic experience. Liveness turns a passive viewer into an eyewitness.”
“The key word is immersive. In visual and acoustic delivery systems, success is based on how closely the systems simulate the real. Satisfaction is measured in pixels per inch. By contrast, Blur is decidedly low-definition. Its primary building material is one indigenous to the site: water. Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through a dense array of high-pressure nozzles, creating a constantly shifting fog mass. Blur challenges the orthodoxy of high resolution by presenting a formless, featureless, scaleless, depthless, spaceless, massless, and surfaceless space. Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical whiteout and the white noise of pulsing fog nozzles.”
pro⋅pri⋅o⋅cep⋅tive
pertaining to proprioceptors, the stimuli acting upon them, or the nerve impulses initiated by them.
pro·pri·o·cep·tor
n. A sensory receptor, found chiefly in muscles, tendons, joints, and the inner ear, that detects the motion or position of the body or a limb by responding to stimuli arising within the organism.
“”An anomaly or mutation is not in itself pathological. Both express other possible norms of life” The normality or pathology of a feature is thus contingent on its viability in a particular environment. I propose that early-twenty-first century technologies create similar boundary problems between initially separate, specific systems, namely between the human body and various electronic systems. This is due not only to immersive environments such as virtual reality but also to the totalizing effect of visual, aural, and other ambient technologies surrounding us. Our newfound capacity to “be there” in many places at once, as we are when we speak on the phone or search the Internet, constitutes a significant ontological shift.””
“The symbiosis of artifact and user and the process of technology becoming “transparent” produce boundary problems akin to the effects of proprioceptive disorders. In these cases, an individual loses the “natural” sensory comprehension of various bodily extremities and, by extension, the ability to interact with the world normally.”
“As we move from visual techniques of observation to haptic techniques of immersion, how are new intersystemic relations between bodies, space, and technology constituted? What is the nature of boundaries in such constructions? Is the precise delineation of boundary even important? What are the criteria of viability for new modes of spatial perception?”
“Perhaps more than any other site in the world, New York’s Times Square embodies the challenge to architects posed by contemporary media. Nearly every surface penetrable by the eye {and rentable by the dollar} is covered with illuminated advertisements, running tickers, and LED screens featuring live video broadcasts. Here, the relationship between space and surface is pushed to its limits. Buildings become signs and signs become structures. Visual perception of surfaces supplants the other senses, including the tactile.”
“The proliferation of media produces effects of seamlessness and discontinuity at once.”
“At any given moment in Times Square, one can find images from far flung places like Iraq, China, and Chicago collapsed and juxtaposed within a single space.”
“If we consider Times Square to be a symptom of larger trends rather than an anomaly, what does this signify for the future of architecture? Is there any role left for buildings-real, three-dimensional, physical spaces-in this world of ubiquitous media images and surfaces? How can architecture address the conditions of seamlessness and continuity presented by the media?”
“Architects can reveal the interactions between these different but coexisting dimensions. We should produce spaces that perform as interfaces between users and their environments, questioning the relationships between individual experiences of space and dislocated surfaces of information.”
“The twentieth century was the age of electronics, beginning in 1897 with the identification of the electron and in 1905 with its first practical application in the form of the diode valve. Initially, architects saw-perhaps too clearly-electronics as separate from architecture. In its default setting, architecture is the production of the effect of stillness, an amazing effect in a world that is endlessly moving. And since electronics is nothing but movement, the controlled movement of a negative charge, our default reaction was to see electronics as separate from architecture, as either being housed by architecture or extending it. This was the case at the beginning of the century. By the end, however, we were in the opposite situation: seeing-again too clearly-architecture inside electronic flows. Perhaps what we have found within these flows are new forms of stillness, new forms of our old magic. Perhaps we have yet to expose ourselves to the risks of movement that we have celebrated so long and so loudly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after one hundred years of thinking about and reacting to electronics, I wonder if architects are really ready to act differently, to think differently.”
“In the late nineteenth and early twemtieth centuries, photography and film revolutionized the way people saw the world. Previously imperceptible details were captured; the movements of human, animal and technological bodies could be recorded; whole new realities could be fabricated.” [abstraction, intro, ocular]
“Walter Benjamin famously argued that these technologies of mechanical reproduction would lead people to perceive architecture in a new way – what he called a “mode of distraction.” The late twentieth century has seen an intense proliferation of new digital technologies that may give rise to their own modes of perception – not least the virtual realities of contemporary popular culture. How will architecture respond to these changes? Will the rise of visual immersive technologies lead to a de-emphasis of real three-dimensional spaces, or will it instigate new modes of experiencing and designing spaces?”
“The other term is one of external mediation: the logic of surface perception as given by the emergent consumerist culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, whose subjects were being trained on mass advertising in magazines, billboards, and of course, television- the television screen, along with the computer screen with which it will eventually merge, being the ultimate surface toward which all others will gravitate. The abstraction of Mies’s envelope, I argued, can be seen as both a reproduction of and a defense against this new logic of surface perception and the consumer-communication economy that sponsored it, an abstraction and a deterritorialization in architecture that is an analog of the abstraction and deterritorialization in society.”
” What I suggest is that while the mediation of the modernist envelope was one of abstraction and negation, the mediation of the new envelope is rather more a process of smoothing and dedifferentiation- a de-differentiation of form, technique, and experience, a spreading out so complete that the experience of the architectural envelope is no longer distinctive but is now part of an aesthetic experience that is diffused through and saturates every part of our lives and seems always and everywhere the same.”
” I have a few observations about the new envelope. First, it is perhaps obvious but still important to observe that the new envelopes are integrally tied to contemporary digital design technologies and specific kinds of software (Maya and CATIA, for example) that coordinate and synthesize multiple parameters and all sorts of data into a smooth, frictionless flow. An important feature of these design technologies is that their procedures and techniques are the generic ones of design, not specific to architecture, and can be applied to Audi TIs, iMacs, and animated films like Shrek as much as to buildings. It is consistent that the reception of the architecture thus produced will be woven into the same general media fabric as video games and televisual leisure, part of the smooth media mix.”
“Second, the notion of surface is still important for the new envelope, and this is evidence that it builds on the accumulated techniques and effects of early design models like Mies’s curtain wall. But while in Mies’s case, as with modernism generally, there was an isomorphism, a continuity of conception between the envelope and the space and structure that it enclosed, the new envelope is often detached from any support, developing under its own momentum, raised to a second power of the sort that the notion of simulacrum was reintroduced to name…..It is as if the surface of the modern envelope, which already traced the forces of reification and commodification in its very abstraction, has been further neutralized,reappropriated, and then attenuated and animated at a higher level. This new enveloping surface no longer corresponds to a particular social public or locale-neither Park Avenue nor Las Vegas nor Levittown-which is perhaps what gives it its slightly unreal quality, even when built.”
“While it is too early to be certain about any external term of mediation, I suggest that one possibility to work on and modulate is something like what Raymond Williams in 1974 called “total flow”: the constant emission of generic but continually changing bits of information that we move in and out of in a kind of ultimate suture between time and space.”
“The new envelope analogously weakens disciplinary autonomy, dedifferentiates procedures of design and dissemination, and attempts to dissolve the very distinction between the architectural representation and the larger world of image-spectacles. But the new envelope paradoxically (or dialectically) produces a link between the aesthetic experiences that it enables and the current abstract global system; the link is made as a triangulation of social space, architecture, and a historically specific media concept that frames the relationship between the two.”
[Final Application] “Buildings, in their simplest form, are made of vectors and envelopes. How one enters a building and moves through it constitutes the vectors. What keeps out the rain, cold, heat, noise, and burglars constitutes the envelope. Vectors activate; envelopes define.
New kinds of envelopes have been made possible by contemporary technologies. How do these articulate exclusion or inclusion? Is the enclosure real and material? Can it be virtual and immaterial? Is it a single layer or a composite of multiple superimposed membranes? How do apparently static envelopes relate to the dynamics of movement, the vectors within them?
The interaction between envelopes and vectors can be approached in several ways. It can be a relationship of indifference, reciprocity, or conflict. Indifference is the condition in which there is no relation between the envelope and what happens inside it. Reciprocity is like an ideal kitchen, in which everything is in exactly the right place to be reached by the most efficient bodily movements. Conflict is the situation in which everything is strategically in the wrong place-such as if one tried to play ice hockey in the living room.”
[Final Application] “I have also been interested in basic daily rituals. In the Blades House, for example, we created a his-and-hers shower mechanism that related to the day-to-day use of the domestic environment and was juxtaposed with more generic building elements. In projects like this, architecture is understood as a series of intimate engagements, as something experienced haptically, by operating or moving through it, rather than via an intellectual or visual conceptualization. A large amount of our work for a number of years comprised these discrete objects: a door handle that dealt differently with entry and exit, a hand-operated window/door that juxtaposed a large-scale architectural piece with the scale and strength of the human hand.
These armatures became part of a larger generative fabric as we aggressively pursued methods of production that departed from conventional construction techniques. A huge amount of invention took place through the process of construction itself rather than through the traditional conceptual realm.”
[Final Application] “What is identity? One definition of identity is the quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or particular qualities under consideration. But identity also implies the opposite: individuality, something that distinguishes a person, building, or object. What does identity mean for architecture? The pairing of detail and identity seems to suggest a simultaneous taking apart and putting together-the fragment and the whole considered at once.
Is it possible that an architectural detail can reveal more than just the resolution of materials? Can a fragment of a building provide an entrance into a particular way of thinking? Details can perhaps be seen as a kind of evidence; therefore, buildings and architecture might be thought of as accumulations of material evidence.” – page 38
[Final Application] “It is the idea that counts. The concept, whether an explicit statement or a sub-jective demonstration, establishes an order, a field of inquiry, and a limited principle. An organizing idea is a hidden thread connecting disparate parts. An architecture illuminating the singularity of a specific situation. In this way, concept can be more than an idea driving a desig; it can establish a miniature utopian focus.” – pg 27
[Final Application] “The essence of a work of architecture is the organic link between idea and phenomenal experience that develops when a building is realized. Architecture begins with a metaphysical skeleton of time, light, space, and matter in an unordered state; modes of composition are open. Through line, plane, and volume, culture and program are given an order, an idea, and perhaps a form. Materials the transparency of a membrane, the chalky dullness of a wall, the glossy reflection of opaque glass-intermesh in reciprocal relationships that form the particular experience of a place. Materials interlock with the senses to move the perceiver beyond acute sight to tactility. From linearity, concavity, and transparency to hardness, elasticity, and dampness, the haptic realm opens. Through making, we realize that an idea is a seed to be grown into phenomena. The hope is to unite intellect with feeling, and precision with soul.”
[Final Application] “Architecture must remain experimental and open to new ideas and aspirations in the face of conservative forces that constantly push it toward the already proven, already built, and already thought. Architects must explore the not yet felt. The realization of one inspired idea in turn inspires others. Phenomenal experience is worth the struggle. It yields a silent response-the joy radiated in the light, space, and materials of architecture.”
“In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and party out of the, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which , thier human origin and thier variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings….The impact of the world’s reality upon human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force.” -page 11
“The primacy and contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth as the kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or god. This eternity discloses itself to mortal eyes when all human movements and activities are at perfect rest….It does not matter what distrubs the necessary quiet as long as it is disturbed.” – page 16
“This is mortality: to move along a rectinlinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in cyclical order.” – page 19
“Aristotle meant neither to define man in general nor to indicate man’s highest capacity, which to him was not logos, that is, not speech or reason, but nous, the capacity of contemplation, whise chief characteristic is that its content cannot be rendered in speech.” – page 26
In Greek antiquity, “A man who lives only a private life, who like a slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian, had not chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.” – 35
“The chapter on place describes how pervasive digital networks are reconfiguring our relation to place by enabling simultaneous presence in both physical and networked place.” is it really simultaneous and not actually the augmented reality subverting and abstracting the authentic reality. “This layer of networked accesibilty is tied to a range of social and cultural tensions – drivers are distracted by their mobile phones and screens; massive, multiplayer online games capture players’ atention at the expense of out -of-game commitments; parents and children alike text others from their dining room table; and people congregate in cafes only to huddle in front of their laptops. We are still very much in the midst of negotiating appropriate social norms in this era of layered presence.” – page 6
“Mobile phones, Wi-fi hot spots, and networked automobiles create personal cocoons of private connectivity and conversation so people can stay connected with the people they feel most comfortable with. At the same time, these technologies have also been criticized as leading to social insualrit, as people shut out engagement with co-present others in favor of their remote, but intimate, relations.” – page 10
“Objects and places are the next targets for aggregation into the digital network. As networks increasingly pervade the nooks and crannies of physical space through portable objects and place-based infrastructure, we have opportunities for an always-on sense of networked connectivity and a layering of presence in various physical and online places.” – page 12
PLACE
“The always-on, always-accessible network produces a broad set of changes to our concept of place, linking specific locales to a global continuum and thereby transforming our sense of proximity and distance.” much like airplanes did in a physical abstraction of distance. – page 15
“series of key conditions: the everyday superimposition of real and virtual spaces, the development of a mobile sense of place, the emergence of popular virtual worlds, the rise of the network as a socio-political model, and the growing use of mapping and tracking technologies.” -page 15
Story of starbucks setting … “You are all somehow drawn together by the lure of the generic (but branded) caffeinated beverage and the desire to share a similarly generic, but nonetheless communal, space with other humans with whom you are likely not to have any direct interaction.” – page 16
“But if these individuals don’t interact with the other cafe-goers verbally, they are engaged ina a calculated co-presence…” – page 17
“”the only way that humans could navigate the overwhelming condition of the metropolis was by disconnecting, by shutting off their connections to this multitude of others.” – page 18
‘In her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jane Jacobs linked the decline of the city and the collapse of the public sphere, arguing that a vital sense of civitas depends on architectural infrastructure that encourages frequent, random face-to-face interactions within an urban community.” – page 18
Marc Auge’s Non-Places – page 18-19
“…we still have an urge to gather together, even if in our solitude….means that we are not necessarily alone even if we are not interacting with those in close physical proximity to us…..the bodily presence of the other cafegoers easing the disconnect with the local that the network creates.” – page 20
“Instead of architectural plan or spatial design, the telecocoon relies on networking technology to create private space, thereby overcoming the problems that distance introduces into our lives….transforming a subway train set, a sidewalk, a street corner into the user’s “own room and personal paradise”.” -page 22-23
“[The desert is a place] to scrape off our century, to prepare and inner-clearing for ones spirit and one’s biological rhythms.” – page 239
“proximity to non-being illuminates what is…” – page 219
“tries to bring emptiness into focus…” – page 1
“To steep in silence, to absorb the long view, is to become more comfortable with the emptiness that surrounds us, even in civilization.” – page 4
“When people gather in groups they tend to relate to one another, When they are alone they relate to space/place.”
Eaton, Dustin W. “Interchange.” Thesis. Montana State University, 2006. Print.
“Achieving both identity and orientation within this fragmented non-space, while seemingly impossible, is absolutely critical to our existence within the present condition. Our daily lives revolve around this non-space and its profound implications, but its disjunctive nature has rendered our global context an incomprehensible state of confusion.” – page 09
new plane of intangible human interaction – page 08
Castells, ” information age theorist argues that the structured network prevailed as an ideal organization becase of:
A. Flexibility, could reconfigure around changing environments, searching for alternate paths.
B. Scalability, nodes could be added and subtracted with ease
C. Survivability, information (identity) decentralized – page 19
We become nomads through the abstraction of space and distance, with faster means of travel (both physical and liminal) – page 44
Mongols had tents to travel with and maintain identity and sense of place, what does the modern nomad carry with him?, where is his identity and sense of place – page 45
The “revenge of place” implies that the way to increase value of a certain place is to increase its unique, irreplaceable, and non-transferable qualities. – page 58
“Currently human form remains in place, but our presence is subjected to a disorienting flow of information that effectively takes sensory dominance over the real. Sensory dominance occurs, for example, in a virtual reality environment where our consciousness is overtaken by mass flows of information and allows us to neglect the real. Media space, or information, and where it goes when launched into oblivion by the simple stroke of a key, is often disregarded by society because of its perplexing character.” – page 63
“”Art integrates the senses,” he [Dr. Goebel] said. “Science takes the senses apart and analyzes. The idea of Empac is to bridge the gap between the digital world of data and the physical world of our senses, which is where we make sense of things and decide what things mean.””
“Scientists are used to viewing data on a small computer screen that measures maybe 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, he said. Now imagine, he said, data projected on all four walls measuring 4,000 pixels by 4,000 pixels, with sound or touch as an extra dimension to tell you when some data points exceed some limit, for example. “Walk into this environment and the data is all around uou,” Dr. Kolb said.”
“You hold up your cell phone and use it like the viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what’s in front of you. But it also shows things you couldn’t see before: Brightly colored markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars.”
“…uses Layar to let people post virtual tags, with their locations and activities, that other people can see if they use the same app.”
“That will allow virtual objects to be placed “on” actual locations.”
“that in the next few years we might see everything from augmented reality video games to musem guide services that recognize paintings and can pull up videos showing the artist at work.”
Main Entry: abstract
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: conceptual, theoretical Synonyms: abstruse, complex, deep, hypothetical, ideal, indefinite, intellectual, nonconcrete, philosophical, recondite, transcendent, transcendental, unreal
Antonyms: actual, concrete, factual, material, objective, physical, real
| Main Entry: | abbreviate |
| Part of Speech: | verb |
| Definition: | shorten |
| Synonyms: | abridge, abstract, boil down, clip, compress, condense, contract, cut, cut back, cut down, cut off, cut out, digest, encapsulate, get to the meat, pare, prune, put in a nutshell, reduce, summarize, take out, trim |
| Antonyms: | amplify, enlarge, expand, extend, increase, lengthen |
“Buildings and sities provide the horizon for the understanding and confronting of the human existential condition. Instead of creating mere objects of visual seduction, architecture relates, mediates and projects meanings. the ultimate meaning of any building is betond architecture; it directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being. Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings. In fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art.” – page 11
“My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration.” = page 11
“Architectural work is not experienced as a series of isolated retinal pictures, but in its fully integrated material, embodied and spiritual essence. It offers pleasurable shapes and surfaces moulded for the touch of the eye and other senses, but it also incorporates and integrates physical andmental structures, giving our existential experience a strengthened coherence and significance.” – page 12
“Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of space, making us mere spectators.” – page 13 – focused vision like on a small screen.
“Architecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure. It domesticates limitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind. As a consequence of this interdependaceof space and time, the dialectics of external and internal space, physical and spiritual, material and mental, unconscious and conscious priorities concerning the sense as well as their relative roles and interactions, have an essential impact on the nature of the arts and architecture.” – page 17
“…an ocularcentric metaphysics of presence.” – page 17
“The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority. The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.” – page 19
“It is thought-provoking that this sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports.” – page 19
“The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perprtual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.” – page 21
“Instead of reinforcing one’s body-centered and integrated experience of the world, nihilistic architecture disengages and isolates the body, and instead of attempting to reconstruct cultural order, it makes a reading of collective significance impossible. The world becomes a hedonistic but meaningless visual journey.” – page 22
Walter J Ong theorized that the shift from an oral culture to a visual written culture has led to an “insistent world of cold, non-human facts.” – page 24 – “He argues that as hearing-dominance has yielded to sight-dominance, situational thinking has been replaced by abstract thinking.” – page 25
“In recent decades, a new architectural imagery has emerged, which employs reflection, gradations of transparency, overlay and juxtaposition to create a sense of spatial thickness, as well and changing sensations of movement and light. This new sensability promises an architecture that can turn the relative immateriality and weightlessness of recent technological construction into a positive experience of space, place and meaning.” – page 32
“We have a mental need to grasp that we are rooted in the continuity of time, and in the man-made world it is the task of architecture to facilitate this experience. Architecture domesticates limitless space and enables us to inhabit it, but it should likewise domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continuum of time.” – page 32
“Architecture is essentially an extension of nature into the man-made realm, providing the ground for perception and the horizon of experiencing and understanding the world.” – page 41
“…the sound measure space and makes it scales comprehensible.” – page 51
“the silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence. A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence…” – page 52
“In striving for a meaningful architecture, historicist-ironist or mythicizing-classicist postmodern architects inevitably find themselves at one remove from any authentic reality and set on a theoretical course that leads to abandoning an architecture that belongs to the realm of things which words, signs and symbols refer to, for an architecture of ciphers themselves. Architecture becomes just one more medium, and architects well-intentioned communicators if not just entertainers-with-shelter. In an “information age” it is too easy to lose sight of the fact that what something is, is distinct from what it communicates. Joining the pervasive suppression of the perception of reality in favor of the perception of messages – of what is in favor of that is meant – will loosen us ever further from the possibility of an architecture grounded in fact and sense of the necessary.” – page 14
“Realness, I think, can be divided into four components, the last one of which has two aspects:
presence,
significance,
materiality,
emptiness, (emptiness1, emptiness2).” – page 32
“An object or building (or person) with presence has a shine, a sensousness, a symmetry to it…..Every material and texture is fully itself and revealed….A Building with presence, with a kind of mute awareness of its doors left ajar and windows open, finally seems attentive to our presnese. Immensey patient, surrounding us with a benignn othernes…” – page 36
“If presence is largely a perceptual matter, significance is a cognitive one…Significance is not achieved by the display of icons, signs and symbbols- no matter how “appropriate” – but how buildings actually come to be and how they continue to be part of the loves of the people who dream them, draw them, build them, own them and use them…. Buildings with significance are sifnigicant to someone, rather than, or in addition to, being symbolic of something.” – page 38
“No, a new building is given historical significance over and above its formal timeliness only if it brings to light the genuine history – human or natural – of its site and the circumstances of its construction. Significant buildings, real buildings, are achieved rahter than provided.” – page 40
“The second strategy consists in (a) eschewing materials that do not look or behave like what they are, (b) using materials that have keen tactile, visual, and kinesthetic qualities – shiny or veined or sawn, (c) structurally stressing materials so that, in feeling “their pain,” we are drawn to consider their substance, and (d) not using materials that look or feel like nothing in particular (whose material is immaterial, as it were)….For indeterminancy of material detracts from realness as much as fakery.” – page 48
“The case of ruins and very old buildings is illustrative. Here, wear and sign sof maintenance, cracks and collapses, reveal all; and when this clarity of materiality is joined by presence and significance, the realness of these structures becomes indelible. But there is one more component to realness that explains the power of ruins and of the many fine vernacular buildings (and those rare deisgned ones) that stand so unblinkingly and enigmatically in the loght of our ratiocinations about them: emptiness.” – page 48
“Emptiness1 is approximated…[as] the “emptiness of intention” we attribute to nature.” – page 52 A tree is a great design for shade and beauty yet was created/exists for neither of the purposes as an intentional act.
“Emptiness2 is more akin to the idea of space, or interval. The Japanese have the word ma which comes close to the meaning of emptiness intended here. Ma! Ma is he gaps between stepping stones, in the silence between the notes in music, in what is made when a door slides open….pregnant with ineffable significance,” – page 56
“Architecture with emptiness2 is thus always unfinished: if not literally, then by the space it makes and the potential it shows. We become engaged with the intervals and open ends.” – page 58
“Not unlike the malls, much contemporary high-style architecture lacks emptiness2 by being quite literally full….Here, in fact, both emptiness1 and emptiness2 come together in their lack. For these buildings are not only full of things coming and going, they are full of themselves and their cleverness.” – page 60
“High-Realism: undoubtedly an architecture easier to call on than to master, easier to find than to produce. ITs inspiration lies in an elusive esthetic experience of the real.
If we cannot grasp reality as a whole or even be sure that we have in part, we seem nonetheless to be allowed glimpses. We know it to be “at hand.” And the quality of realness that certain objects, people and places have more thanothers leads us on, like a scent,a promise, evidence” – page 68
“All human culture is intended to protect human beings from nature in one way or another and to mitigate the effect upon them of nature’s immutable laws….[Architecture’s] purpose is to mediate between the individual and the natural worldby creating the physical realityof the human community, by which the individual is linked to the rest of humanity and nature is in part kept out, in part framed, tamed, and itself humanized. So architecture constructs its own model of reality within nature’s implacable order.” – pg 341
“The automobile was, and remains, the agent of chaos, the breaker of the city, and redevelopment tore most American towns apart to allow it free passage through their center…” – pg 342
“Insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation – that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of, the contexts in which we have previously seen them, their counterparts or their moderls. They communicate by prompting associations.” – page 93
“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of pschological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need – but are at constant risk of forgetting we need – within.” – pg 107
“Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined. We need a hoe in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate ofr a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances.” – pg 107
“We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our mishapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice.” – pg 121
“Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, remind ourselves.” – pg 126
Worringer’s theory of switches of societies value for different architectural styles, eg abstract in time of chaos, and a need for calm. – pg 135 continued on 157
Desire for natural in art, sue to shifts away from natural world – pg 159
Simplicty and refinement. – pg 201
“We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated.” – pg 209
“…this lack of insulation was evidently far from accidental, being tied instead to a desire, Zen in origin, to remind the occupants of their connection to, and dependance on, nature, and of the unity of all living things. A walk to the kitchen in midwinter deliverd a brief and tart lesson about man’s place in a larger and more powerful universe. Yet this wider natural world was evoked in the most abstract of ways…” – pg 234
According to the philospher Paul Ricouer, a hybrid “world culture” will only be a possibilty through a croos fertilization between rooted culture and apprpriate universal civilization on the other. – page 471
A distinction must be made between vernacular, which is an instrumental sign method, used to evoke not a perception of reality, but uses preconceived information ot evoke certain desires. “Critical Regionalism is a dialectical expression.” It self-conciosly(self awarely) seeks to deconstruct universal modern trends in a way that can be applied to that which is locally cultivated. So whilse maintaing rooted cultures and “autochthonous elements” it is also “adulterated” through the introduction of ideas from alien sources. – page 471-472.
Another distinction between vernaculr (or Populism) and Regionalism is that Populism ,”aims not to provide a liveable and significant environmnet but rather to achieve a highly photogenic form of scenography.” – page 473
“Each design must catch, with the utmost rigour, a aprecise moment of the flittering image, in all its shades, and the better you can recognize that flattering quality of reality, the clearer your design will be…” – quote on page 473
Key elements of successful critica; regionalism:
1. Grounded in topography
2.REsponse to urban fabric
3. Sensitivity to local materials
4. Sensitivity to craft work
5, Subtleties of local light
A. Sense of filtration and penetration – page 473
“Simislar feelings and concerns are evident on his opposition to the invasion of privacy in the modern world and in his criticism of the subtle erosion of nature which has accompanied postwar civilization.”
“Everyday life is much too public. Radio, T.V. telephone all invade privacy…..Architects are forgeting the nedd of human beings for half-lightm the sort of light that imposes a tranquility in their living rooms as well as in their bedrooms….Before the machine age, even in the middle of cities, NAture was everybody’s trusted companion….Nowadays the situation is reveresed. Man does not meet with Nature, even when he leaves the city to commune with her. Enclosed in his shiny automobile…Nature becomes a scrap of nature and man a scrap of man.” ” – page 474
Ando speculates that the desnity of urban and suburban cities is what has led to an end of Japanese Residential architectures intimate connection to nature. – page 479
“What Ando has in mind is the development of a trans-optical architecture where the richness of the work lies beyond the initial perception of its geometric order. The tactile value of the tectonic components are crucial to this changing spatial revelation, for as he was to write of his Koshino Residencee in 1981:
Light changes expressions with time. I believe that the architectural materials do not end with wood and concrete that have tangible forms but go beyond to include light and wind which appeal to our senses….Detail exists as the most important element in expressing identity.” – Page 480
Analysis of Ppedestrian zone on Pjiilopappus Hill in Greece by Pikonis:
“an Ordering of “places made for the ocassion,” unfolding around the hill for a solitary contemplation, for intimate discussion, for a small gathering, for a vast assembly.
To weave this extraordinary braid of niches and passages and situations. Pikonis indentifies appropriate components from the lived in spaces of folf architecture, but in this project the link with the regional is not made out of tender emotion. In a completely different attitude, these envelopes of concrete events are studied witha cold emperical method, as if documented by an archoeligist. Neither is their selection and positioning carried out to stir easy superficial emotion. They are platforms to be used in an everyday sense but to supply that which, in the context of a contemporary architecture, everyday life does not. The investigation of local is the condition for reaching the conrete or the real, and for rehumanizing architecture.” – page 481
Megalopolis = reduction of nature to commodity. Regionalsim = enclave, ” the bounded fragment against which the ceaseless inundation of a place-less, alienating consumerism will find itself mometarily checked.” – page 482
Precedents worth investigation:
Bires House, Povoa do Varzim – 1976 – Alvaro Siza y Viera
Bouca Resident’s Assocaition Housing – 1977 – Alvaro Siza y Viera
Pinto Branch Bank, Oliviera de Azemeis – 1974 – Alvaro Siza y Viera
Jyvaskyla University – 1937 – Alvaro Aalto
Saynatsalo City Hall – 1949 – Aalto
House with three walls (1972) and house with flower walls (1975) – Raimund Abraham
Xanadu complex in Calpe – 1967 – Ricardo Bofill
Luis Barrgan
Richard Neutra
Schindler House, Los Angeles
Carlo Scarpa in Venice
Mario Botta – Riva san Vitale
Tadao Ando – Koshino Residence – 1981
I see it as the proof that we are indeed becoming cyborgs, and that, as each technology extends one of our faculties and transcends our physical limitations, we are inspired to acquire the very best extension of our own body. When we buy our home video system, we want it to perform every possible editing function, not because we will ever use them, but because we would feel handicapped and inadequate without them….Indeed, it suggests that we are perfectly capable of integrating devices into our identity, certainly into our bodies. – page 2 (skin)
One of the functions of our personal psychology is to create an illusion of continuity when there are major cultural and technological breaks and, thus, to slow down the effects of technological feedback on our nervous system. If we did not have some sort ofpersonal stabilizing
environment, we would be in a permanent state of shell shock from dealing with the cultural trauma of new technologies. We would be like Chancy Gardiner, the main character in Jerzy
Kosinski’s novel Being There. After living his whole adult life in front of television, Chancy walks out into the street for the first time and finds to his utter dismay that, for some unaccountable reason, his remote control no longer works. – page 4 (skin)
Indeed, telephone, radio, television, (omputers and other media combine to create environments that, together, establish intermediate realms of information-processing. These are the realms ofpsychotechnologies. Seen from this vantage, television becomes our collective imagination projected outside our bodies, combining in a consensual, electronic teledemocracy. TV is literally, as Bill Moyers called it, a “public mind.”3……With television and computers we have moved information processing from within our brains to screens in front of, rather than behind,
our eyes. Video technologies relate not only to our brain, but to our whole nervous system and our senses, creating conditions for a new psychology. We have yet to come to terms with our relationship to our screens. It may help to understand that TV does not compete with books, but suggests something entirely different. It proposes a collective imagination as something we can actually consume… – page 5 (skin)
Homogenization spreads like wildfire via TV, as nobody wants to be caught out of style. Any shopping mall is ‘walk-on’ TV. TV sounds, colours and shapes are the sensory expressions of our collective sensibility. – page 17 (skin)
Indeed, the quick and universal adoption of pc’s can be understood as the necessary protest of the individual in a society dominated by video. – page19 (skin)
Talking back requires some form of interfacing. It is therefore understandable that much of the work that has gone into building better computers has focused on improving interfaces and
making them user-friendly. Simultaneously, the interface has become the privileged locus of information processing. That’s precisely where the boundary between inside and outside has started to blur. The important question haunting cognitive psychologists today is whether when using computers we are the master or the slave-or a bit of both. Are the routines of programming purely external events pertaining to an objective machine or do they impose such a rigorous protocol of operations that they turn us into mere program extensions? The only possible answer to that critical question is to recognize that computers have created a new kind of intermediate cognition, a bridge of continuous interaction, a corpus callosum between the outside world and our inner selves. – page 19 (skin)
Not so evident is the combined psychological appeal of the technologies themselves: while television has always been perceived as a broadcast medium, with a largely public character, computers were personalized as stand-alone, private media. While TV provided a kind of collective mind for everybody, but with no individual input, computers were private minds without collective inputs. – page 53 (skin)
Convergence offers a new, unprecedented possibility, that of plugging individuals and their special needs into collective minds. This new situation is profoundly empowering; it has social and political as well as economic repercussions. It will accelerate changes and adaptations in the geopolitical scene as well as in the private sensibility of everybody. – page 53 (skin)
THE EFFECTS of mass, speed and depth have always been with us. Print, telegraphy, photography, telephone, radio, cinema and television have each in turn accelerated the pace of a previous culture. Computers are specifically associated with speed; microchips have invaded and increased the speed of other technologies. Computers accelerate and disintegrate traditional cultural patterns, only to re-integrate them later in a new way. Pg 65 (skin)
Instances of acceleration, sudden growth or intensification can affect one or all of the features of a design. They can shatter or transform the whole structure. Besides altering its basic operating rhythm, one effect of acceleration is to sever the connections between the various’ parts of an organization, thereby dismantling it in time and space. Page 67 (skin)
As Canadian composer Murray Shafer has suggested, with our eyes we are always at the edge of the world looking in, while with our ears, the world comes to us and we are always at the centre of it. Of course, this effect is the same for everybody from the jungle to the urban headhunter. Pg 102 (skin)
“The architecture of places then make it possible to think about them with some subtlety and to ally particular ideas and events with specific forms and shapes and their relationships. Places could bring emotions recollections, people, and even ideas to mind; their qualities were part of a culture’s intellectual equipment. ” – intro xi
“The scope of change in everyday environments has outpaced the accumulation of wisdom and craft that traditionally guided the making of places; indeed much of what was previously known has in haste been set aside, leaving a blank slate. Worse yet, there are those who would abandon the tangible world altogether in favor of a virtual reality assembled in computer networks – Memory Palaces dislodged from the earth and inhabited by electronic speculation. ” – intro xii
Places are spaces that you can remember, that you can care about and make a part of your life. Much of what is built now is too tepid to be remebered. The spaces with which we are surrounded are so seldom memorable that they mean little to us.
” [Axes] reach across space to draw together important points…they help us position ourselves and make alliance with things….[forming paths] so that what happens along the way becomes the important thing…allowing the mind to do the connecting ..the feet to wander….and to put things in sequence. ” – page 5
” An axis is a relationship across space, not simply a path. At best it is a thing of the mind, not just of the feet. ” – page 9
” [Platforms, slopes and stairs] negotiate the vertical dimension. Platforms make a stage, a a place apart. Slopes join things gently. Stairs coreogrpah our movements. They make us especially aware of our own presence…because they must fit our feet, they provide a reliable gauge of the size of the whole place. ” – page 53
” [Borders] distinguish inside from outside. If they are simple, they make it clear where we are; if they are complex, encompassing distinct pockets of space, they affords choices or the chance of change…one of humankind’s most potent devices for achieving mystery, distance, and the setting apart of a special place has been to build layers of walls…in architecture, as in thought, simple tight boundaries are most often too confining.” – page 81
” [Portals] bids us welcome and draw us through them. Doorways and gates cultivate expectations of the places hat lie beyond. ” – page 101 ”
” The placement of opening therefore is a matter of great importance. They must be considered in at least four ways:
as ways to move and/or see from one space to another;
as sources of light, air, and sound;
as voids in the structured fabric of a building;
as a pattern that explains the character of a building and suggests comparison with buildings of a similar ilk. ” – page 104
” [Monuments], towers, obelisks, pyramids and the like command attention and mark a center. They mark a space and give us something to be next to. On a more intimate scale, objects the size of people…become fellow occupants. They help us inhabit places and stand in for us when we’re not there. ” – page 151 “Singly each [monument] lays claim to its immediate domain, in multiples they create an assembly of presences, a field of intense energies and mysterious significance.” – page 155
” Space and form are understood in [light]. Light can clarify them, as the ancient Greeks knew, or it can extend and enhance mysterious distances, as did light coming through stainedglass in Medieval cathedrals…We can’t sense space without light, and we can’t understand light without shadow and shade. Shadow is the ghost of and object; shade, te absense of light, offers us refuge from the overzealous sun. ” – page 179
” Types have the power to lend weight to our perceptions, confirming and amplifying our experience of a place by lending it a substratum of recollection and familiarity. Modernists, confident of their ability to invent a new and better world, have been hostile to types, seeing them as the embodiment of unexamined habits and ossified relationships, as impediments to the creation of forms and spaces that would afford new experiences and capitalize on the possibilities offered by changes in technology and social organization. Others, bedazzled by the pace of change, and dismayed by some of the fruits of invention, look to the codificaiton of types as a brake on change, a guide to the making of things that incorporate a form of collective wisdom – tried and true. Some go as far as to attribute to traditional types a form of cultural memory, invoking for types of spatial organization an authority that bears no tolerance of change.”- page 222
” [Gardens] require even more energy, continuously given, for a garden soon dissapears without ongoing care. But the pleasure it gives back are perhaps the most precious of all, in sheer delight and in the sense of being connected to the earth, and all the natural world….they merit attention especially because they are so thoroughly invested with care, and more linked to the elements and cycles of nature than most buildings are.” – page 255-258
According to te anthropolgist Marc Auge, the future of physical human interaction seems to arriving at a dismal conclusion. His theory surmises that humanities sense of place is coming to an end. This lost sense is a result of the pervasiveness of non-place in our current societal setting. Non-places are spaces of transition that have no identity, no space for human relationships, or traces of history. Consider a parking garage, how many memories or human relationships have been created within those spaces, add to that places like elevators, airports, the space free world behind our computer screens, the shopping mall, and even local supermarkets. These are prime examples of the expansive progression both in size and distribution of non-place, perhaps even now considered ubiquitous spaces of necessity. Contrast that with places or locations in which individuals can gather, each with their own unique indentity to form human relationships and develop a sense of history within its boundaries.
The value in indentifying and altering the progression toward a society of non-place is determined by what is at stake. The eventual product of non-places is a life of solitary individuality and formulated rules, whereas places are filled with individuals, interacting without formal rules. This solitary disconnect is only futher amplified and exacerbated by suburbian disconnect, the pull of the virtual networked world, the loss of a sense of local culture, the couch in front of the tv, and the mobility of communication all part of the silken thread “cocoon of communication” insulating our lives from physical social interaction.
Parking Garage - A Space of Non-place
How did we arrive at the ubiquitous state of social disengagement in the public sphere? If we take a step back and consider some of the eras on the timeline of public space and transformation, from a sociological point of view, a trend becomes apparent. During the nineteenth century in bourgeois countries like France a new public realm of boulevards and parks began to flourish. This system of planned and designed open greenery was occupied by what Charles Baudelaire called the flaneur or, “”a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin described this emerging urban man in his new environment as though, “the streets becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as acitizen in his four walls”. He was free to interact with the city and its occupants as he would travel the streets constantly meeting old and new members of “his household”.
As the nineteenth century came to a close the industrial era pushed forward a new mobility, with buses, trams, trains, escalators and even elevators. Each of these new technologies altering and accelerating movement and the sociological environment. These transformations brought about adaptive social behaviors which sociologist George Simmel described in the sense that, ” people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another”. Therefore the only way to now navigate the new metropolis and its overwhelming conditions was to disconnect oneself from all the multitudes of people now silently swelling about them.
The third and final cultural shift that widened the divide of the disconnected was the mass exodus from decaying metropolitan cores to the peripheral suburbian sprawls. Public boulevards were replaced with private backyards and social spaces became more and more virtual in nature. Not olnly was space more privatized but newtorks of people were replaced by networks of television broadcasts, and the metamorphosis from public citizen to private consumer forged forward towards its end goal.
Realm of the Public Citizen (Amsterdam)
Realm of the Private Consumer (Anywhere, USA)
Converge – “to come together from diffrenet directions”
“As networks pervade the nooks and crannies of physical space through portable objects and place-based infrastructure, we have the oppurtunities for an always-on sense of networked connectivity and a layering of presence in various physical and online places.” – Mizuko Oto, “Networked Publics”
The scene is more than familiar, perhaps even mundane. The local Starbucks at 6pm, filled with people sipping coffee, perhaps a pair here or there, mostly just seperate entities attending to their quotidian business. The ambience created by the hip background music and cappucino machines whirring in the background. However, there is much to this scene that literally goes unsaid. The two young teens at the table are listening to music on their iphones while texting friends at a nearby mall, the businessman with loosened tie is checking his email and talking to some peers on his Blackberry, and the woman on the love seat relaxes while apparently surfing the web. Though they have chosen to gather within the close proximity imposed by the cafe setting, they maintain the social disconnect typical in metroplitan areas. This disconnect is however quite deceptive as they may at any given time be in the midst of intense social interactions and most likely engaged in multiple conversations simultaneously. The teens being both in Starbucks and at the mall with their friends. The woman in the middle of a conversation with her sister in Nebraska through facebook, , and the executive still at work while sipping his hazelnut mocha. All of these people effortlessly shifting through the superimposed layers of presence, both real and virtual. Yet here they all sit in this generic communal setting. Why the urge to gather in this dance of shared non-interaction? Why here at Starbucks, surely this is not the only wi-fi spot in town, why not just stay at home? What does this tell us about the future of public spaces and their effect on the human condition? How did our society get to this point of social and spatial interaction?
Layers of Copresent Individuals
Architectural Perspicacity 