Well, I do not know nevertheless I tend to imagine it being not. As for me, life seems to be a continuous experience.
I suppose, if you’re only interested in the individual – arguably a rather crude segregation.
But isn’t it also true that every time we found fundamental building blocks of matter we later realized that they are composed of even smaller corpuscles? This looks to me like a continuous plot which radiates towards infinity.
That is not entirely true. I believe what we discern as order, finally is not different from chaos, it is just a part of chaos that we learned to understand. Therefore I recommend a pinch of chaos in interaction with a certain order so that a polymorphous God of harmony can be sensed, abolished or aspired, but his all-embracing presence never neglected.
Before we speak about a larger context let’s try to adopt this concept of internal correlations for an easy artifact like a Doric column. Although its capital has a composed appearance, it is carved from a single block of marble. On the other hand its shaft, uniform in appearance, consists of stacked drums. Fragmentation and wholeness require one another. That it is more than simple juxtaposition becomes quite obvious when one discovers that the very top of the shaft is indeed “part” of the capital. Such a disposition –let’s call it inverse correlation– bears much greater implications beyond just the invention of another capital.
It’s possible it hardly required verbalizing; it simply fit their appetite for ambiguity. This kind of balanced hierarchy could likewise be found in their participatory understanding of democracy, or likewise in the curves and tangents forming the oval shape of a human face.
What I meant was, if you distil the mathematical essence from an artefact, its basic logic can be transposed – independent of its origin and scale, and without superficial semantic content.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Certainly. But while you would be further interested in genealogies to understand present socio-political conditions from their past, I would short-cut and rather use them in a more pragmatic way affecting thereby their future development. An elegant way to guide evolutionary processes is to change the setting. By altering the “biosphere” you could control selection criteria, thus changing the code without having to itemize it. In respect to overall variety, digging a pond in your garden is more effective than haphazardly crossing your rose trees.
All right. Try to understand figure and ground or structure and infrastructure like capital and shaft. If you apply the concept of inverse correlation, it follows that even though buildings come in great variety they are basically the same “material.” And ground, despite the habit to read it as one continuous layer, is composed of various connected places. You could be shocked that it is all made from marble.
If you were given a giant brush and fair supply of ox blood you could paint your entire world red. The categories of your perception will then shift towards an ever-changing landscape of porosity, texture and spatial complexity...
Finally you’re getting it! Unification allows for a mastery of a couple of things simultaneously. Rather than differentiating more and more layers –and thus constructing dichotomies– collapsing them will enable us to tackle the intersection of complex problems, and fragmentation can be encountered with creative will.
Yes, by all means. The problem is that we don’t believe that everything also has a cultural value. Did you ever wonder why most public transport systems are as hideous as they are?
Which at least would be painted red in my scheme.
…While we plant our churches into a graveyard.
But why is duality only present in the interpretation of a phenomenon and not in the phenomenon itself? I suppose it is more likely that we have yet to find a point of view for consistent understanding; and of course it is more laborious to search for that, rather than being already satisfied with an entertaining chat.
Precisely, so you caught a glimpse of the secret of beauty! If you happen to be in a state of emotional resonance that is aligns with the cadences of an object of consideration, it will then evoke a positive reflection of your own existence.
No! I can’t agree. It isn’t about these cursed relationships. The magic is in the formation of thought and emotion itself –that something invisible emerges from the composition beyond any direct intent. In music, for example, the melody cannot be fully represented in the score alone; it must be played and be heard. It is not the arrangement of notes; the miracle lies in the complete substitution by an intuitive experience, something which is not present in its original codification in the score. Think of architecture then like the gestures of a dancer: they don’t speak of hands and legs but rather about command, elegance, beauty.
In return let me ask you: where do people start to dance all by themselves?
Now, what’s the fundamental characteristic of the three?
Why, then, do most people prefer animated or picturesque backgrounds for daily life?
In other words, is it that we see multicultural distractions as a mask for the underlying monotony of global life? Viewed in the light of the history of ideas, are our busy marketplaces in fact deserted?
Now let’s return to our transportation infrastructure. If you are considering the design of a social accelerator –which should by nature inspire sophisticated human behaviour– it is naive to start with programmatic determination, as you previously pointed out. Furthermore, trying to impose your ideals upon the public is doomed to fail. The only possible way to encourage participation is through seduction: only when people start to love their environment they will really take care after it. Therefore our design should be done with generosity, and with a strong faith in mankind’s maturity.
I have a more cyclical conception of time and thus it would read more like, “Order differentiated into chaos, which inevitably will be reverted into order again” –nonetheless you are aiming in the right direction. See, profanity has deprived architecture of its connection to worlds other than our daily life. On one hand, we can regret that architecture is no longer dedicated to the Sun or other types of gods, but that’s history –let it go! But on the other hand, the inability for architecture to be in sincere accordance with greater conceptions such as nature is becoming more and more of a fatal deficiency.
As far as we know, randomness is a fundamental law that governs the universe –from the scale of galaxies to the most elementary particles, from the evolution of civilizations to the evolution of the mind.
...and the creative realm between ratio and emotio could be rediscovered as man’s garden of pleasures.
...and when we come to an unfinished array of rocks, we shall dare to lay down yet another stone.
What do you think, is nature discrete?
Which usually begins at the moment of birth and ends upon death.
But let’s say for now that we are looking at matter: isn’t there a great progression of discoveries that it appears in indivisible units?
It is indeed interesting how you try to deduce unity through extension and not by reduction; still I believe you could not live with the overall idea of chaos, even if this would be the final unifying principle.
Slowly it dawns on me that your conception of harmony is in some way relative… regarding disharmony as complementary and not simply oppositional to harmony. In fact I was convinced that a fragment is much more likely to provoke a sort of poetic reaction from a spectator, but now I see that a perfectly composed work has internal correlations that seduce a beholder to think beyond mere completion and finally become curious about the existence of a creator… A creator who presents a perfect piece –in contrast to an open piece– generates a force, acting on the observer that is much more directed towards challenge and response than something deliberately incomplete. This kind of creator could be seen as ultimately more respectful to his audience because he is considering them as potentially equal in ingenuity.
By disposition you mean mathematical information, in which thought is inscribed into physical matter. It could be paraphrased: We, the glorious Greeks, think that it is most amusing if continuous materiality has manifold volumetric expression, and discontinuous materiality forms a unified surface, all together we serve it as a self-contained element in a complex composition such as the Parthenon.
Besides self-similarity you teased me with implications that are greater than the next syntactic step...
Right, but if you were to use the model of the column, as you did, for the manifestation of a community, like a city, you would lose the inherent implications of a tree or human body.
Perhaps –but only at first glance. Both are living creatures, and thus the result of evolutionary processes. The second-order metaphor of mutation and selection can help to understand a city.
But without knowing where to dig you could end up with a dry pit! You can’t just separate intrinsic from extrinsic factors, code from context. The unity of life comes from their very reciprocity, with the nice side-effect being that, in the end, in order to build a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it at all. Random trial is the greatest artificer of them all! The more you want to design your city, the greater the chance that it will fail to work. Instead, random disasters could be the most beneficial strategic tools. But now I’m lost: I can no longer see the analogy between the column and changing the cityscape.
By Zeus, volume and surface are basically the same? Buildings and infrastructure, land and sea are one coherent reactive surface for our culture and existence?
...So while you are busy smearing out your unicoloured field, I would take advantage and open up a fissure, thus bridging between topographic and demographic barriers. An operation of minimal spatial impact could generate maximal programmatic input, but only if we gave it no specific function in the first place.
But if I consider it correctly, we live on this unified surface already. Even the smallest thing in our world has its universal value: its price.
I see what you mean. It’s not that we couldn’t build more inspiring spaces –certainly we can– it is because in our view, transportation infrastructure is value-free in terms of aesthetics and cultural potential. The National Museum of Antiquities is important for our cultural identity, but not the doorknob to the toilet in the subway station.
Take for instance the great and all-embracing care present in a Japanese temple complex. Everything from the stepping-stone in a garden to the single cane of a thatched roof is cared for with equal affection. It seems that Shinto- Buddhist syncretism nurtures a smooth distribution of objects attractive for preoccupation.
But isn’t duality a good thing, so long as it raises questions and refines answers?
One might also say that analysis is always dependent on a consistent resolution of time and space, and only very rarely is the resolution of the observer in agreement with the inherent sequence of the phenomenon.
With great works of art, you can assert that the sequence of information on display is in perfect alignment with the human ability to detect said sequences without surplus effort. We could launch another term, let’s call it for now concise ambiguity, and define it thereby that not the pieces of information should be ambiguous but their relationships, furthermore we could demand that the possible readings are not infinite but limited to a set of well orchestrated variations. With this we can clarify a prevalent misunderstanding of Le Corbusier’s elementary forms –they are simple and unambiguous not because he wanted to avoid suggestiveness. Quite the contrary: they are simple precisely so that their composition may establish ambiguous yet concise relationships. And only these have the ability to move you truly. They mean something.
How then would architecture look like, architecture which brings people to dance?
From my experience I am reminded of a lonely square, or a stage, or a winter lake frozen over.
Of course, you need a void plane for dancing, but as for the role of architecture, it presumes that dancers are most moved rather by its absence. Or, worse, it should serve only as background.
Could it be that their lives are lacking those qualities?
Perhaps to truly advance in our development of society, we must overcome this horror vacui of ours. Rather than trying to concoct an ultimately stiff synthesis, it might be more appropriate to create vestal spaces, so that through methods of substitution new cultural dimension can replace yet transcend outdated ones, allowing future generations to actually benefit from the past.
You mean that it carries freedom for virtuoso use and abuse from local communities over centuries the programmatic attitude must read something like, “Dedicated to the journey of humanity in the universe coming from divine origin, descending into chaos?” And the architectural expression of it could be an edifice that resembles at first an eight-kilometer long stoa. If you are getting closer it will become clear that it is in fact randomly composed from 168 temple cross-sections of Greek and Vitruvian origin.
That is true. It almost seems that the present refusal of a discourse of aesthetics is a distant, unconscious echo of the repressed ancestry of the term. Decidedly, ethics might not have been the preferred domain of artists, and their thirst for prestige is merciless, but in a very deep way they always worship humanity, paradoxically sacrificing their own existence for the delight of others. And finally, shall irrationality be the underlying principle of our cultural history?
That would mean, if we accept that determinism is a gross oversimplification, other rules besides cause and action could enter the game, and accidental discovery as an important basis for true creativity will regain its adequate status...
So every once in a while, if we find a patch of flowers planted a bit too straightly, we shall pick some of them.
Well, I do not know nevertheless I tend to imagine it being not. As for me, life seems to be a continuous experience.
I suppose, if you’re only interested in the individual – arguably a rather crude segregation.
But isn’t it also true that every time we found fundamental building blocks of matter we later realized that they are composed of even smaller corpuscles? This looks to me like a continuous plot which radiates towards infinity.
That is not entirely true. I believe what we discern as order, finally is not different from chaos, it is just a part of chaos that we learned to understand. Therefore I recommend a pinch of chaos in interaction with a certain order so that a polymorphous God of harmony can be sensed, abolished or aspired, but his all-embracing presence never neglected.
Before we speak about a larger context let’s try to adopt this concept of internal correlations for an easy artifact like a Doric column. Although its capital has a composed appearance, it is carved from a single block of marble. On the other hand its shaft, uniform in appearance, consists of stacked drums. Fragmentation and wholeness require one another. That it is more than simple juxtaposition becomes quite obvious when one discovers that the very top of the shaft is indeed “part” of the capital. Such a disposition –let’s call it inverse correlation– bears much greater implications beyond just the invention of another capital.
It’s possible it hardly required verbalizing; it simply fit their appetite for ambiguity. This kind of balanced hierarchy could likewise be found in their participatory understanding of democracy, or likewise in the curves and tangents forming the oval shape of a human face.
What I meant was, if you distil the mathematical essence from an artefact, its basic logic can be transposed – independent of its origin and scale, and without superficial semantic content.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Certainly. But while you would be further interested in genealogies to understand present socio-political conditions from their past, I would short-cut and rather use them in a more pragmatic way affecting thereby their future development. An elegant way to guide evolutionary processes is to change the setting. By altering the “biosphere” you could control selection criteria, thus changing the code without having to itemize it. In respect to overall variety, digging a pond in your garden is more effective than haphazardly crossing your rose trees.
All right. Try to understand figure and ground or structure and infrastructure like capital and shaft. If you apply the concept of inverse correlation, it follows that even though buildings come in great variety they are basically the same “material.” And ground, despite the habit to read it as one continuous layer, is composed of various connected places. You could be shocked that it is all made from marble.
If you were given a giant brush and fair supply of ox blood you could paint your entire world red. The categories of your perception will then shift towards an ever-changing landscape of porosity, texture and spatial complexity...
Finally you’re getting it! Unification allows for a mastery of a couple of things simultaneously. Rather than differentiating more and more layers –and thus constructing dichotomies– collapsing them will enable us to tackle the intersection of complex problems, and fragmentation can be encountered with creative will.
Yes, by all means. The problem is that we don’t believe that everything also has a cultural value. Did you ever wonder why most public transport systems are as hideous as they are?
Which at least would be painted red in my scheme.
…While we plant our churches into a graveyard.
But why is duality only present in the interpretation of a phenomenon and not in the phenomenon itself? I suppose it is more likely that we have yet to find a point of view for consistent understanding; and of course it is more laborious to search for that, rather than being already satisfied with an entertaining chat.
Precisely, so you caught a glimpse of the secret of beauty! If you happen to be in a state of emotional resonance that is aligns with the cadences of an object of consideration, it will then evoke a positive reflection of your own existence.
No! I can’t agree. It isn’t about these cursed relationships. The magic is in the formation of thought and emotion itself –that something invisible emerges from the composition beyond any direct intent. In music, for example, the melody cannot be fully represented in the score alone; it must be played and be heard. It is not the arrangement of notes; the miracle lies in the complete substitution by an intuitive experience, something which is not present in its original codification in the score. Think of architecture then like the gestures of a dancer: they don’t speak of hands and legs but rather about command, elegance, beauty.
In return let me ask you: where do people start to dance all by themselves?
Now, what’s the fundamental characteristic of the three?
Why, then, do most people prefer animated or picturesque backgrounds for daily life?
In other words, is it that we see multicultural distractions as a mask for the underlying monotony of global life? Viewed in the light of the history of ideas, are our busy marketplaces in fact deserted?
Now let’s return to our transportation infrastructure. If you are considering the design of a social accelerator –which should by nature inspire sophisticated human behaviour– it is naive to start with programmatic determination, as you previously pointed out. Furthermore, trying to impose your ideals upon the public is doomed to fail. The only possible way to encourage participation is through seduction: only when people start to love their environment they will really take care after it. Therefore our design should be done with generosity, and with a strong faith in mankind’s maturity.
I have a more cyclical conception of time and thus it would read more like, “Order differentiated into chaos, which inevitably will be reverted into order again” –nonetheless you are aiming in the right direction. See, profanity has deprived architecture of its connection to worlds other than our daily life. On one hand, we can regret that architecture is no longer dedicated to the Sun or other types of gods, but that’s history –let it go! But on the other hand, the inability for architecture to be in sincere accordance with greater conceptions such as nature is becoming more and more of a fatal deficiency.
As far as we know, randomness is a fundamental law that governs the universe –from the scale of galaxies to the most elementary particles, from the evolution of civilizations to the evolution of the mind.
...and the creative realm between ratio and emotio could be rediscovered as man’s garden of pleasures.
...and when we come to an unfinished array of rocks, we shall dare to lay down yet another stone.
What do you think, is nature discrete?
Which usually begins at the moment of birth and ends upon death.
But let’s say for now that we are looking at matter: isn’t there a great progression of discoveries that it appears in indivisible units?
It is indeed interesting how you try to deduce unity through extension and not by reduction; still I believe you could not live with the overall idea of chaos, even if this would be the final unifying principle.
Slowly it dawns on me that your conception of harmony is in some way relative… regarding disharmony as complementary and not simply oppositional to harmony. In fact I was convinced that a fragment is much more likely to provoke a sort of poetic reaction from a spectator, but now I see that a perfectly composed work has internal correlations that seduce a beholder to think beyond mere completion and finally become curious about the existence of a creator… A creator who presents a perfect piece –in contrast to an open piece– generates a force, acting on the observer that is much more directed towards challenge and response than something deliberately incomplete. This kind of creator could be seen as ultimately more respectful to his audience because he is considering them as potentially equal in ingenuity.
By disposition you mean mathematical information, in which thought is inscribed into physical matter. It could be paraphrased: We, the glorious Greeks, think that it is most amusing if continuous materiality has manifold volumetric expression, and discontinuous materiality forms a unified surface, all together we serve it as a self-contained element in a complex composition such as the Parthenon.
Besides self-similarity you teased me with implications that are greater than the next syntactic step...
Right, but if you were to use the model of the column, as you did, for the manifestation of a community, like a city, you would lose the inherent implications of a tree or human body.
Perhaps –but only at first glance. Both are living creatures, and thus the result of evolutionary processes. The second-order metaphor of mutation and selection can help to understand a city.
But without knowing where to dig you could end up with a dry pit! You can’t just separate intrinsic from extrinsic factors, code from context. The unity of life comes from their very reciprocity, with the nice side-effect being that, in the end, in order to build a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it at all. Random trial is the greatest artificer of them all! The more you want to design your city, the greater the chance that it will fail to work. Instead, random disasters could be the most beneficial strategic tools. But now I’m lost: I can no longer see the analogy between the column and changing the cityscape.
By Zeus, volume and surface are basically the same? Buildings and infrastructure, land and sea are one coherent reactive surface for our culture and existence?
...So while you are busy smearing out your unicoloured field, I would take advantage and open up a fissure, thus bridging between topographic and demographic barriers. An operation of minimal spatial impact could generate maximal programmatic input, but only if we gave it no specific function in the first place.
But if I consider it correctly, we live on this unified surface already. Even the smallest thing in our world has its universal value: its price.
I see what you mean. It’s not that we couldn’t build more inspiring spaces –certainly we can– it is because in our view, transportation infrastructure is value-free in terms of aesthetics and cultural potential. The National Museum of Antiquities is important for our cultural identity, but not the doorknob to the toilet in the subway station.
Take for instance the great and all-embracing care present in a Japanese temple complex. Everything from the stepping-stone in a garden to the single cane of a thatched roof is cared for with equal affection. It seems that Shinto- Buddhist syncretism nurtures a smooth distribution of objects attractive for preoccupation.
But isn’t duality a good thing, so long as it raises questions and refines answers?
One might also say that analysis is always dependent on a consistent resolution of time and space, and only very rarely is the resolution of the observer in agreement with the inherent sequence of the phenomenon.
With great works of art, you can assert that the sequence of information on display is in perfect alignment with the human ability to detect said sequences without surplus effort. We could launch another term, let’s call it for now concise ambiguity, and define it thereby that not the pieces of information should be ambiguous but their relationships, furthermore we could demand that the possible readings are not infinite but limited to a set of well orchestrated variations. With this we can clarify a prevalent misunderstanding of Le Corbusier’s elementary forms –they are simple and unambiguous not because he wanted to avoid suggestiveness. Quite the contrary: they are simple precisely so that their composition may establish ambiguous yet concise relationships. And only these have the ability to move you truly. They mean something.
How then would architecture look like, architecture which brings people to dance?
From my experience I am reminded of a lonely square, or a stage, or a winter lake frozen over.
Of course, you need a void plane for dancing, but as for the role of architecture, it presumes that dancers are most moved rather by its absence. Or, worse, it should serve only as background.
Could it be that their lives are lacking those qualities?
Perhaps to truly advance in our development of society, we must overcome this horror vacui of ours. Rather than trying to concoct an ultimately stiff synthesis, it might be more appropriate to create vestal spaces, so that through methods of substitution new cultural dimension can replace yet transcend outdated ones, allowing future generations to actually benefit from the past.
You mean that it carries freedom for virtuoso use and abuse from local communities over centuries the programmatic attitude must read something like, “Dedicated to the journey of humanity in the universe coming from divine origin, descending into chaos?” And the architectural expression of it could be an edifice that resembles at first an eight-kilometer long stoa. If you are getting closer it will become clear that it is in fact randomly composed from 168 temple cross-sections of Greek and Vitruvian origin.
That is true. It almost seems that the present refusal of a discourse of aesthetics is a distant, unconscious echo of the repressed ancestry of the term. Decidedly, ethics might not have been the preferred domain of artists, and their thirst for prestige is merciless, but in a very deep way they always worship humanity, paradoxically sacrificing their own existence for the delight of others. And finally, shall irrationality be the underlying principle of our cultural history?
That would mean, if we accept that determinism is a gross oversimplification, other rules besides cause and action could enter the game, and accidental discovery as an important basis for true creativity will regain its adequate status...
So every once in a while, if we find a patch of flowers planted a bit too straightly, we shall pick some of them.