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| The young person in architecture, “filled with dreams of building a better world, they toil in the office… their work consists of helping to design efficient boxes for clients they do not know.” Frank Lloyd Wright - manages to open his own office and break boxes rather than to build them. |
Be gently lifted at nightfall to the top of a great down-town office building and you will see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and menace, this thing we call a city. There beneath, grown up in a night, is the monster leviathan, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High overhead hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath reddened with the light from its myriad eyes endlessly everywhere blinking. Ten thousand acres of cellular tissue, layer upon layer, the city’s flesh, outspreads enmeshed by intricate network of veins and arteries, radiating into the gloom, and there with muffled persistent roar, pulses and circulated as the blood in your veins, the ceaseless beat of activity to whose necessities it all conforms.
unheimlich - uncanny, weird. An imagined city, if we provided artists with the dreams of the people of the land. They’d never be built but capture some sense of the people, and the world they wanted to walk in (even if these were misguided or impractical.)
Anarchitecture - the phrase invokes three ideas
- that this is a possible architecture
- “an anarachitecture” rather than the normative “architecture”
- that this is an architecture that is analogous, a parallel world that unfolds at the same time, within, through or somehow about (in both senses of the world) architecture; and the suggestion there might be something anarchistic about it, which is to say that it proposes or imagines architecture that fights rather than affirms, order and power, and that it represents or enables self-organizing, and free communities.
The photograph, he points out, is the first work of art to divorce the object one sees completely and fundamentally in three ways: from what it represents, from what it is made of, and from where it is seen. This, he argues, brings into question its authenticity or what makes it “real.” And that, in turns, brings him to what he believes is the photograph’s real effect, which is to destroy time and space. The photograph is modern technology made real, blowing up any sense of continuity between the thing and its representation, material and form, and making and seeing art.
Eisenman’s model was a linguistic one, and he spent several decades trying to translate the works of thinkers such as Chomsky, Saussure, and Derrida into built form - this despite the fact that all of these writers were interested in the impossibility or at least inherent contradictions of any form of cultural production. Eisenman’s response was to make houses that were themselves, more and more useless and contradictory, culminating in House VI which became famous for including an upside down staircase and a gap that ran through the middle of the marital bed.
The work of collage starts not without a blank state, but with the reality or detritus of the world which we inhabit.
The Body Without Organs (BwO) is not a body stripped of organs, but a body upon which what serves as organs… is distributed according to crowd phenomena in Brownian motion, in the form of molecular multiplicities. The BwO is no longer a singular object or container, but rather is a landscape of pores, cavities, parasites or other growths. They refuse to accept the body at the scale and according to definitions that allow us to contain it within all our understandings. Rather they propose that from a certain perspective or way of knowing, including that of the “schizophrenic” the body might only be expression that allows it to be the site of interpretations, fears, or other modes of being.
Timothy Morton on Hyperobjects:
Hyperobjects have numerous properties in common. They are viscous, which means that they “stick” to being that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words any “local” manifestations of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve profoundly different temporalities than the human scale ones we are used to. In particular some HO are such as planets have a genuinely gaussian temporality, they generate spacetime vortices due to general relativity. HO occupy a high dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for a stretch of time. And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The HO is not a function of our knowledge: it is hyper relative to worms, lemons, ultraviolet rays, as well has to humans.