Sleepers A Poem by Nick Trombley m o t i o n l e s s m o t i o n l s e s m o t i o n s l e s m o t i o s n l e s m o t i s o n l e s m o t s i o n l e s m o s t i o n l e s m s o t i o n l e s s m o t i o n l e s s o m t i o n l e s s o m t i n o l e s s o m t n i o l e s s o m n t i o l e s s o m n t o i l e s s o m n o t i l e s s o m n o t l i e s s o m n o l t i e s s o m n o l i t e s Concrete poetry sleepeuphony
Because we have to sleep Two nights later, as he was getting ready to bed down, the boy looked for the star they followed every night. He thought that the horizon was a bit lower than it had been, because he seemed to see stars on the desert itself. "It's the oasis," said the camel driver. "Well, why don't we go there right now?" the boy asked. "Because we have to sleep." Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist sleep
To carve a volume into the void of darkness The nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of dripping water in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses sounddarknesssleepsolitude
Traced in the summer skies Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. Albert Camus, The Stranger sleepcrime
Drawing as a means of thinking Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’ The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool. Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray Section-perspective drawingThe situation talks backWhen we make a model and realize it's rubbish drawing