Names vs. The Nothing This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls. Graham Coreil-Allen & Roman Mars, 99% Invisible 99percentinvisible.org New Public SitesLocal Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design & The Nature of Cities emptinessnamescities
99% Invisible A Podcast by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt 99percentinvisible.org The Worst Video Game EverSome Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret LifeThe Help-Yourself CityLawn OrderNames vs. The Nothing+7 More designunderstanding
The 99% Invisible City A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt 99percentinvisible.org urbanismcitiesdesignarchitecturedetails
The Worst Video Game Ever A Podcast from 99% Invisible by Roman Mars & Howard Scott Warshaw 99percentinvisible.org Disorientation
Guided by image In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn. Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image". So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better. Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth Maps and observation design