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Once, Robert Rauschenberg erased most of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and then named it Erased de Kooning Drawing.
I am in no way certain what this is connected to either, but I suspect it is connected to more than I once believed it to be connected to.
Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.
Each pattern depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the larger patterns within which is is contained. Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patterns that help to complete it. It is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language.
What does it mean that man is a "social animal"? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that mollusks and earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like.
"A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character," wrote Stendhal.
Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links weren’t directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.
Methodically noting and filing resources is a sign of a mature and deliberate craftsman—it is an investment into future learning and projects. Before long, you will begin to reach the point where this collection generates projects and ideas with minimal effort; previously isolated ideas are consolidated and curiousity spurred on.
And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
The feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced — that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level.
…Why is the vernacular image still being dismissed as ephemera? Why is its study not being prioritized? All languages are alive, but visual language is galactic. Keywords are not eyeballs, and creating rutted pathways to follow is the antithesis of study. A century of visual language, knowledge, and connectivity is marching toward a narrow, parsimonious basement of nomenclature. The NYPL takes a step backward if it models its shelves and research on a search engine. Spontaneity is learning. Browsing is research.
Maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.
Collect the Web,
Express Yourself.Collect what truly matters to you from the web. It's who you are. Like-minded people will find and learn from you.
Glasp is a social highlighting app that allows you to highlight and tag what you think is important while reading articles or watching videos on the web.
This brilliantly engaging book may actually be one of the first to describe and discuss what might be architecture’s true value at this pivotal point in our own history: seeing that everything is connected, and artfully hosting that complexity, before constructively plotting routes towards clarity, pinned up on broad civic, ethical foundations.
So Architects after Architecture, as the title suggests, is not about buildings. Or at least not always, not directly. Buildings are simply one of the ways that this complex yet constructive sensibility might exert itself, but they are certainly not the only way, nor are they always the most potent – as muf’s Liza Fior makes clear here, when she says “the answer to a brief is not necessarily a building.”
Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.
This paper introduces a novel representation, called the InfoCrystal, that can be used as a visualization tool as well as a visual query language to help users search for information. The InfoCrystal visualizes all the possible relationships among N concepts.
Intelligent note-taking. Non-linear file management. Ideas and relationships visualized.
Alexander: If you say: "Well, look, you're a feeling type, and I'm a thinking type, so let's not discuss that because we are always going to be on different sides", then it removes from this discussion what I feel to be the absolute heart and soul of the matter when it comes to buildings. Now I don't want to deny at all what you are saying about personalities. But I really cannot conceive of a properly formed attitude towards buildings, as an artist or a builder, or in any way, if it doesn't ultimately confront the fact that buildings work in the realm of feeling.
Alexander: It never occurred to me that someone could so explicitly reject the core experience of something like Chartres. It's very interesting to have this conversation. If this weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get into this on a psychiatric level. I'm actually quite serious about this. What I'm saying is that I understand how one could be very panicked by these kinds of feelings. Actually, it's been my impression that a large part of the history of modern architecture has been a kind of panicked withdrawal from these kinds of feelings, which have governed the formation of buildings over the last 2000 years or so.
Why that panicked withdrawal occurred, I'm still trying to find out. It's not clear to me. But I've never heard somebody say, until a few moments ago, someone say explicitly: "Yes, I find that stuff freaky. I don't like to deal with feelings. I like to deal with ideas.”
Eisenman: I would argue that the pitched roof is – as Gaston Bachelard points out – one of the essential characteristics of "houseness". It was the extension of the vertebrate structure which sheltered and enclosed man. Michel Foucault has said that when man began to study man in the 19th century, there was a displacement of man from the center. The representation of the fact that man was no longer the center of the world, no longer the arbiter, and, therefore, no longer controlling artifacts, was reflected in a change from the vertebrate-center type of structure to the center-as-void.
Alexander: Up until about 1600, most of the world views that existed in different cultures did see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable ... either through the medium of what they called God or in some other way. But all that was understood. The particular intellectual game that led us to discover all the wonders of science forced us to abandon temporarily that idea. In other words, in order to do physics, to do biology, we were actually taught to pretend that things were like little machines because only then could you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick. That's all fine. It was a tremendous endeavor, and it paid off.
But it may have been factually wrong. That is, the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized. Now, I am not talking about some kind of aboriginal primitivism. I am saying that it may actually be a matter of fact that those things are more related than we realize. And that we have been trained to play a trick on ourselves for the last 300 years in order to discover certain things. Now, if that's true – there are plenty of people in the world who are beginning to say it is, by the way, certainly in physics and other related subjects – then my own contribution to that line of thought has to do with these structures of sameness that I have been talking about.
In other words, the order I was sketching out last night is ultimately, fundamentally an order produced by centers or wholes which are reinforcing each other and creating each other. Now, if all of that is so, then the pitched roof would simply come about as a consequence of all that – not as an antecedent. It would turn out that, in circumstances where one is putting a roof on a building, in the absence of other very strong forces that are forcing you to do something different, that is the most natural and simple roof to do. And, therefore, that kind of order would tend to reappear – of course, in a completely different, modern technological style – simply because that is the nature of order, not because of a romantic harkening back to past years.
Eisenman: Le Corbusier once defined architecture as having to do with a window which is either too large or too small, but never the right size. Once it was the right size it was no longer functioning. When it is the right size, that building is merely a building. The only way in the presence of architecture that is that feeling, that need for something other, when the window was either too large or too small.
City Hall by Rafael Moneo, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain.
Alexander : At least my experience tells me, that when a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable in such and such a situation, their opinions about it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they're making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won't agree. But if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that kind of harmony.
The thing that strikes me about your friend's building – if I understood you correctly – is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.
Eisenman: That is correct.
Eisenman: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.
Eisenman: Tolstoy wrote about the man who had so many modern conveniences in Russia that when he was adjusting the chair and the furniture, etc., that he was so comfortable and so nice and so pleasant that he didn't know – he lost all control of his physical and mental reality. There was nothing. What I'm suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything's all right, Jack, which it isn't. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn't all right.
Alexander: I can't, as a maker of things, I just can't understand it. I do not have a concept of things in which I can even talk about making something in the frame of mind you are describing. I mean, to take a simple example, when I make a table I say to myself: "All right, I'm going to make a table, and I'm going to try to make a good table." And of course, then from there on I go to the ultimate resources I have and what I know, how well I can make it. But for me to then introduce some kind of little edge, which starts trying to be a literary comment, and then somehow the table is supposed to be at the same time a good table, but it also is supposed to be I don't know what; a comment on nuclear warfare, making a little joke, doing various other things... I'm practically naive; it doesn't make sense to me.