What's suitable for each unique condition What of machines and prefabrication? How do they compare? Well, the machine has its limits. We, using handcrafted methods, do things that machines cannot do. Of course, it's not fast like a machine. And in complicated areas like here, things wouldn't go the same using a machine as it would by hand. We use numerous variations of all these connecting and splicing joints. Using a machine, [the wood joints] can all be made uniform, but really, we need to consider whether that's a good thing. It's better to make each mechanism and joint by considering what's suitable for each unique condition. Akinori Abo, Kigumi House Chopped and disfigured contextmachinesconsistency
Interlocking "The art world is highly invested in the idea that you can take an object and set it in a room, and the internal relationships will be so strong and so meaningful that all the kinds of change that take place on the object as a result of its being in a new environment will not critically affect our perception of the object. If that is the given assumption, then the object can be moved from one environment to another without its being critically altered, which then gives rise to the illusion that it can be moved from culture to culture, that it has the ability to transcend its cultural specificity, which in turn gives rise to the ultimate illusion that the object can transcend time. Because what is being claimed is that there exist certain objects isolated and meaningful enough to be transcendent, that they have the power to go on and on, that they are, as it were, timeless. "Well, one of the things that I was becoming involved in at that point in playing artist was the growing suspicion that this breaking down of the edge, the idea of the painting's moving into its environment, was putting the whole heightened rationale of the art object into doubt. There is simply no real separation line, only an intellectual one, between the object and its time environment. They are completely interlocking: nothing can exist in the world independent of all the other things in the world." Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Deep Interlock contextchangeenvironmentobjects
Object and environment "The marriage of figure and ground—which is how they always term the cubist achievement—of necessity leads to the marriage between painting and environment; essentially they are the same thing, just taking it one step further. When I married the painting to the environment, suddenly it had to deal with the environment around it as being equal to the figure and having as much meaning." Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees context
Overlays The awkwardness of the room itself forced Irwin toward the next phase of his endeavor: each installation from there on would have to arise out of the unique configurations of each new site. As Irwin put it, "Instead of my overlaying my ideas onto that space, that space overlaid itself on me." Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees contextspace
Homebuilders The term homebuilder describes the house as a product that exists independent of its context. This approach would be appropriate if houses floated freely in space, or in some other environment where actual interaction between neighbors was neither possible nor desired. But houses are not meant to exist in isolation, so to think of the individual house as the ultimate outcome of the builder’s craft robs that craft of its broader significance. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation context
Domain-specific vs. Domain-independent UX An Article by Ryan Singer m.signalvnoise.com Domain specific UX means understanding how the supply should fit the demand considering a specific situation and use case. On the other hand, many aspects of UX don’t require knowledge about a particular situation. They‘re based on the common constraints of human sense faculties, memory and cognition or the net of ergonomic factors around the device and the setting where it’s used. These domain independent elements of the UX are important too. Domain independent UX should absolutely pervade the organization. It belongs to the general skill and knowledge of each supplier at their link in the chain. It’s part of learning to be a good designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson etc. uxdesigncontext
A Burglar's Guide to the City A Book by Geoff Manaugh burglarsguide.com To commune with the spaceEvery building is infinitePutting the streets to useTopology by other meansBurglary's White Whale+13 More Picking locks with audio technologyThe axis of movementLearning to walk through walls architecturecitiesurbanismcrimetheft
To commune with the space ...having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it. crime
Every building is infinite For the burglar, every building is infinite. House of Leaves architecture
Putting the streets to use Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form. Burglary's White Whale transportationurbanismcrime
Topology by other means The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. It means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. Burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes. spacetopology
Burglary's White Whale If all cities already contain the crimes that will occur there, then, taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests there might be a kind of Moby-Dick of crime, a White Whale of urban burglary: a town or city so badly designed that the entire place can be robbed in one go. Putting the streets to useInvisible Cities
Tarzan of the concrete jungle Weissmuller was most famous for playing Tarzan, and swinging into his apartment from a ledge outside had a wild irony, like some new Tarzan of the concrete jungle updating the character for an urban age.
The source code for SimCity Local Code was Sorkin’s attempt to design a whole city from scratch—with one big twist. The whole thing had been written as if it were the byzantine, nearly impossible to follow codes and regulations for an entire, hypothetical metropolis. The effect is like stumbling upon the source code for SimCity. Sorkin’s exhaustively made point was that, if you know everything about a given metropolis, from its plumbing standards to its parking requirements, its sewer capacity to the borders of its school districts, then you could more or less accurately imagine the future form of that city from the ground up. Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude rulesregulations
Architectural dark matter Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason. Sonorisms I euphonyinfrastructure
Vamburglars Burglary was originally only possible in a household or dwelling; the very word contains an etymological variant on the Latin burgus, for “castle” or “fortified home” (from which other words, such as burgher and even borough, also derive). Common law definitions of burglary also originally required the person to break into a house or dwelling at night. Giving historical burglary an oddly vampiric dimension, you could not, legally speaking, be a burglar while the sun was still out. darkness
The close Think of it as an invisible geometric shape perceptible only to lawyers—a conceptual pane of glass that might not have kept the rain out but could, for legal purposes, be used to define the original limits of the car’s interior. This is the close, and defining it is ultimately just a form of connecting the dots: drawing an imaginary line from the corner of an open window to the edge of a nearby wall to the front gate of a home garden, and so on. Breaking the close thus constitutes entry into a “protected interior” or “specified enclosure". law
To deter crime “To deter crime,” Cisneros explains, “spaces should convey to would-be intruders a strong sense that if they enter they are very likely to be observed, to be identified as intruders, and to have difficulty escaping.” Eyes on the street
Architectural sequences Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Architectural screenplays architecturebehaviorux
Architectural screenplays Tschumi began to explore this notion through what he called screenplays: each “screenplay” was a black-and-white diagram breaking down a range of events that might occur inside an architectural space. Tschumi drew them in a way that resembled dance notation or the spatial analysis of a film scene. Architectural sequences
The City of Light Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation. urbanism
Spatial expectations Loya, who served seven years in prison for multiple bank heists before becoming a writer, explained to me that it was during the getaway that he often had the best chance of thwarting people’s spatial expectations. In his case, this meant that what he did immediately after leaving the bank was often the most important decision of all. Bandits
The getaway to end all getaways Any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve caught. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study. failure
Every heist is a counterdesign Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect. crimearchitecture
All the things we want to do This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives. Rage rooms urbanismlife