no2self.net

A quick note to highlight some places I’ll be this week, in the hope that you’ll come by and say hello if you happen to be there too…

Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a workshop event leading up to the btween conference in Manchester. I’m very flattered to find myself invited along to play geek architect of the group. Here’s the premise:

The workshop is the first stage of a project designed for Beacon to develop collaborative proposals for on online service that will map connections between people, place and knowledge, and creative activity across Manchester

A process of scoping, seed idea proposals, selection and development will lead to ideas pitching and final selection of one concept to be commissioned to answer Beacon’s needs effectively

The workshop will generate ideas and questions that will form the heart of a story cube collaboration that will run throughout b.TWEEN 08 on the 19th and 20th June

Story Cubes - a consultation tool developed by Proboscis. I’ve been a fan of their work for a long time so I’m looking forward to meeting the people behind the projects.

On Wednesday I’ll be at Urban Vision North Staffordshire for the last in their series of green design seminars. They’ve decided to end in a slightly more lighthearted way and run a Dragon’s Den style event following a morning design workshop. I’ll be playing one of the dragons alongside 3 others from UVNS, CABE and Open University.

My only concern is that I’ve never actually watched an episode. Are there any catchphrases I need to learn? Colleagues tell me that TV dragons are arrogant and full of themselves. I’m sure I’ll fit right in.

Architectural Art Advent Day 7:

Excerpts from the stainless steel clad brochure from the 1968 MOMA exhibition The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. (10Mb PDF file!)

Last night I dreamt I was abducted by gang of Buddhists. They found me via Google. I was taken to a shanty town of poorly built concrete block houses containing roughly hewn wooden tables and meditation spaces themed like the Crystal Maze. At the end of the tables were flat screen monitors built into the wall. They were into Web 2.0. I was shown some around some of the meditation areas.

…And this group are building a meditation space to feel like a kitchen. The subtle noise of the condensing gas boiler in the cupboard helps them maintain a discrete control over their physical awareness before emptying their minds…

It was then that I realised who I had to blame.

I formed an allegiance with another Buddhist who, like me, just wanted to be left to learn to let go on her own. We made a dash for it in a Rover 214. It took two attempts.

Note to self: remember to check for online version before typing out yourself - Guardian Unlimited: Into the deep.

A couple of quotes from an interview with Anish Kapoor in Saturday’s Grauniad; posted here partly as a further addition to past Kapoor entries and partly because interviews with artists who laugh a lot are so bloody rare.

On new, inverted, dark space:

Well, says the interviewer Simon Hattenstone, everything you paint or make seems like a fanny in one way or another.

Hahahahaha! Hahahahaha! My art is upside down and inside out. Absolutely. I’ve always said that. You might be quoting me there, hahahaha! I would say that to make new art, you need to make new space. The modernist space, all the great modern art, has been like the rocket, phallic, onwards and upwards. The new space is the opposite of that. It’s in the gutter, it’s deep, dark inverted, it’s inside out. If you think what the space of the internet is, it’s a curious non-space - it’s like it’s turning itself inside out because you can create so much more space by going in and deep. So this is, in a curious way, the future, and it links psychologically to the past and, as you say, it’s sexual.

On the kinds of form:

There are only two kinds of form. The one that sticks out and the form that sticks in. Everything else is flat, that’s a fact.

Here’s a fitting to end to my last collaboration with Tony:

Dear Rob and Tony

I’m very pleased to inform you that you have been awarded a commendation in the 2006 Euroclad Drawing Competition, organised in conjunction with Architecture Today and judged by Piers Gough and Sadie Morgan. There will be a prizewinners’ lunch in central London on October 19th, which I hope you will be able to attend. Further details on this will follow shortly from CIB Communications. We shall be publishing the winning and commended entries in the October issue of Architecture Today.

Congratulations and best wishes

Ian

Ian Latham
Publishing Editor
Architecture Today

London bloggers - you know who you are - celebratory drinks on October 19th? Keep your diaries free.

Here’s our entry to the Euroclad drawing competition, which asked entrants to ’sketch a fresh look for Brighton’s West Pier’.

Chambers for a Brighton Memory Palace

Concept: “The first pier at Brighton was known as The Chain Pier, and there was a silhouettist working on it throughout most of it’s history. The slhouettists moved to the West Pier when it opened in 1866, and continued more or less continuously until shortly before it’s closure in the 1970’s.”¹

The profile of a sea front pier is a well understood, easily recognisable form that stirs recollections. The history of the silhouette cutters on West Pier is captured within the full scale profile and becomes a surface to incite and then receive the memories of the people of Brighton.

Repeated, rotated and woven together to form a field of chambers housing exhibitions, events and installations; the grid becomes a set of co-ordinates that control the curating of time and topics.

Construction: The spaces are created by intersecting, perforated metal clad walls with an opening in each side connecting to the adjacent chamber. Exposed spaces drain towards the edges and covered areas shed rainwater into the cavity between the walls. Colour controlled lighting in the cavity seeps through the perforations and assists themed curation of exhibitions by directing visitors across the grid. Lightweight tent structures stretch over the volumes that trace a wandering path across the grid providing alternative environments for different events/objects.

Curate: The grid of silhouettes conveys the passing of time in one direction and cultural topic in the other. The profiles heading away from the beach out onto the sea carry the topic through the intersecting date lines parallel with the shore. We begin at the shore in 1865² and travel towards the horizon to the present day, crossing decades as we move from chamber to chamber. As time passes the structure continues to grow into the sea and new topics are added along the beach. Non-linear journeys through history are suggested within the volumes traced across the grid by the silhouettes of the original pier buildings.

The co-ordinates provide public meeting places with a nostalgic³ subtext.

“Should we meet at 1964/Mods or 1975/Pier ?”

With apologies to Charles Moore and Donlyn Lyndon for the Chambers for a Memory Palace rip off. The drawing is also available as a PDF.

notes:
1. from ‘The Silhouette Tradition of Brighton Pier’ by Edo Barn.
2. the year the West Pier was constructed
3. as I was inking this thing into life, my RSS feeder pinged with a timely entry by thingsmagazine: The object as a starting point for nostalgia

I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of doing competitions. Here’s our* entry to the first brief for the Line of Site competiton.

If you’re interested in the McLarenesque ‘how we work’ story you can see the project notes and evolution on the Backpack page I used: Everest Base Camp. There’s a Sketchup model buried in there and a montage that was also submitted as an alternative approach to the same early concept. Unfortunately the notes don’t really track the most fruitful exchanges that went on between team members in the pub and my mobile phone involving the dimensions required for Yak turning circles.

Lightweight hi-tech solutions brought from afar tethered to heavyweight indigenous material, mediated by complex cultural interchanges between travellers and locals, transmitted via dishes of digital noise and walls of faith and prayer.

With big pipes to get rid of the crap.

Here’s the mandatory hyperbole that was submitted with the image.

A collection of conditions loose enough to accomodate the complex topography, climate and culture forming a balance between the permanent, semi-permanent and fleeting.

Inverted moraine diagrams turn the lateral and medial trails left by supraglacial debris into hill hugging weather buffers of shelter and prayer.

Walls built from the mountain rock with the services buried inside them stand unmoved across millennia and provide an anchor to the fleeting visits of travellers and their technology.

There are further images in a flickr set: Everest Base Camp sketches.

* This was a collaboration with Tom Booker, Rob Squibb and David Sauvion.

Extensive quotes in this baby. Some new, some old; go put the kettle on first. Emphasis in bold by me…

Geert Lovink on Blogging and Nihilism:

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasize its counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of a unfolding process of ‘massification’ of this, still, new medium. What the Internet after 2000 lost is the “illusion of change”. The created void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through automated software, named weblogs, or blogs.

Kazys Varnelis (who provided the link to the above) on Geert Lovink:

I’d like to suggest that this isn’t merely a conflation of unlike terms but rather that there is a steady evolution here. There is a desire in each of the subsequent movements to affirm the individual (through subject position, through productive agency, and through an active DIY voice), but instead each one actually does a more thorough job of wiping out individual subjectivity than the previous iteration (please slot the blob under dot.com Deleuzeanism… a million 20-40 year old students, all being original, all making nearly identical shapes).

But, like Geert, what I am observing is not only the massification of the Internet but a more generalized cultural move toward nothingness that expresses itself through the medium of the blog. Through the blog, we attain a complete and fatal condition, making our comments into the void, thereby affirming our existence while we also emphatically assert our distance from any situation we might act in.

Me in December 2000 (opening paragraph quoting Jencks):

“It would be interesting enough if adaptive complex systems inescapably were located at the edge of chaos, the place of maximum capacity for information computation. The world could then be seen to be exploiting the creative dynamics of complex systems, but with no choice in the matter. But what if such systems actually got themselves to the edge of chaos, moved in parameter space to the place of maximum information processing? That would be really interesting: the ghost in the machine would seem to be almost purposeful, piloting the system to maximum creativity.”

Jencks introduces this discussion to architecture. Firstly describing the importance that science has within our changing understanding of modern culture and secondly by drawing comparisons between nonlinear theory and the process of making architecture, demonstrating which practices are already developing new theories for ‘maximum creativity’. Outlining the manifesto for what he calls ‘cosmogenic’ architecture, Jencks attempts to predict the new movement of complex, emergent design. Simultaneously an assault on the reductivist modernist movement, the exposure of early post-modernism as an applied typology and an escape from the fragmentation of post-structuralist theory, ‘The Architecture of the Jumping Universe‘ is a key text in our investigation.

…

Following the post-structuralist flattening of hierarchies, the erasure of the architects ability to prioritise his subjective will creates a vacuum. The defining of the undecideable/in-between space allows theorists to reflect upon the moment that represents the act of making architecture, and the rigorous examination of process rushes in to fill the vacuum. Alongside this, the growing culture of scientific uncertainty (quantum science) creates new questions regarding Western society’s ideas about the Universe’s dynamics. If the processes of nature demonstrate a self-organizing ability to find the most powerful creative/evolutionary moment, why shouldn’t architectural creativity demonstrate the same? Complexity science exposes the source of that creativity and finds that it too exists as an undecideable.

The created void, the cultural move toward nothingness and the erasure of the architect creating a vacuum - all an expression of the same thing.

The quote taken from my own post-graduate work six years ago (I’ve added some emphasis for this outing) is part of a dissertation that tried to propose the computer was filling this vacuum or void. One of my mistakes (sadly there were many, don’t expect me to link to the rest of it) was that I didn’t sufficiently drill down far enough, beyond the beige box. I didn’t look at the medium that Varnelis highlights.

There was a feeble attempt in the conclusion:

Let us return for the moment to the theory of the Universal Turing Machine. The concept is that the Universal Machine itself has no predefined purpose. For the machine to function it must be able to deform to the requirements of each new task it is given (the radical nature of Turing’s vision is clearer when you remember it was originally perceived as something mechanical) as well as provide the result. Each problem the Universal Machine is set must also contain the instructions for how to solve it. Now, it is of course easy to see how this is precisely the way in which a modern computer performs, with it’s dumb hardware supplied a purpose by the software; but it also reminds us that this Universal Machine is the perfect embodiment of objectivity. To use Eisenman’s terminology, until the task in hand is commenced, it has no ‘interiority’¹. It is formless.

It is widely accepted that the benefits of using a computer are found among such things as its ability to perform complex tasks quickly, sort and store large amounts of data and, in an abstract fashion, shrink or expand linear restrictions of time and space. However, what I would like to focus on here is what the computer represents in the design process, rather than what it actually does.

What it represents is the answer to the question of how to ‘open up process’ ¹. The continued search for objectivity or releasing of authorial control is over, since it is resolved by the presence of the Universal Machine. Since we are incapable of achieving true objectivity, we have introduced a stand-in that can.

Now we can begin to see the importance of Van Berkel’s statement, ‘But it has to sound right’². Providing the source of objectivity is not the end to our quest; somebody must feed the Universal Machine. The one factor that all the architects we examined have in common, regardless of which side of the discourse they reside, is that they must all deal with their relationship to their machine. The most difficult task becomes how to move the process into and out of the machine, performing the eversion from the virtual to the real. We must find new ways to interact with the results of our emergent processes and position ourselves within our work.

Am I ‘dealing with my relationship to my machine’ via my blog? ‘Moving the process into and out of the machine’ feels like filtering through the move from txt to html to rss to tags. Perhaps if my tutor were here now I could excuse the dead end of my dissertation⁴ by the fact that I didn’t know what a blog was in the year 2000.

Related entries: Contextual Slippage and the Info Pimp Force Diagram and I would have missed a few things if he hadn’t pointed with his trunk occasionally and Parc de la Villette.

Notes:
1. I’ll come back to this in an upcoming entry about Thom Mayne
2. Winy Maas, RIBA conference, Oct 31 2000 responding to a question from the audience about authorial control
3. ‘Move’ by UN Studio
4. Note to students: never write an academic paper on the assumption that a conclusion will appear through the very act of writing it. It won’t. Ask a scientist to tell you what a hypothesis is and why they’re important.

Dear Reader,

I enclose some letters between Matt Webb and I that we both feel are worth sharing. Topics include: meditation, breathing, Arthur Dent, puffing sacks, giving form to that which you know intuitively, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and the gentle hum of radiators.

In a wonderfully self-fulfilling way, writing this has itself given a form to something I only knew through intuition until yesterday.

And yes, I’m sticking to the word letters because somehow the truth (e-mails) seems depressingly cold for a topic such as this. They deserved a typewriter with an old ribbon, a failing key or two and reassuringly thick paper. Diagrams in the margin drawn with a fountain pen.

On 24 Nov 2005, at 23.50, Rob Annable wrote:

Dear Matt,

Great entry on meditation. I too find myself unable to put aside the short chunks of time meditation deserves, but you’ve encouraged me to try harder.

Some advice that I’ve read elsewhere that you may find useful….

Concentrate on your breathing by imagining the point on your body at which the air enters and leaves - the tip of your nose. By focusing on a specific thing you can push all other things/distractions out of your mind. Count each breath but give yourself a system to structure your counting better - only go from 1 to 10 and then start over, make yourself start again if your mind wanders.

Then soon the tip of your nose will become forgotten as you concentrate on your breath. Then, perhaps, your breath will become forgotten as you concentrate on your trajectory, as you call it. A gap appears between you and your body. You realise that the body is perfectly capable of breathing on your own while you go off and do other things. Try not to laugh with delight. Once it becomes automatic, etc, etc.

Arthur Dent learns to fly by forgetting to hit the ground. It’s a bit like that. Perhaps the dressing gown is important.

I may have a book somewhere, what’s your address?

Regards,

Rob

On 25 Nov 2005 at 12:07:54 Matt Webb wrote:

Hi Rob,

It’s a curious thing. The more I talk to new friends, the more of them I find have been meditating daily for many years.

I tried for 10 minutes this morning, taking the advice you mention. The first paragraph is the easy bit.. I didn’t even get close to the second. It seems like that experience of suddenly seeing will be the way it happens, though.

I would be interested in a book, if you find it, thanks! If not, I can look it up if you remember the title.

best
Matt

On 29 Nov 2005, at 0.54, Rob Annable wrote:

‘…My body is a bellows, an automatically moving, rhythmically puffing sack…’

That’s it. You’ve nailed it. I’ve never read such a fitting description.

Sorry if my previous description of the counting/breathing process was a little tricksy.

I’ve returned to practice myself and it’s no surprise to find that I’m completely out of touch with the process. I shall have to start again.

Your comment about the puffing sack got me thinking about new ways to look at the problem. I think it’s got something to do with distance and the new found perspective this gives. Counting your breaths gives the process a formal structure. A topography that you can observe objectively. By observing it you step away from it.

It reminds me of something I once stuck on everything2.com when I used to mooch about there a little (before I had a blog to bore everyone with):

‘In my experience, the moments of greatest clarity come when you read or are told something you already knew intuitively. Something that you’ve never had either the experience or need to formalize in your mind before. By being shown old words in a new order, you’re intuition takes shape and becomes recognisable as a form that you can hold up against others like it.’

We’re formalizing the breathing process in order to put it aside. We can pigeon-hole it now that we know what it is. It’s become a thing whose form we could hold up against other things in order to categorise it. In your case, a puffing sack.

I used to find it quite useful to try meditating in front of an open fire. Not because of some hippyesque notion of the power of fire, rather as a subtle way of locating myself in the room during the process. It’s about simple stages: I allow the feeling of heat and the quiet sounds of the fire to help me picture, categorise and then put aside my actual physical position; I count my breaths to allow me to distance my mind from my body; I empty my mind in a way that Dan Ackroyd must have wished he was capable of when he accidently conjured up the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Room-(fireplace)-body-(breathing)-me.

The fireplace and the breathing are simple tools to help me reduce the topography of the room and my body to something more manageable that I can pack away.

The book I was thinking of is a book on Buddhism. I was confusing it with a web page on meditation I read some years ago which I no longer have the address for. It’s a good book though and you’re welcome to it if you want it - Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor.

I don’t think I’d be too worried about recording your thoughts on this journey. Like you, I’ve never been keen to have a teacher for meditation, but perhaps you could look upon your blog as somewhere in between. Writing this has certainly been useful for me. If you don’t mind I may blog some of our correspondence myself.

Apologies for using two sci-fi comedy references in as many e-mails.

Regards,

Rob

p.s - I’m pleased to see Peter has been able to help, he and I were talking a little about Buddhism a few weeks ago and promised to pick it up again soon. You’ve reminded me to do so.

On 29 Nov 2005, at 18:29:28 Matt Webb wrote:

Your point about formal structure is completely it. I was thinking the same thing yesterday, but didn’t write it up last night because I wasn’t sure how to express it.

Please do write this up on your weblog (and feel free to quote from any of our emails) because I’d like to point to it :)

This morning, there was a gap in my mind apart from the counting and the breathing, and it was being filled with random thoughts. I filled it with the hum of the radiator, and that did the job. Hardly your open fire, but near enough.

best
Matt

ps. cheers for the book recommendation. I’ll look it up I think, but thanks for the offer!