organica

It may not be all that difficult to fathom why organic architecture—a mostly asymptotic process—failed to produce anything close to a design method, or propose a substantial contribution to architectural theory, where it was never inducted. The emerging observation of organica points precisely to the missed approaches that proliferated in an effort to perpetuate a master vision. The overwhelming majority of Wrightian followers failed to advance the architecture that prompted them and often trivialized its very serious foundations. Wright, who argued most extensively in favor of a widespread organic architecture, used enthymematic rhetoric at best, laden with implicit pointers, and prompted his followers to draw their own conclusions. Even to the readers of his writings he advised to “read between the lines.” Relentlessly focused on what lied ahead, Wright recorded little interest in reconstructing his process in vitro. There may be merit to suggest that Wright was being purposely vague about his method when he kept urging his acolytes to his mother source, “N”ature. Whether he trusted that his students would draw out worthy design from their forays into nature remains a mystery. However, Wright did mention in one of his Sunday talks that it will likely be the next generations those who, free of the disadvantage of knowing him personally, will be better positioned to advance the organic philosophy and evolve the architecture he started. 

Par-fornir

We architects are notorious for interpreting, convincing, deploying semantic nuance, and yielding to self-reference. Yet, the two most frequent verbs in a student’s vocabulary during studio reviews are I like and I want, invariably leading to well-known consequences. This confusion between the I and the anticipated expectations of a formidable profession might verge on identity crisis, but lately it is beginning to slip to a far more dubious ground, evident in the increasing popularity of the call to performance, driven by ecological exigencies and consumerist greenwash alike. Pondering the etymologic distant origins of this tiring term–performance­–pumps buoyancy into a crucial question: can architecture be a complete provider? In a stochastic leap, it may be even more apt to provoke, can the architect be a complete provider–can the architect perform? If so, perform how, and for whom?

Hugely consequential, the double-loop reflective practice theory of Donald Schön suggests that there is a clear limit to professional expertise beyond which the only recourse is reflection-in-action. This would be a paradigm shift for architects in all stages of becoming, from students to the dwindling milieu of architecture critics. However, a shift to reflective practice should urge us foremost to focus on its implicit call to reconsider performance. Reflective practice–seeking the root and not only the cause of consequence–may re-establish that the core of architecture’s substance is composition-in-action; the synthesis at the crux of nowhere-here/never-now axes. Only through the regeneration of compositional dexterity will architects recapture our purpose as determiners of vision, not followers of a runaway global promise. Composition is about space as much as it is about materiality; is about analogy as it is about computation; is about digital organic as it is about analog exception; is about complex adaptation as it is about singular apparition; is about redundancies as it is about economy; is about the inchoate as it is about the polished; is about transformation of consciousness as it is about determinism. Isn’t it time we recognize that authorship is not anathema to collaboration, but nutrient? The perpetual dualistic discourse in the wake of modernism has left cracks wide open in architecture’s corpus, through which the last serious attempts to safeguard a continuum of theory and history are being alarmingly exhausted. As the bandwagon of performative architecture is about to abduct consequential criticism all together, someone, somewhere whispers, “composition…” Because that is what we do best.

Kenneth Frampton whispered in the preface to the fourth edition of Modern Architecture, “Herein lies the paradox confronting the architecture of our time, for while techno-science in the form of digitally driven environmental and structural engineering takes the art of building to an entirely new level of cultural sophistication, this seemingly positive potential tends to be vitiated by our lack of any overarching vision beyond the perpetuation of a consumerist waste economy upon which our continual accumulation of maldistributed wealth fatally depends.”

anderson_4

anderson_3

anderson 2

a new lamp

the 3rd and the 7th

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

A FULL-CG animated piece (this means everything you see is done on a computer, no matter how “real” it looks) that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.

the core of aristotle’s metaphysics

“Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premises by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive. Now of the thinking states by which we grasp truth, some are unfailingly true, others admit of error-opinion, for instance, and calculation, whereas scientific knowing and intuition are always true:  further, no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than scientific knowledge, whereas primary premises are more knowable than demonstrations, and all scientific knowledge is discursive. From these considerations it follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premises, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premises-a result which also follows from the fact that demonstration cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor, consequently, scientific  knowledge of scientific knowledge. If, therefore, it is the only other kind of true thinking except scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge. And the originative source of science grasps the original basic premise, while science as a whole is similarly related as originative source to the whole body of fact.”

—Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II:19, G. R. G. Mure (MITweb)

_redlines.s2.1_greenlines.s2.1_bluelines.s2.1

the study of horizontal lines has fascinated me since a young age and have done several watercolors of this theme. this triptych explores the proportional space between lines by generating a rule that is applied to scalable copies of the originating pattern onto itself. the composition generates itself in a way, as I keep looking for boundaries that exist in the pattern and its subsequent overlaps. each of the r.g.b. compositions utilizes different brushes for the mapping of the line boundaries.

para_si(gh)t_e

para_site – beside, near, past, beyond or contrary locus
para_sight – beside, near, past, beyond or contrary notion
parasite – symbiotic relationship between organisms (architectures) of different orientations

Parasitology – as Kostas Terzidis put it in a recent chat in the desert of Taliesin West – is a dialog initiated in a strong and urgent observation that architectural theory has reached an unexpected expiry of dogmatic structure and has entered a reality of disparate and often mutually exclusive notional rants. Out of this dialog, I expect a sort of manifesto that calls for the preservation of this void in theory that energizes a forum for experimentation, and resists forces that create platforms for dogmatic or ulterior-motive theory.

The interconnected, dysfunctioning, and volatile systemic collapses that we are witnessing ever so frequently, prompts ridding the term parasite of its negative connotation and exploring it as Eris’ apple in an emerging tendency to a unified theory. Old patterns decay. Parasitic theory preserves this emerging void for the purpose of relentless experimentation.