110321 - grounds

Here are my notes from Rajchman, Grounds:

This essay uses the word ‘ground’ as a starting point from which to unfold architectural / philosophical possibilities.

For Wolfflin, ground has to do with a basic formlessness. The will, as a vital force in immanent things must try to overcome this formlessness. ‘Force of form’ pulls us up from formlessness. Notions of regularity, proportion and symmetry derive from this idea.

In The Radiant City, Le Corbusier declares ‘natural ground’ to be the bearer of disease, and the ‘enemy of man.’ Thus buildings should be separated from natural ground. Severing the relationship to ‘natural ground’ gives a building an autonomy; it is free to become monochromatic planes set on pilotis barely touching the ground.

This is a type of un-grounding, a freedom from the weight of tradition. Artificial rather than natural, abstract rather than figural (abstract in the sense of a universal language reproducible anywhere).

Oppositional ways of thinking about ground:

• natural vs. artificial 
• organic vs. abstract 
• figural vs. geometric 
• contextual vs. abstract

Replacing the first with the second is meant to bring about a ‘revolution.’ What non-oppositional ways are there to consider the issue of ground?

Questions concerning ground (and becoming ungrounded) will address the following:

1. a move away from ‘proper’ visual form, form-giving movement prior to the ground
2. becoming ungrounded is not something that happens once and for all, but it is a potential force 
3. notions of history or memory that move away from progressive time to more complex time

At a certain point in Eisenmann’s work, he treats urban sites as superimposed layers of ‘memory’. The ‘geology’ of urban memories can then be reconfigured to produce a type of ungrounding. The artifice generated here is different from Le Corbusier’s artifice, more Piranesi than Mondrian.

For Eisenmann, fiction comes before narrative and sure judgment, he moves away from “progressivism” and the idea of a complete-able architectural revolution toward something more like Borges’ garden of forking paths. Joints of time can come out of joint.

Matta-Clark’s cuts through buildings (unbuilding or undoing) provide another way out of contextualism. His interventions were seen as a resistance to attempts to revive the context of the historical city through architectural form.

This may be seen as a continuation of Smithson’s notion that the Earth is not a stable ground, but an entropic force, constantly undoing formal structures.

Another type of ungrounding derives from ‘dynamic topologies’ the move away from classical relations between gravity and vision, weight and upright posture. In this case, formlessness becomes a positive feature of space.

“…the faceless figures in the painting of Francis Bacon reveal an undoing of the Albertian relations between face and ground in favor of another kind of corporeal space shown as well in the loss of the skeleton/flesh relation, flesh becoming “meat” – soft, malleable, perhaps even bloblike.”

Groupe Espace (Virilio, Parent) spoke of rejecting vertical and horizontal axes in favor of the oblique – a move that should redefine architecture. Oblique function allowed for planes oriented toward movement and a ‘re-eroticization’ of the ground as a folded or pleated force-field.

This reflected Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the ground in architectural space should be a part of a more general rediscovery of the body, a phenomenological critique of abstract Cartesian space.

Virilio departs from the traditional phenomenological view of a corporeally grounded ‘lived’ space in which the Earth is stable, and instead works with a dynamic conception of the body. These movements are not about going from one fixed point to another, but are traces of an unbounded space.

Virilio says that we are constituted by a ‘corporeal “trajectivity” prior to our subjectivity and objectivity.’ This is another way to imagine becomings of cities and bodies and the spaces in which these becomings transpire.’

As axonometric drawing can produce an overly rectilinear, segmented view of space that dynamic topology can overcome, a programmatic view of space can produce an overly operational view of space that might be superseded by a more affective diagram. What types of spaces might this thinking imply?

We must understand ourselves as vague or indeterminate beings prior to being tied to fixed grounds.

Indeterminate spatial beings are not calculating individuals, members of organic communities, or participants in civil society. Instead our social beings are intersections and assemblages of indefinite trajectories through time and space.

‘Traditional’ social space is said to be grounded in tradition and possibly even in a specific location. The individual is an integral member of an organic whole. ‘Nurturing community.’

‘Modern’ social space is ungrounded from tradition and location. The individual is an atom drifting through undifferentiated space. ‘Possessive individual.’

As an alternative, modernity is a process that turns us into indeterminate beings that do not fit into grounded collective narratives and are not simply individual units in self-organizing processes. “The modern world unleashes patterns of demography or migration that put people in situations where…they are no longer able to tell straight narratives of their ‘origins.’”

We are all potential ‘anybodies,’ the life of a body is indefinite, ungrounded. There is something ‘yet to be constructed’ in an anybody. And this ‘yet to be constructed’ is particular. We are at once close to (particular) and far from (indeterminate) ourselves.

Once the life-world is understood as being ungrounded, we are free to move with lightness. “Movement and indetermination belong together, neither can be understood without the other.”

110321 - atlas of novel tectonics

Here are my notes from Reiser + Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics:

2. Difference in Kind / Difference in Degree – Meaning that is assigned and fixed (chess) vs. meaning that is acquired in context (go).

3. The Unformed Generic: Form Acquiring Content – Projecting content and scale into an unformed field. The field implies no specific scale of content. The stain is at once generic and specific. It contains a wide range of variations.

4. Similarity and Difference – Difference can emerge from similarity and similarity can emerge from difference. Things that look the same may perform differently and things that look different may perform similarly.

5. Variety (Difference) vs. Variation (Self-Similarity) – Intensive quantity generates a whole irreducible to the sum of its parts. Differential repetition is a means of handling program.

7. After Collage: Two Conditions of the Generic – Transformation is a quality perceived through deployment of quantity. Difference is a product of transformation. The universal is understood a “progressive differentiation.”

10. Selection vs. Classification – Typologies are important because they have range within limits. Selection within this range is based on performance of program relative to type.

11. Intensive and Extensive – “The most important distinction in our changed notions of architectural design is the shift from geometry as an abstract regulator of the materials of construction to a notion that matter and material behavior must be implicated in geometry itself.”

Intensive = properties of matter with indivisible differences, gradient. Temperature
Extensive = properties of matter with divisible differences. Mass
Potted plant, intensive proliferation, and extensive limit.

12. Geometry and Matter – Extensive and intensive qualities (quantities) collaborate in the production of architecture. Codes and other constraints can be considered extensive while material systems generate intensive characteristics.

13. Folly of the Mean – The mean is expected, extremes are where there is potential to innovate. The Aristotelian mean is justified in terms of human conduct and gets transferred to proportional systems.

21. Exchanges among Systems – “The architect is, in effect, neither a passive observer of determined systems nor a determined manipulator of passive material, but rather, the manager of an unfolding process.”

24. The Diagram – The diagram is not about the thing itself, but its relation to its context, milieu, or environment. Relationships may change due to scale shifts or behaviors may move from one scale to another. The diagram tracks performance (of relationships) as an abstract model of materiality.

34. Systems Becoming Other Systems – Even received structural systems have the capacity to be transformed along a gradient. New potentials emerge between the standards or norms.

38. Operating under Surfeit of Information – The management of a material process (like cooking) occurs at a different level than scientific research (the minutia are not directly controlled nor are they necessarily understood). This is acceptable because it is the larger scale effects that are important.

39. Asignfying Signs – An asignfying sign is an indication of material quality and performance. It is a locus for becoming, not a linguistic reading. It promotes production of the unforeseen rather than representing the known.

110221 - emergence

Here are my notes from Steven Johnson, Emergence:

Introduction

Slime mold: oscillation between a single creature and a swarm.

Morphogenesis: the development of ever more complex structures out of simple beginnings without any ‘master planner’ calling the shots. “Bottom-up behavior.”

Simple agents follow simple rules to generate complex structures. They operate according local conditions, not a knowledge of the whole.

Positive feedback loops encourage particular behaviors to take shape.

Behaviors (or qualities) identified in emergent systems are only recognizable at the collective scale, not at the scale of an individual agent.

Emergent systems are operative in diverse fields. The systems are similar, but the medium in which they operate is different.

Emergent systems get their intelligence from “masses of relatively stupid elements rather than a single, intelligent ‘executive branch.’”

Emergence is movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication, however a system is not emergent until it displays some type of macro-behavior.

Adaptive emergent systems adjust themselves until a productive or useful macro-behavior is produced. Emergence without adaptation is like snowflakes, beautiful but useless.

Tuning the system. Given a stated goal, how do you make an emergent system adaptive?

Control Artist

Cannot predict results just by looking at the rules. The system must live before it can be understood.

Our tendency is to think of systems such as flocking birds as having a leader rather than a set of the simple rules that each bird follows.

Emergent systems obey rules defined in advance; the rules govern micro-motives. Macro-behaviors are controlled indirectly. “All you do is set up the conditions you think will make that behavior possible. Then you press play and see what happens.”

New form of programming, software that is “grown” rather than “engineered.” Programming that is ‘more like baking a cake’ than ‘engineering a machine.’

In the fitness landscape, there are local maximums. Finding global maximums is a process of trial and error.

‘Fitness’ implies that there is a gauge for success.

The rules of the game and the world of the game can be explored simultaneously. As a society we are becoming more tolerant of being somewhat out of control. We are more tolerant of the phase where the rules don’t all make sense.

Emergent systems are controlled “from the margins,” therefore the unexpected is possible.

“Rules give games their structure, and without that structure, there’s no game: every move is a checkmate, and every toss of the dice lands you on Park Place.”

A game where anything can happen is, by definition, not a game.

Emphasizing rules may seem antithetical to an open-ended, exploratory system, but this is not the case. The capacity for growth and experimentation relies on low-level rules.

“Emergent behaviors, like games, are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

In game design where a player has oblique control, it is up to the game designer to determine how far to the margin the player’s control will be located. Too much or too little control results in a poor game.

Designers have a feel for the middle ground between too much control and too little.

110201 - the fold

Here are my note from Deleuze's The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque. This reading is an excerpt from the book of the same name and it can be found in AD Architecture and Science.

Deleuze’s work informs contemporary notions of society, subjectivity and creativity.

He favors a world where everything is in one mode of substance, in the same level of existence. There is no good and evil, only relationships that may be desirable or undesirable to particular individuals.

Two fundamental concepts:

Difference – there is no identity, only difference
Repetition – nothing is ever the same, everything is always changing, reality is becoming, not being

Deleuze was a constructivist; he argued that philosophers are not just interpreters, but creators of new concepts. In his work he often wrote about other philosophers, radically reinterpreting and freeing them from one fixed, dominate interpretation. This was a way of setting up an ‘encounter’ that would spawn new concepts. Deleuze believed that every reading of philosophy should set up this type of ‘encounter.’ For Deleuze, studying the work of another was inspirational, a resource for developing new ideas.

The Fold – Leibniz and the Baroque, is in this spirit. Deleuze re-evaluates Leibniz and derives new concepts to characterize the Baroque period. Deleuze argues that Leibniz is the philosopher whose thinking can best inform the Baroque and vice versa, in fact he claims that one cannot be fully understood without the other.

Leibniz’s theory of the monad – the whole universe is contained or reflected within each being.

The basic unit of existence is the fold. There are elements of folding in the Baroque and in Leibniz, but only in bringing them together, does the concept gain consistency.

The Baroque refers to an operative function, not an essence (a single style or formal language).

Two types of folds: the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul.

These folds are situated in a two-level regime, with pleats of matter below and folds of the soul above. This is a diagram of subjectivity or a way of thinking about how beings are simultaneously framing and being framed by the world they inhabit.

The first level contains matter folding into itself again and again, ‘caverns upon caverns.’ There are also beings in this level; the animate and inanimate are continuously folded together.

The second level contains the immaterial aspects of our subjectivities, ‘the folds of the soul.’ This level is closed in on itself.

There is another fold between the levels, a ‘style’ of being encompassing one of the many possible worlds expressed by the beings that inhabit it.

The fold implies a recursively curvilinear model of matter – “Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns...”

A fluid is the absence of coherence or cohesion, the complete separability of parts. Hardness is a cohesion or inseparability of parts. A body has a degree of fluidity and a degree of hardness. Neither the Cartesian hypothesis of complete fluidity or atomistic hypothesis of complete hardness holds.

Thus Leibniz proposes a flexible body that still has cohering parts – a series of recursive folds upon folds that apply divisions to the continuous rather than break into separate or unrelated parts.

In the model of matter as folds, relations (or continuities) are folds that may be realized in multiple ways.

The multiple – one that has been folded in many ways. A multiple is not a series of unrelated parts, but a way of thinking about complexity through interconnectedness rather than divergences.

An organism is defined by endogenous folds, folds that come from within, implying a type of sensibility, intelligence or agency.

Inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are determined from without, from the surrounding environment.

People are a type of folded being, folded from within and without. Our modes of being are complicated and manners of being are impossible to predict.

Modernist ‘machines for living’ expressed the needs of the mechanical body. What spaces will be invented for the folded multiplicitous body?

Plastic forces (folds) apt to foster connections, more apt to force change and more apt to evidence a degree of cohesion. “The living organism…by virtue of preformation has an internal density that makes it move from fold to fold…”

epigenesis vs. preformation – starting from material that is unformed and gradually taking shape over time vs. individuals that adhere to a form defined in advance.

A plastic organism can fold and unfold itself, not to infinity, but to extents allowed within a particular species.

Does folding produce truly different types? Or only differentiations along a continuum?

110201 - sandstone and granite

Here are my notes from the Manuel De Landa reading Sandstone and Granite which is excerpted from the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:

Meshworks (rhizomes) and hierarchies (trees).

Engineering diagrams (similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machines) are structure-generating processes.

Is it possible to go beyond metaphor and use an engineering diagram to think about the generation of both geologic and cultural formations?

Rivers act as hydraulic computers to sort pebbles of different sizes. They carry and deposit pebbles of different sizes according to the strength of the flow. For a given period, pebbles of a relatively consistent size are deposited on the ocean floor. Then another process fuses individual pebbles into a relatively permanent structure.

This two-stage process (double articulation) can be found operating in other (i.e. cultural, biological) regimes.

The formation of strata occurs in the evolution of species. Genetic material accumulates (material deposited) until a subpopulation becomes isolated and it cannot reproduce outside its group leading to crystallization.

Cultural strata form in a similar way. People are sorted according to what they can do or what they have. Then these categories are crystallized by religion or law.

This process of homogenization and consolidation to form hierarchies operates across heterogeneous regimes.

There is not as straightforward an engineering diagram for meshworks as hierarchies. The simplest type of meshwork is the autocatalytic loop which is self-stimulating and self-maintaining.

They are dynamic systems with stable states (attractors) and they grow by drift. A two-node system (two chemical reactions that catalyze each other) can grow through the insertion of a third reaction using the byproducts of those already in place. This is not a planned growth. This growth may be constrained by external factors (supplies of raw materials) but it is not designed to meet any requirements of the external environment.

Deleuze and Guattari propose a diagram of meshworks with three parts:

• interconnection of diverse overlapping elements
• intercalary (something inserted between) agents, a special class of operators that effects these elements
• there must emerge some stable pattern of behavior

As opposed to sandstone which forms according to the hierarchy-producing diagram, granite forms according to the meshwork-producing diagram. Granite is produced when magma cools:

• heterogeneous crystals interlock during cooling
• densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, within the material bring about local articulations
• chemical reactions within the magma bring about stable states

Granite is a self-consistent aggregate.

Gene pool of a species = stratified structure (homogenous).

Ecosystem = self-consistent aggregate (heterogeneous).

Small-town markets = self-consistent aggregate. Markets are meetings and exchanges of heterogeneous needs.

• markets come about through an interlocking of producers and consumers
• money is an intercalary agent
• markets seem to produce a stable state in the cyclical variation of prices

These diagrams producing hierarchies and meshworks are relatively simple and would need to evolve and become more complex to more fully describe the functioning of biological or cultural systems. Furthermore, in reality one must deal with combinations of hierarchies and meshworks.

Alternatives to causal thinking (simple arrows going from cause to effect):

• negative feedback (stabilizing or deviation counteracting) – i.e. thermostat, sensor triggers heat production which effects sensor, forms a closed loop in which temperature is held constant.
• positive feedback (destabilizing or deviation amplyfing) – i.e. a self-accelerating explosion, explosion generates heat which accelerates the explosion, temperature goes out of control.

It is important not to conclude that meshworks are intrinsically better than hierarchies.