Saturday, August 18, 2012

Chapter 04_Architectural weaponry_Reading

One of the primary roles to be played by the experimental activists in architecture is not to come up with new ideas of what architecture should be, but to come up with new ways to talk about it - NEW MEDIA.  Maybe, rather - it should be about using the NEW MEDIA to present an alternative perspective.  Im not saying necessarily a solution, just a possibility.

He says that in the sense of new media, it's absolutely crucial we foster new technologies of communication - can the communication channels be aligned with the architectural axes?

Use science fiction - it is an incredibly important mode of theorising about technology and about space...

To what extent then, are we surrounded by more architecture than ever - or less architecture than ever before? If Architects are builders who theorise - articulate builders... where is the balance that defines the architecture and the building?

Architecture is obsessed with being slow.  We can made the most exciting thing dull.  We have that expertise.  Our social role has been that: to be slow, to be stable, to be a reference point for change.  It's in a sense, how we have been so clearly the enemies of turbulence - and the question is: how do you foster turbulence.  Slow Architecture is not acceptable for a flexible user.

Everybody wants their future to be absolutely predictable from their present state.  I think what would be really interesting is to take away that absolute desire to control you own future and to take a risk.

Unsolicited Architecture (Ole Bouman): Architecture that didn't think it was already architecture.  It produces something that wasn't asked for, in aesthetics, programme, future consequences and counter proposals in light. 

Architecture must engineer a crossover between all programs, forms, materials, etc. Creates a rich, unpredictable dialogue, a kind of complex ecology in which new species emerge (like a new level on a computer game, that is exciting, unknown, the enigma).
Productive mutations that make us hesitate - don't reinforce patterns, interrupt them for greater social change.

New Babylon: a hidden mechanism that repeats itself endlessly and automatically, shaping and controlling the everyday environment, even while no one can directly engage with that mechanism. Example of architectural Stalinism - a world of total control. a la matrix.. reality_shift.
The real revolution here would be that technology would take away the political advantage of the boss vs the worker.  What if we can completely remove this facet? 

Consider:
What are current personal freedoms? And what should they be?

Ananananananananalogy... Within the nomadic mobile home culture, you're only free to go anywhere you want insofar as you never leave the US highway.  
We really build constraints - we don't build freedoms: we build reductions of freedom. Although the controlling system of New Babylon is hidden from citizens, it is still a reductive limitation.

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