15
Apr
2009
words I have a great deal of disdain for
I don’t want to bang on about this too much today, as I’ve got a much more spectacular tirade planned, but I wanted to single out these two words for a particular savaging.when I hear otherwise intelligent people use these words, it makes me sad and angry. Sad that they have been sucked into the collective delusion that they are good words to use, and angry that nobody has the courage to stand up and say ‘Stop! these words make you sound like an idiot.‘
Materiality
Materiality is the chief offender of a group of words that end in -iality. You can take any word, and add -iality to it, wordiality, dooriality, spatiality, doggiality.The phrase that really makes my blood boil is often uttered in crits accompanied by copious beard stroking -
“have you considered materiality“
What this really means is ‘what is it made of?” or “what are the properties of this material that make it particularly appropriate for this situation?“, or any number of other similar questions related to materials, and the offending, beard stroker will counter, ‘but every profession has it’s lexicon, it merely allows me to convey my meaning in a succinct and crisp way‘, with a subtext of ‘you clearly don’t understand, and you are beneath me‘. My rebuttal to this I’m afraid is a DH0 disagreement, “bollocks!” but when pressed further I’ll try and rise up the disagreement hierarchy and give a more complete answer.Other fields use their specific language to sharpen their enquiry. Paramedics can recount the treatment given and condition of a patient being brought into A&E precisely because their words are so accurate that they need very few of them to completely describe the situation.Our field does exactly the opposite. My main gripe with the “have you considered materiality” probe, other than that it infects young impressionable minds with the idea that it’s ok to ask that question, is that it’s lazy, that’s it, just plain lazy. The M question (as it shall henceforth be known so that my blood remains at a gentle simmer) allows the questioner the luxury of not really having to ask a question. It is really the equivalent of a raised eyebrow that a nervous student takes to be a indication that they ought to keep talking. Its rise to ubiquity seems to stem from the the questioner not really knowing what the right question ought to be.If you find yourself about to ask the M question in the future, stop, for the sake of cute puppies and fairys everywhere don’t do it. Instead, ask yourself what is it that I really want to know and ask that question.When presented with a beautiful white card model of a – well, an anything really – the M question is a very easy trap to fall into. But really we can add so much richness to the discussion by simply asking real questions.
What is it made of?What do you want it to feel like when you run your hand or your cheek along it?How is it made?What do you want the materials to say about the space?
Architectonic
This is a word even more shrouded in obfustication and cigar smoke than materiality but thankfully less commonly used.The wikipedia article for architectonic is pitiful, and this seems to reflect the general understanding of the term.From a quick survey of about 15 eloquent, educated architects, the general consensus was that architectonic was about the fact that architecture is made of pieces of stuff, and so the -tectonic bit was about the bits of stuff meeting each other and how they did that. However, it was also agreed that it was a frown, nod and stroke beard moment in any conversation where they pretended to know what was being said.Again I’m going to apply the charge of laziness to this one, but on additional charge of laziness of misapropriating words from philosophy without understanding their context.—I’ve been feeling very alienated by my distaste for these words, but recently I’ve found an underground movement of people just like me, so I’m making a stand.So next time someone asks you the M question, look them squarely in the eye, and ask them straight back
“what, exactly, do you mean by that?”
8
Apr
2009
how to disagree
I’ve been telling a lot of people about this recently, so I thought I’d put up a link to the source.
Paul Graham has written an excelent guide to levels of didagreement, and by understanding these it makes it easier to upgrade your responses.
The general idea is that you can clasify disagreement into
I won’t go into the details, you can see them worked out with much greater clarity here
I recently commented on a BD article, Concern as English Heritage cites Wikipedia in listing submission, and Verity Bird rebutted me. I’ve submitted a response, so hopefully that will be moderated soon and if it hasn’t fallen off the radar we’ll get a bit of a debate going!
My response level is currently about a DH4 though, so hopefully i’ll get to DH6 in the not too distant future!
1
Mar
2009
multi literacy
There was some discussion last night about spatial literacy, and how it was affected by signage etc. We managed to largely avoid getting into tedious 90s discussions about how spaces should be designed so that they didn’t need it, and then that was it – our grapefruit/wine mix propelled us off onto another tangent and all was forgotten.
Then today I was walking through the park thinking about exactly what it is that I do, or would like to do (I’m still no closer to an answer on that one), and the word literacy came up again, but this time in a totally different context.
I was thinking about improving people’s technical literacy, and then realising that ‘technical’ was probably the wrong word to use, and that the right one is still a long way off a, subject for another day perhaps, but also that literacy as a general concept was a bit of a mystery to me.
On the surface it looks simple – the ability to read something, but this gets complicated by the fact that reading is so tightly associated with text.
However, you often hear people talking about ‘reading a drawing’ or ‘reading the mood in the room’ so reading must be a more widespread ability.
In ‘Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom‘, a paper about Russell Ackoff’s taxonomy of content of the human mind there is a staging between data, the raw stuff that comes in from our senses, up to wisdom, which can roughly be though of as the sum of a persons experiences up to that point (real or imagined). I’d posit the acton of reading to cover the first three of these steps, data [gathering], information [interpretation into 'thoughts'], and knowledge [storage, at least temporarily].
So in my imagined situation where I walk into the bar room just after another man, and he exchanges a few heated words with some others in the bar, and then turns and locks the door.
In my reading of this situation, I ought to get out of there as soon as I can, as there is goign to be a full on wild west brawl, but what steps am I going through?
Data, is me looking around and seeing the two opposing factions, and hearing their sounds. It’s tempting to say that I’d be hearing their words, and their tone, but these are a higher level of processing over and above the raw data coming from my ears and eyes.
The information stage would be be turning that raw signal into things like words and shapes, but I still haven’t ascribed meanings to them.
Now that I have that information, I can start to turn it into knowledge. The process doesn’t require any great proccesing to happen in the brain, but more just a job of matching up the prexisting symbols from my experiences, with the new inputs ready for to take the next step of understanding them.
For me, that is as far as reading goes. I’ve often read whole pages of text and come away with no recolection of what that text was actually about. So I’m not convinced that it’s necesary for there to be a level of understanding to be included in the reading process. However, I consider the concept of literacy to require that extra step of understanding.
To explain this, lest assume that I’m still standing up, halfway to the bar when the aforementioned situation unfolds arround me. In a microsecond, the first three steps happen, this is me reading the situation, and then I start to understand that this is a very bad place to be if I want to keep all my teeth. Now I can act on this and start running as fast as I can toward the back door of the bar!
Assuming that the back door is unlocked and I make it out alive, then I can add that experience to my wisdom, the store of situations and symbols to search against next time.
I’m not totally convinced by reading and literacy, being slightly different, but my gut feeling is that literacy is asscribed a slightly higher status than just reading. One can be highly literate, but it’s not often said that one is a good reader (after the age of about 8). So i’m going to stick with it for the moment, and hopefully it’ll make deciding on my grand direction a little easier!
14
Aug
2008
GC theoretical frameworks
There is a new bit at the start of the 2 day workshop that I do that deals with a lot of the general theory of using GC, it’s still got a long way to go before it’s perfect, but it’s currently lopping about half a day off the time taken to get to the end of what was previously the end of the workshop.you can find the PDF presentation here…
..and you can find the scans of the notebook that I planned it in below. I think these 3 pages are actually far more interesting than the finished product!
click on the images to go to flickr and see them at a decent resolution.
15
Apr
2008
architectural ideas are inherited from generation to generation – hmm, really?
This is my Thinking Architecture essay, i thought i’d got out of doing it, but obviously not.
It has some images in the PDF (here) but their absence doesn’t really detract from the content, just the visual appeal.
‘Architectural ideas are inherited from generation to generation’. (Colomina, 1999)
Up to this point, from which architects have you inherited ideas extended in your architectural design? Name a primary architectural forefather or foremother and set out, by an analysis of a maximum of two of their projects (including art installations), how you have interpreted or modified the spatial/structural/tectonic etc concepts being purported by the earlier generation in your design. It will be important for you to posit yourself i.e. where your beliefs lie. Are you a post- Deconstructivist, Neo-Modernist, Metabolist, Constructivist, etc? It is essential you discuss how your inheritance of architectural ideas connects to and extends the aims of your DS unit and your individual design project. [Please include illustrations of the two projects by your inspirational architect showing their connection to your architectural design.]
The premise of this essay is to explore the supremely personal issue of inspiration. Initially I had planned to take a very broad approach and suggest that true inspiration, as expressed in contemporary architecture, only ever comes from outside the profession, but on consideration that statement seems a little bombastic and the reality is far more nuanced. Read the rest of this entry »