Hi Graham! What are your thoughts on the overall theory given by Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros? How well does it sit with the Hannes Meyer’s Approach and the overall approach that you have been advocating for in architecture? I have some idea about Leon Krier and his work with Prince Charles in Britain and […]
I’ve lived and worked in China for almost three years now. There’s many things I still don’t understand but there’s no urgency. These things will sort themselves out. Representations of grass (1) A Chinese Tier 2 city with aspirations to becoming a New Tier 1 city will generally have a metro system in place and, […]
Sigmund Freud is generally regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, that revolutionary circa 1900 idea that aimed to externalize and give expression to people’s innermost feelings in order to gain an understanding of them and, if not a happier life, at least a life less torn by anxieties and insecurities. The Expressionism of the late […]
Historically, defining beauty as singular, mysterious or beyond explanation must have served some function such as helping perpetrate some system of aesthetic elitism or stylistic churn. I only say that because it still does. Claiming, as I am, that architectural, visual Beauty is not the mystery it’s made out to be isn’t a popular stance. […]
If we just look at the left half of the image above, you’ll see the six categories that I call fundamental building attributes across the top, and below each of them are sixteen possible values – states they can take, effects they can produce. The state of any one attribute is independent of those of the […]
The previous post in this series described how this framework interpreted some words like Change, Transience, Uncertainty and Disquiet as far as architectural aesthetics is concerned. The aesthetic heyday of any building designed in the fashion of the moment will be fleeting but no building is aesthetically timeless. At the outset, I made it clear […]
This post, written in early May, concludes last week’s Comfort Zone post. I’ve not been out much lately. The above photo shows my studio apartment in Dubai. I spend a lot of time at that table staring out the window, wondering what to write and, when I’m not doing that, I look at my walls […]
We’re almost done. Over the past twenty months, at the rate of one post per month, I’ve explained how this thing called The Architecture of Architectures came about and what it claims to do, and I’ve described how the sixteen aesthetic effects are derived from a simple structure that shows both how they are different […]
F:ASSOCIATE is the sixteenth and final aesthetic effect. There are no more. F:ASSOCIATE is like E:DESIGNATE in encapsulating all three types of aesthetic idea, but differs by evoking them by a tangible similarity instead of a tangible difference. At its core is UNITE instead of SEPARATE. With ASSOCIATE, the framework is complete. Both DESIGNATE and […]
There are only two effects left to introduce: E: DESIGNATE in this post and F: ASSSOCIATE in four weeks’ time. These two effects are the only two having all three types of aesthetic ideas working together, along with a physical difference in the case of DESIGNATE and a physical similarity in the case of ASSOCIATE. […]
CONFLATE is the architectural effect generated when an Idea of Unite and an Idea of Separate are evoked by a characteristic that has a similarity with its surroundings. It is paired with JUXTAPOSE, and fits into the framework like this. As was the case with JUXTAPOSE, CONFLATE evokes no Idea of Negate and so is […]
These posts are becoming shorter and the text almost mechanical as it becomes more apparent that the core realities and types of idea are equivalent parts of the one single structure. The next pair of characteristics C: JUXTAPOSE and D: CONFLATE are the thirteenth and fourteenth effects and the third and final pair containing two […]
B: INTEGRATE is the other half of this second of three pairs of characteristics comprising two types of idea. As with A: DIFFERENTIATE, one type is an Idea of Unite and the other is an Idea of Negate – a sense that the characteristic (or attribute) observed isn’t that of a building or the building it […]
With the next pair of characteristics A: DIFFERENTIATE and B: INTEGRATE we run out of digits and so switch to hexadecimal naming, convenient because there are sixteen aesthetic effects. These two are the eleventh and twelfth. If every building, that has ever been built or will be, has the six attributes of Colour, Pattern, Shape, […]
