In the March 2015 post Inflationary Tendencies, I tried to make some sense out of the second last chapter of The Autopoiesis of Architecture (Vol.1). How time flew! Last year’s The Massively Big Autopoiesis of Architecture post was an omnibus edition intended to prime readers and myself for an end-of-year finale that never happened. It’s just as well as […]
First some snapshots from the journey so far before moving on to the penultimate chapter. I plan to read the final one within a week or two and bring this autopoietic journey to an end. It’s time. At 439 pages it wasn’t such a long journey but, as I began reading the book in 2012, it wasn’t a quick one. 2012 October 26: The Autopoiesis […]
We’d all like to believe in some everlasting unchanging measure of worth, architectural or otherwise, but it’s a losing battle. The old Vitruvian warhorse of Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas has been patched and updated for centuries now. Yet still it’s around. Sure we can think of Firmitas in terms of structure and stability and Utilitas in terms of function or […]
“You can have any colour you like as long as it’s black.”Henry Ford Oh the indignity of having your surname prefixed by “Post-“! Me, I never knew Post-Fordism existed until page 73 of The Autopoiesis of Architecture Vol.1. The first two sweeping statements are what happens when your aesthetics has no ethical dimension. Non-visual virtue is invisible. One of the […]
Or not – it seems, if you believe The Autopoiesis of Architecture: Vol.1 Chap. 3.8.1: The Historical Transformation of Aesthetic Values. We begin this academistic overview in some unidentified pre-Greek time where ‘aesthetic’ responses were dogma if beneficial to society or taboo if not. All archaic societies and cultures institutionalized ‘aesthetic’ values in the form of rigid distinctions […]
There’s a chapter in Italo Calvino’s piss-take of Deconstructivist literature, If on a winter’s night a traveller, where a woman – Ludmilla’s sister Lotaria, I think – is a member of a book club and each person receives a single page of the novel for discussion the following week. Calvino is drawing attention to the absurdity of the fragment containing […]
I’ve missed this. Up for some more? 3.7 Styles as Research ProgrammesTHESIS 16: Avant-garde styles are design research programmes. They start as progressive research programmes, mature to become productive dogmas, and end as degenerate dogmas. I saw the word ‘avant-garde’ for the first time in a long while and my heart sank. Did you see what the […]
Out of over 65,000 search terms 60,000 people have used to find and view over 200,000 pages on this blog, NOT ONE OF THEM has been “the autopoiesis of architecture”. So who’s searching this term? And where do they get their information? I may be stuck in a filter bubble, but here’s what I see – […]
Before moving on to Section 3.6 and finding out why styles are essential if the very fabric of the architectural universe isn’t to be torn apart, I’d like to go back to these four pages. They seem important. They’re a partial summary of what’s gone before, but they also contain a rather dodgy justification for what’s […]
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Chaps. 3.3~3.4 veer off into topics conventionally associated with architecture but, as it does so, becomes increasingly – and possibly strategically – vague about whose idea of architecture is being talked about. Chapter 3 is meant to be the meat in the sandwich so whatever is going to happen ought to have its basis here. […]
This is la veuve Cliquot. This past week saw another grande dame, Dame Zaha Hadid named Veuve Cliquot Businesswoman of the Year. To receive this award one has to meet the following criteria. Entrepreneurship: founder / leader and driving force of a business through pioneering approach, business acument, dynamism, audacity, innovation, tenacity Financial Success: sustained profitable business growth […]
This post is a mashup of my 2010 architecture fable The Red Igloo, and thoughts from Patrik Schumacher’s The Autopoiesis of Architecture. Both purport to convey some kind of truth about architecture. * * * Once upon a time all Inuit people made igloos the same way. Vernacular building relies on tradition, on well proven solutions taken for granted. […]
THESIS 9: Any attempt to integrate architecture and art, or architecture and science/engineering, in a unified discourse (autopoiesis) is reactionary and bound to fail. Even though Luhmann, the guy who put all these ideas in the author’s head, said that architecture existed within the great social system of art, in this sub-chapter (p148), the author […]
This book is taking a while to get going. I’m somewhere between a third and half-way through volume 1 and have concluded that taking it sub-chapter by sub-chapter is probably the best way to do it. Fortunately, sub-chapter 2.4 is a particularly rich one. It may even be the turning point of the entire book. THESIS […]
