Movement of Existence

returning from a hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

...an unanticipated hiatus that is. What's going on?

1) CONFRENCES

"Epistemopolis II: chaosmos and mixture as post-human urban ideology"

I recently presented at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy's annual conference at the University of Auckland New Zealand in December 3-5. As always, I met some great people, saw some old friends, and heards some fantastic papers.

"Epistemopolis: Anti-utopia, Anarchy, and the Architecture of Postmodern Epistemology"

Coming up, I am presenting at the Pacific APA's annual meeting April 8-12 in Vancouver on Friday morning. Come see me on the epistemology panel on Friday morning!

2) GRAD SCHOOLS

I am in the process of applying to philosophy graduate school, hopefully I hear some good news in February and March.

3) PAPERS

I've got 2 papers in the works:

"Meaning and the Making of Multiplicity: broadening the scope of architectural phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze"

I'll hopefully get the time to post on this soon.

"Delighting in Architecture: venustas as harmony"

This is a joint paper with Dr. Lynn Holt relooking at Vitruvius in light of an Aristotlian virtues. Our aim is to resurrect, or perhaps re-appropriate, a reading of Vitruvius which is not only more consonant than traditional readings with the Greek philosophical tradition which partly informs De Architectura, but which can adequately guide and assess architectural idioms as otherwise diverse as classical and modernist, even post-modernist.

4) THESIS AND THE JACKSON COMMUNITY DESIGN CENTER

"Metropolitan Machines: The future of State Street"

This is a thesis on how to create urban problems. Our concern here is to entertain an idea of a State Street that avoids idiomatic interpretations of larger scale urbanism, while also avoiding the extremes of omnipotence (Collage City) on one end and simulacrum (Sprawl) on the other. We are going to engage the 9 miles of the State Street corridor by importing the spatio-political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explicated mostly in A Thousand Plateaus. Procedure through this project begins by finding and evolving territories through abstract modeling, mapping, collaging, and diagramming concrete data (such as crime data, property value, zoning maps, etc) that will then be manipulated as form and space in order to create what Deleuze and Guattari call abstract machines. These abstract machines deterritorialize space—they breakdown borders, destroy edges, fold elements together, and cut across boundaries. Abstract machines are not acts of homogenization; they preserve heterogeneity by weaving together all kinds of materials. At the same time the abstract machine is being developed, we will develop assemblages that territorialize strata—that order form and substance (as opposed to smoothing function and matter). Assemblages cannot be ignored simply in favor of deterritorialization—Deleuze and Guattari warn against the danger of deterritorializing too fast. Abstract machines and assemblages are not two distinct spaces or forms of working—only mixture exists, the smooth fades into striated and the striated back into smooth. This means our process can create an artifact as a smooth object and then modify it is a striated one. The work is two fold: 1) create a book of theoretical concepts specific to Jackson for the Jackson Community Design Center and 2) create a thesis project that suggests new machines of deterritorialization as a solution to the problem of the worst. The physical end product of this thesis work is not known.

Immersion

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:43:00 +0000

Thesis Proposals

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:12:00 +0000

1. The Culture of Congestion: Complexity and Complication

In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas writes that “the original promise of the metropolitan condition” is the “Culture of Congestion,”[1] which is a culture that is premised on conflict, complication, and a continuously changing skyline. Buildings as ideology constantly rise and fall, and the experience of this energy keeps the metropolis alive. Jackson, MS lacks all of these characteristics and consequently is a dead metropolis. This thesis is a proposal to reinvigorate Jackson with complication and complexity. The city needs to be layered with conflicting patterns of ideas, circulation, functions, aspirations, successes, and failures. We do not simply need urban density, but rather a culture of continuous change and conflict.[2]

This project contains an epistemological counterpart, one in which the city actually becomes part of epistemology. A polemic on healthy epistemology is a manifesto for a successful city. A paper is already in the process. This paper will explore the city as a model for knowledge, the epistemopolis, by looking at two postmodern, relativistic epistemological options and their accompanying architectures: anti-utopian epistemology and anarchic epistemology. Does the abandonment of absolutes in the epistemopolis necessitate a full blown eclecticism where judgments can no longer be made about the built environment? Is our only choice suburban sprawl and cheap, poorly stylized strip malls? In answering these questions, the conflict between the east and west coasts of America, Los Angeles and New York, emerges at the heart of the debate. These two cities represent the extremes of the epistemopolis, one sprawling and without epistemic garbage and one bound to a small island and full of conflict, complication, and epistemic waste. In the end, Koolhaas’s New York, and its accompanying anarchy, is shown to be the superior epistemic and urban option, and thus this thesis project becomes an attempt to validate a position on knowledge.

The Culture of Congestion is not created by any one architect, planner, capitalist, or bureaucrat—it is not Eisenman’s counterfeit complexity. Chaos is not constructed from a single ideological viewpoint. Rather, this project will be an attempt to encourage and breed mania by setting up the right systems and examples to purposefully cause conflict and schizophrenia. Achieving complication includes many significant concepts: the layering of information, the relation of architecture and the digital environment, junkspace, and the relationship of diversity to standardization. Although the method of accomplishing congestion is not certain, possibilities include: light rail systems, mixed-use buildings, megastructures, junkspace™,[3] public structures and spaces, and modifications to infrastructure.

2. Rhizomes: Building the Chaosmos

“Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterrritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.”[4] Binary logic is the logic of a tree, a centralized and grounded object, one which is familiar to most of us today in the various forms of modernism and critical theory. It is organized, rationalized, “scientific”, and linear. In contrast, rhizomes, systems that have no central core or specific starting point, are multiplicities, or varieties, of elements that have no unit of measure. They are chaos. The world is no longer (or never was) cosmos, it is chaosmos.[5] Rhizomes are not made up of points, but rather of lines. Rhizomes are always between a beginning and an end, never at them.[6] As Deleuze as Guattari write, “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”[7]

This thesis simply asks how we make rhizomatic architecture. It should be noted immediately that chaos does not by any means imply random or lackadaisical architecture. It is, instead, a mode of building in the world that embraces multiplicity, change, and flow. Integral to a chaos approach will be the rejection of architecture dualism: e.g. form and space cannot be considered opposites. Architecture that is the result of rhizomatic logic is unresolved, varying, and mutable. It is not about the fixed idea, but rather process and events—it is about path. This thesis is not driven by a desire to create formal or spatial chaos for its own sake—it is not an attempt join the idiomatic fad of post-structuralist style. Rather, it is an attempt to find and create rhizomes in the urban environment through multiple approaches. Deleuze and Guattari find rhizomes in technology, music, the oceans, math, war, and art, so we should be able to find rhizomes in architecture through program, aesthetics, utility, phenomenology, structure, infrastructure, light, shadows, etc. This project is conceived as an urban intervention with no specific place or name. It will simply be architectural artifacts (public facilities, transportation systems, monuments?) that are involved in the fabric of State St. The goal is to create architecture that defies clear attempts at categorization (this idea will be expounded upon from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of smooth and striated space)[8] because it always pushes back and flows against binary logic.

3. Delaying the Rush to Meaning: Revising Phenomenology

Phenomenology as an architectural method clearly, and rightly so, finds strong affinities with the spatial and experiential aspects of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, and consequently much of related architectural practice and theory has focused on sensational qualities such as light, color, perspective, movement, time, and sound.[9] Through the method of bracketing, the transcendental reduction allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve the need for primordial description in ontology by the use of the doctrine of “primacy of perception” that situates being in phenomenon. The focus on the primacy of perception is the bridge that has led the phenomenological approach to architecture to focus on the experience of phenomenon, and bracket off other issues. I would like to suggest here that the real project of phenomenology in architecture should be considered much larger in scope. Limiting “phenomenological architecture” to the work of people such as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, and Juhanni Pallasmaa, in contrast to other contemporary architects such as Coop Himmelb(l)au, Herzog and De Meuron, or Rem Koolhaas is not only detrimental, but possibly even the eventual nail in the coffin for phenomenology as architectural theory.

Gilles Deleuze’s criticism of phenomenology[10] actually provides a means for criticizing the tendency to narrow the scope of phenomenology. According to Deleuze, phenomenology assumes the world to be “primordially impregnated with univocal meaning,”[11] thus reinstating axiomatic thinking. However correct, Deleuze’s criticism does not spell the end of phenomenology, for the robust ontology of the flesh laid out by Merleau-Ponty provides a serious response and even companion to Deleuze’s notions of paradox and multiplicity.[12] In light of Deleuze’s criticism and a focus on Merleau-Ponty’s later work, I would like to characterize the real goal of architectural phenomenology as the creation of architecture that leaves the door open on univalent interpretation as long as possible so as to delay the collapse of meaning and to allow the freedom of expression and imagination.[13] Architectural phenomenology does not simply find its roots in the visible and the sensuous, but also the invisible. This characterization should suggest the application of phenomenological theory in a number of different ways and should lead architects and architecture theorists to address concepts such as unnameability, complication, paradox, chaos, and multiplicity as facets of phenomenology. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.”[14]

The work of this thesis then is to reject phenomenology as simply a product of over expressed and over emphasized phenomena, and, instead, suggest that architecture should be engaged in delaying the collapse of meaning. Building an architecture that slows the move towards meaning would involve an attempt to use both phenomena and meaning based conventions to explore multiplicity, unnameability, paradox and chaos. This thesis could be executed with any sort of program, but greater success may be possible with a larger scale, public building, which will allow a freer exploration of slowing meaning in a social setting.

[1] Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto, 293.

[2] Delirious New York, 296.

[3] Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100, Spring 2002, pp.175-190.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 21.

[5] Deleuze and Guattari, 7. Also, a move from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis (17-18).

[6] “Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its bands and picks up speed in the middle” (25).

[7] Deleuze and Guattari, 21.

[8] Deleuze and Guattari, 474-500.

[9] For example, see Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, San Francisco, William Stout Publishers, 2006. The majority of this book is devoted to addressing phenomenology in this very way.

[10] For his discussions on phenomenology, see What is Philosophy?, Difference and Repetition. The Logic of Sense, And Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.

[11] Reynolds, Jack, and Jon Roffe. "Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37, no. 3 (October 01, 2006), 230.

[12] Several recent pieces of work have suggested a connection between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty:

Henry Somers-Hall, "Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: The Aesthetics of Difference," Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale) 10, no. 1 (March 01, 2006), 213-221.

Leonard Lawlor, "The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty," Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 1 (January 01, 1998), 15-34.

[13] There are certain affinities of this definition with the work of Rachel McCann in Wild Being and Carnal Echo: The Experience and Design of Architecture in the Flesh, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.

[14] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, 144.

Meaning and the Making of Multiplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:07:00 +0000

Broadening the Scope of Architectural Phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

(Abstract)

Phenomenology as an architectural method clearly, and rightly so, finds strong affinities with the spatial and experiential aspects of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, and consequently much of related architectural practice and theory has focused on sensational qualities such as light, color, perspective, movement, time, and sound.[1]Through the method of bracketing, the transcendental reduction allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve the need for primordial description in ontology by the use of the doctrine of “primacy of perception” that situates being in phenomenon. The focus on the primacy of perception has led the phenomenological approach to architecture to focus on experience, and bracket off other issues. I would like to suggest here that the real project of phenomenology in architecture should be considered much larger in scope. Limiting “phenomenological architecture” to the work of people such as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, and Juhanni Pallasmaa, in contrast to other contemporary architects such as Coop Himmelb(l)au, Herzog and De Meuron, or Rem Koolhaas is not only detrimental, but possibly even the eventual nail in the coffin for phenomenology as architectural theory.

Giles Deleuze’s criticism of phenomenology[2] actually provides a means for criticizing the tendency to narrow the scope of phenomenology. According to Deleuze, phenomenology assumes the world to be “primordially impregnated with univocal meaning," [3] thus reinstating axiomatic thinking. However correct, Deleuze’s criticism does not spell the end of phenomenology, for the robust ontology of the flesh laid out by Merleau-Ponty provides a serious response and even companion to Deleuze’s notions of paradox and multiplicity.[4] In light of Deleuze’s criticism and a focus on Merleau-Ponty’s later work, I would like to characterize the real goal of architectural phenomenology as the creation of architecture that leaves the door open on univalent interpretation as long as possible so as to delay the collapse of meaning and to allow the freedom of expression and imagination.[5] This characterization should suggest the application of phenomenological theory in a number of different ways, and should also suggest that architects and architecture theorists address concepts such as unnameability, complication, paradox, chaos, and multiplicity as facets of phenomenology. Architectural phenomenology does not simply find its roots in the visible and the sensuous, but also the invisible. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression."[6]

[1] For example, see Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, San Francisco, William Stout Publishers, 2006.The majority of this book is devoted to addressing phenomenology in this very way.

[2] For his discussions on phenomenology, see What is Philosophy?, Difference and Repetition. The Logic of Sense, And Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.

[3] Reynolds, Jack, and Jon Roffe. "Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37, no. 3 (October 01, 2006), 230.

[4] Several recent pieces of work have suggested a connection between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty:

Henry Somers-Hall, "Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: The Aesthetics of Difference," Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale) 10, no. 1 (March 01, 2006), 213-221.

Leonard Lawlor, "The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty," Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 1 (January 01, 1998), 15-34.

[5] There are certain affinities of this definition with the work of Rachel McCann in Wild Being and Carnal Echo: The Experience and Design of Architecture in the Flesh, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, 144.

Philosophers' Carnival LXXVI

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:21:00 +0000

.... is here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Paper: Knowledge as the Metropolis

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:28:00 +0000

I've just uploaded a more recent, but still rough, draft of my paper "Knowledge as the Metropolis: Anti-Utopia, Anarchy, and the Epistemological Picture" although it is still a little convoluted (especially section 4). Any thoughts?

Abstract:
Epistemology, while largely an attempt to deal with the incorporeal, has not escaped the grasps of material, architectural terminology and analogy. Recent philosophy has witnessed the fall of Foundationalism into disrepute and Modern architecture has gone along with it. If modernism is indeed dead, what counter-epistemologies and architectures can be advanced? Many reactionary epistemologies embrace some sort of relativism, which is nothing new (similar views can be traced back through Aristotle), but what does relativism necessarily entail? Does a response to scientism require a vicious sort of relativism that lacks ambition and embraces everything? Does the abandonment of univalence in architecture necessitate a full blown eclecticism where judgments can no longer be made about the built environment? Is our only choice suburban sprawl and cheap, poorly-stylized strip malls? By examining two postmodern alternatives, anti-utopian and anarchic epistemologies, I explore the architecture of relativistic epistemology and suggest a possible alternative to foundations.

New Bookcases

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:45:00 +0000

We just moved into a new apartment, and I need more bookshelf space. The plan is to build something that we can move again in a year. A possible idea:

Internalist Justification vs. Virtuoso Expertise

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0000

M1. Epistemic justification (that is, subjective epistemic justification, being such that I am not blameworthy) is entirely up to me and within my power. (Warrant: The Current Debate, 19)

Plantinga suggests that this is one of the motifs of epistemic internalism, and that it is derived from deontological commitment. This motif can be attributed to its roots in modern, western epistemology started by Locke and Descartes. Because justification is totally within my power, justification stops at some point that is beyond the individual's control. I may be a brain in a vat, but I cannot be blamed for not thinking that if my external situation does not allow me to make that realization (and I am functioning epistemically blamelessly).

This aspect of internalism strikes me as wrongheaded, not in the sense that we should turn to reliablism or some other form of externalism, but rather the combination of this assumption with the idea that most people have the ability to line up objectivity and subjectivity is overly democratic. Plantinga describes this second motif:

M2. For a large, important, and basic class of objective epistemic duties, objective and subjective duty coincide; what you objectively ought to do matches that which is such that if you don't do it, you are guilty and blameworthy. (20)

Under a foundationalist assumption, the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity suggests that even though the non-philosopher (I'm using this term more in Aristotle's sense, not to mean necessarily a university professor or the likes) may not be to blame subjectively, they still hold objective blame for being wrong. The dichotomy may similarly be used for morality to say even though someone made the wrong choice they are not subjectively to be blamed.

Virtuoso epistemology, on the other hand, can assert that just as in any other skill, we are not completely in control of our epistemic abilities. Just as I will never, and could never, be able to play professional basketball or compete in the Olympics, some people cannot reach the same skill level in philosophy as a Kierkegaard or an Aristotle.

The internalist collapses the criterion of truth and truth itself in M2. This way, the conception of knowledge as justified, true belief (JTB) can actually line up with objectivity. If this move cannot be made, then the internalist really is stuck in an ephemeral state and justification can never escape subjectivity. This doesn't coincide with the foundationalism that seems to accompany internalism.

Now, returning to Virtuoso epistemology, what if we simply have no criterion of truth? The virtuoso epistemologist may get closer to truth, not because he has developed subjective criterion of truth that lines up with what is objective, but rather that he has developed expertise in that area. Just as their is no perfect golf swing, their is no perfect philosophical position. This is not to say that one is not better than the other, expertise takes care of that.

I mentioned earlier that internalism is overly democratic, and in the sense of attempting to create a level, objective playing field this is true. Under any foundationalist doctrine, everyone is judged against the same epistemic measuring stick. However, Aristotle leaves the door much more open to the fact that we will all not be good at the same thing. There are expert basketball players, expert mathematicians, and expert philosophers. One may not be able to excel at the others profession, but this does not mean that Tiger Woods needs to learn more epistemology. It also does not mean that I need to practice golf more. Expertise is not something that anyone can achieve. Neither epistemology nor morality are objective systems-they are relative-but this in no way implies a vicious sort of universalism. They are relative to the person and situation (i.e. virtue ethics).

Expertise clearly implies higher skill levels. If I want to succeed as a professional philosopher (and have the ability) the answer is to apprentice myself to an expert. Furthermore, the shift to relativism does not imply the abandonment of truth, just that truth cannot be attained by a clear criterion.

The Dymaxion Car, anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 23:00:00 +0000

2008:

SAM is a Swiss award-winning and patented Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) designed
and developed by Cree Ltd. Notcot.org

1933:
Hmmm. . .

The Psychotic Metropolis

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:11:00 +0000

the Bldgblog recently pointed out an interesting Boston Globe article on the psychiatric effects of the Big Dig in Boston. Despite the rather bland assertions by the quoted individuals in the Globe article that architectural/engineering failures can lead to collective shame or that traffic makes people angry, Geoff pulls out some interesting questions of how a city could shape the psychosis of its inhabitants.

I wonder if the city makes the psychosis or the psychosis makes the city? Take New York through a Frenchman's eyes:

In New York, the mad have been set free. Let out into the city, they are difficult to tell apart from the rest of the punks, junkies, addicts, winoes, or down-and-outs who inhabit it. It is difficult to see why a city as crazy as this one would keep its mad in the shadows, why it would withdraw from circulation specimens of a madness which has in fact, in its various forms, taken hold of the whole city. (Baudrillard, America, 19)

Indeed, the modernist movement attempted (and is still attempting) to act as a proverbial psychoanalyst and bring mental health to a confused and otherwise disturbed place. Attempts to order, decongest, and clean up might actually not be good for a city, and here I am not talking about literal trash or traffic. The psychosis of New York is one of conflicting ideologies. Manhattanism depends on insanity for its existence. The moment madness is covered up Manhattan ceases to exist. New York is a city that needs psychosis.

Baudrillard asks why anyone would live in New York. The only reason he can see is to be part of the electricity and energy of having so many people crammed into such a small area. Why would anyone want to live in a city that reeks of conflict and confusion? It is lonely and callous.

The entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates it
and exploits it. (23)

Consistent epistemologies, and psychologies, are dead epistemologies and consistent cities are dead cities. Relativism ripe with anarchy and conflict feeds the constant growth of knowledge (and insanity?). Ideologies have to grow vertically in Manhattan-there is no room for anything else. Garbage and conflict must be produced.

The vast desert of Los Angeles and Las Vegas encourages horizontal spread-the avoidance of conflict. Venturi was wrong about the metropolis; it does not have to breed the controlling, arogant architect. In fact, the real metropolis makes this impossible. Bigness consumes the architect. Urban sprawl avoids confrontation-it is a relativism of the simulacrum. There can be no trash, no insanity, just complete indifference.

Manhattan works because of its confusion. Maybe more cities need the insane-people with opinions. set the mad free.

The last few weeks . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:08:00 +0000

More photos on Flickr.

The latest Philosophers' Carnival

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:27:00 +0000

. . . is here.

On Truth and Correspondence

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:34:00 +0000

It seems that truth, on the one hand, is something that is defined by the mind – truth is something that exists in relationship to thought and thinking. One the other hand, truth also seems like a property of things – specifically truth in some ways seems to be equivalent to being. Augustine says truth is that which is. Even if truth is not assigned to being itself, statements and claims seem to be true or false and statements supposedly can be freed of the individual cogito. Descartes describes unshakable proofs he lays out in The Meditations as proceeding in the manner of geometry. Everyone will arrive at the same conclusion because truth is universal.

Aquinas, writing on whether truth is a product of the intellect or a property of things says: “[t]he definition that Truth is the equation of thought and thing is applicable to it under either aspect” (Summa Theologica, Book 1, Q. 16. Art. 2, Pt. 1, pg. 89). That is to say truth as an equation is applicable regardless of whether truth is a property of thought or thing.

thought = thing

The approach of internalists and externalists, rationalists and empiricists alike is largely predicated on the idea that bring about truth in this equation is accomplished by molding the left half of the equation – the intellect – to conform to the world-as-it-is. The world is a fixed referent and the mind is either molded by carefully constructing the right epistemological mechanisms or tuning in to the reliable processes that connect us to the world. Even in a weaker empiricism, such as that of Locke, the goal is to make judgments based on the probability that we actually know about the world.

thought <-- thing

In contrast, Baudrillard, and much of postmodernism, tries to escape what is seen as tyranny and oppression in the absolutes of the right side of the equation by killing the referent in hopes of attaining freedom. The intellect is free to do whatever it wants because everything is already coated in truth (or truth is simply seen as irrelevant) in a world of simulacrum where everything is faux. When there is no equation, then there is ultimate freedom for thought. In postmodernism thought is not a fixed variable as much as it is the only thing that exists because everything is collapsed into the immanence of mind. Language and constructs become reality.

thought

The third possibility is of course that neither side is fixed and that modifications happen in both directions. The world pushes back against a postmodern conception of truth. Thought is simply not freely modifiable, but this also does not mean that the world is a fixed referent. The world only plays the role of boundary conditions that limit the movement of thought. There is no specific criterion of truth that is the thing-in-itself.

Thought <--> thing

The world-as-it-is is not a fixed concept either. Just as the world modifies the person in it, so does the person modify the world. When things are not as they should be, we act to change the world. Ethics and making are two of the most prominent ways we act on the world to change it and conform thing to thought. Aquinas gives an illustration of architectural making as conforming the world to thought and bringing about truth: “For a house is said to be true that expresses the likeness of the form in the architect’s mind . . .” (Book 1, 90). Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, points to the fact that we make to relieve pain – for example, a chair is made to relieve the pain of body weight. Human action is a constant expression of dissatisfaction with the way things are.

The correspondence theory of truth, as normally conceived, only seems to get half of the modifying movements of truth. Truth is conceived as description of a fixed world. Modification is made on thought in order to bring it into correspondence with things. However, if modification is made in both direction, truth as a variety of correspondence can be saved without reverting to foundationalism. Truth is not something that exists a priori in objects nor is it something created out of the freedom of the intellect. Instead truth is brought into being by the relationship of thought and thing.

Culture Watch: Kitsch to Postmodernism

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:23:00 +0000

Kitsch at its finest! Slip covers for your washers. The copy to the right reads "transform your unsightly appliances in seconds." What better way than with yellow polka dots? The person of style may object to these unsightly pieces of work, but why are people buying them? Kitsch is an attempt to rescue ourselves from modernity! Take a look at an earlier post on Etsy.

Here is exactly what the anti-war movement needs: a quote book! quote books surely bring some of the much needed legitimacy to any position. Sound bites! Postmodernism at its finest. Sold at all your local Urban Outfitters.

Kroger sells pet insurance, life insurance, renters insurance, and (you guessed it) mortgages. All are easily available in the checkout line. I'm not really sure how to interpret this . . .

Phenomenology and Presuppositions of the Primordial

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:20:00 +0000

But heretofore our information about primitives has been provided by ethnology. And ethnology operates with definite preliminary conceptions and interpretations of human Dasein in general, even in first ‘receiving’ its material, and in sifting it and working it up. Whether the everyday psychology or even the scientific psychology and sociology which the ethnologist brings with him can provide any scientific assurance that we can have proper access to the phenomena we are studying, and can interpret them and transmit the them in the right way, has not yet been established. (Heidegger, Being and Time, 76)

Heidegger points to the fact that in attempting to get back to the phenomena, the fundamental of a phenomenological ontology, we often turn to the primitive or the primordial, but we have to presuppose ‘an inadequate analytic of Dasein’ to judge what the primitive is. Not only do we need these presuppositions to analyze and understand the primitive—we need to them to decide what is actually ‘primitive.’ Phenomenological enquires often presuppose that the primordial is the experience of sensations such as taste, touch, sight, feel, etc, but how can we be sure that sensation is primordial?

Even arguing that sensation is an experience had by all around the globe does not give evidence for its primordial nature because this is the result of conflating the everyday with the primordial. It also must presuppose the systems of fact gathering and analyzing that is used in gathering data about the everyday.

This is something that has always puzzled me about phenomenology, especially in a conference setting. The system of language, the institutions and standard interactions of conference process, and even the functioning of Microsoft Powerpoint all get presupposed to doing actual phenomenology. It is very rare, maybe impossible, to see a presentation (even this term depends on an inadequate analytic) on phenomenology that does not depend on some of these presuppositions.

Merleau-Ponty sums this point up beautifully:

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire “work” is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could no state it, since it is silence. (The Visible and the Invisible, 125)

Of course, Merleau-Ponty goes on to resolve the problem by interweaving language with the flesh of the world, but I’m not sure this solves Heidegger’s worry of truly discovering what is primordial. That lesson: phenomenology ain’t easy.

Anti-Utopia or Anarchy: The Epistemology of Relativism

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:34:00 +0000

This is the first step in the development of a new paper on postmodern epistemology and architectural analogies.

Intro: Baudrillard and Deconstruction

The desire for rationality, order, and simplicity has had a stronghold on Western thought since the Enlightenment and has ushered in a foundationalist epistemology that relies on undeniable a priori truths. This epistemology of gravity has fallen into disrepute in recent years, and arguments against it have proliferated. The failures of scientism and architectural modernism are now readily apparent to many theorists and philosophers, but what views are to be advanced as counter-epistemologies? Many reactionary epistemologies embrace some sort of relativism, which is nothing new. Similar views can be traced back through Aristotle, but what does relativism necessarily entail? Does a response to scientism require a vicious sort of relativism that lacks ambition and embraces everything?

Generally speaking, postmodernism accepts, and even embraces, one half of modernism, the fragmentation and chaos of knowledge, and rejects the second half, the eternal and immutable laws or truths (Harvey, 1990, p. 10). In America, Jean Baudrillard argues that utopia has been achieved in America by the elimination of foundational truths and historic culture and that this utopian thinking has necessarily led to the rise of the anti-utopia when he claims:

[E]verything we have dreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of representation . . . has all been achieved here in America in the simplest, most radical way. Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being achieved: the anti-utopia of unreason, of deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of language and the subject, of the neutralization of all values, of the death of culture. (1989, p. 97)

The decadence of the anti-utopia is not bad according to Baudrillard, but rather allows the full energy of the simulacrum to be exposed (1989, p. 104). Anti-utopia is a necessary consequence of utopia because in creating ultimate diversity, tolerance, and difference, America must also create an ultimate indifference (Baudrillard, 1989, pp. 94-95). The fragmentation of anti-utopia is the result of the chaos of multiple and conflicting models for knowledge. According to Baudrillard, America’s (un)culture, the elimination of any one specific history or metaphysic, derives from its “unprecedented materialization of models” (1989, p. 79). The multiplicity of models that is necessary for utopia also creates the anti-utopia of unreason and the “indeterminacy of language” (Baudrillard, 1989, p. 97).

The anti-utopia is not simply a plurality of models, but with this plurality comes the destruction of rationality within any point of the structure. By blurring truth and rationality, Baudrillard is able to say that because of a plurality of models and lack of access to a non-constructed world, we can no longer be rational as individuals. Everything must be accepted in the “‘sweet madness’ of meaninglessness” (Baudrillard, 1989, p. 103). In his seminal work The Language of Postmodern Architecture, Charles Jenck’s writes that “eclecticism is the natural evolution of a culture with choice” (1977, p. 127). It is not just that many styles exist, but that the simulation and symbols of these styles become reality. Eclecticism and indifference are a priori.

What Baudrillard tries to do to respond to the scientific, eternal, and immutable laws of modernism actually turns out to promote a similar epistemic situation, even though Baudrillard is more conscious of his move. Baudrillard, and postmodernism in general, glorifies the perceptual present by rejecting the role of history. The here and now contains everything that has happened in the past and in effect all of history is flattened-out into the present. I can turn on the television and watch scenes from a past event like Vietnam with graphics popping up in the corner of the television screen promoting shows that will happen in future while sitting on my couch in there here and now eating a turkey sandwich I just made. The collage of past, present, and future binds the individual to a perpetual present. This eternal “air-conditioned hell” becomes a simulation that takes on the same characteristics of modernist immutability. The role of history is jetted by the turn to simulation; “it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality” (Baudrillard, 1989, p. 104).

The break from history and any stable structure that accompanies the pluralism of epistemic models is the turning point that moves Baudrillard’s simulacrum from an epistemically sustainable position to one teetering on the verge of self-destruction in deconstruction by anti-utopia. I will argue here that although Baudrillard’s willingness to embrace the world of simulation and simulacrum is admirable, it ultimately results in a failed epistemological option. Deconstruction may seemingly be achieved in America, but experience cannot tolerate the consequences of Baudrillard’s purely constructivist model of anti-utopian epistemology. Furthermore, an epistemological option that is just as valid and visible in America that does not require a commitment to irrationality can be outlined.

Anarchy: Kuhn and Feyerabend

Thomas Kuhn, in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sets up a paradigmatic epistemology that also embraces multiplicity but does not commit to the unreason of anti-utopian epistemology. Paradigms, or worldviews, are epistemological positions maintained by certain groups—in Kuhn’s case, scientific communities (1996, p. 10). Paradigms are not fully worked out systems but patterns of generally seeing the world (Kuhn, 1996, p. 23). The vital point of Kuhn’s view is that one can never maintain a position outside of a paradigm, a structure for viewing the world. Paradigms do not shift until a new paradigm is possible, and one must always stand on a paradigmatic position to critique another position.

Procedure by multiple contradictory epistemologies does not require the abandonment of paradigmatic positions and the embracement of absurdity that is epitomized in Los Angeles and California in general. As Baudrillard writes:

California has set itself up as the world centre of simulacrum and the inauthentic . . . . focus and meeting-place for the rootless, California is the land of non-history, of the non-event, but at the same time the site of the constant swirl, the uninterrupted rhythm of fashion . . . . (1989, pp. 102-03)

The characterization of California as an entirely irrational and unreasonable enterprise may be a meta-critique, but the idea that there is no reason and no history does not necessarily follow. For example, Paul Feyerabend lays out an anarchic epistemology, much closer to Kuhn’s paradigmatic model, that still acknowledges multiplicity while not abandoning rationality and the individual’s worldview. In Against Method, Feyerabend describes his opportunistic epistemology:

Knowledge . . . is not a series of self-consistent theories that converge towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of consciousness. (1993, p. 21)

The contrast amongst epistemological options functions to clarify alternatives, not to eliminate all reason as Baudrillard seems to see it.

Feyerabend, like Baudrillard, rejects methodism and agrees that the idea of a fixed method is naïve and lacking in historical evidence, but this goes for any belief that considers the elements of our knowledge to be eternal and immutable. As earlier mentioned, Baudrillard’s simulacrum has the same effect as foundationalism, although Baudrillard flattens out history into a simulation of meaninglessness. Either way, ideas and artifacts are without history and are considered “timeless entities which share the same degree of perfection [or indifference in Baudrillard’s case], are all equally accessible, and are related to each other in a way that is independent of the events that produced them” (Feyerabend, 1993, p. 106). Epistemological rules cannot account for the complexity of the world, nor is there a single epistemological rule that has always been applied across the board without being violated at some point or another (Feyerabend, 1993, p. 14). Feyerabend embraces the same relativism that Baudrillard does, but rejects the idea that relativism is the absolute truth.

In contrast to Baudrillard’s Los Angeles, Rem Koolhaas describes the “culture of congestion” in New York City in the pluralistic terms of Kuhn and Feyerabend (1994, p. 293). The anarchy of “the city of the captive globe” is the result of the “ideological laboratories” of each individual building that are completely separate from one another and are built on bases that “suspend unwelcome laws” and “undeniable truths” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 294). The freedom from the grid and other buildings that the bases offer allows each building to pursue its own idea or mania. The Metropolis that allows pluralism also has to allow this freedom, and the “captive globe” grows because of the constantly changing skyline. Manhattan is, in fact, defined by the creation and destruction cycle of the skyline, so if the change is not constant, Manhattan will cease to exist (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 53). If the metropolis is predicated on the very idea of constant change, then utopian absolutes simply cannot exist. These so-called absolutes are nothing but one of the buildings that rises up from the stone bases. They are just “a truth,” not “the truth.” The metropolis is a collection of truths; it is a construct of institutions. The continued growth of the captive globe is the result of an anarchic epistemology, but this does not necessitate anti-utopian relativism.

Conclusion: Anarchy but not Deconstruction

Baudrillard is right to promote epistemic anarchy with the attitude of letting a thousand ideas flourish, but the ultimate problem of the individual’s epistemic position is not resolved. The rejection of unreason does not necessitate a commitment to the foundationalist epistemology of the enlightenment because reason does not have to be objective. The confrontation of Los Angeles and New York well illustrates the contrast between anti-utopian epistemology and paradigmatic, or anarchic, epistemology. Los Angeles “is hyperreal in its vitality, it has all the energy of the simulacrum. ‘It is the world centre of the inauthentic’” (Baudrillard, 1989, p. 104). New York, in contrast, is not inauthentic, but is “devoted to the artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals and their infliction on the world” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 294). In a movie that plays out the conflict between the two places, Woody Allen remarks that Beverly Hills is clean because “they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.” In contrast, Allen says he loves New York because he is “into garbage” (Allen, 1977). Behind these veiled comments, the relationship between these two cities and two epistemological options can be seen: one without reason and thus without critical refuse and one full of reason and full of refuse. Baudrillard could benefit from realizing the necessary role of history and the individual, even in an anarchic model of epistemology, in the development of epistemological paradigms. An epistemic position outside of all paradigms can never be occupied. All of the world is seen through our constructs and is necessarily never the product of unreason. Even Baudrillard’s characterization of America is the result of a paradigm. To preserve complication and multiplicity does not require a devotion to unreason and the deconstruction of all structures. Relativism is not vicious at all but simply, as Lynn Holt has described it, “a denial of the rule of law in matters of reason and knowledge, without abandoning the notions of reason or knowledge themselves” (2002, p. 74). America does not have to be the manifestation of deconstruction, just anarchy.

REFERENCES:

Allen, W. (Director). (1977). Annie Hall [Motion picture]. United States: United Artists.
Baudrillard, J. (1989). America. London: Verso.
Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against Method (3rd ed.). London: Verso.
Harvey, David. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Holt, Lynn. (2002). Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules. Burlington: Ashgate.
Jencks, Charles (1977). The Language of Postmodern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
Koolhaas, R. (1994). Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press.
Kuhn, T. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Architect as Virtuoso

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Could Vitruvius’s categories of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (As Wooten translates: firmness, commodity, and delight, or as Morgan translates: durability, convenience, and beauty) be described as the virtues of architecture? To uncover this possibility, a good place to begin is by analogizing with Aristotelian virtues, such as courage or wisdom. Virtues are not rules, they are prior to and irreducible to principles and may better be described as dispositions. Firmness and commodity can be thought of as virtues of the architecture itself. Architecture must have strength and utility in the right amount at the right time for the right reasons. Firmitas and utilitas are two of the clear ends or aims of architecture, but delight seems to have a more difficult role to define.

Delight is a quality or characteristic of the person experiencing the architecture. Furthermore, according to Aristotle, people may not delight in things that they should. For example, adolescents often do not take pleasure in learning. Because of the individual nature of delight, it might better be characterized as a good that architecture helps the participant achieve. Delight (happiness?) is not a virtue of the person, but rather a result of being virtuous and not have any major misfortunes (there is a certain amount of “luck” involved in our external situation, se NE 1100b 23 – 1101a 14, the same may be true for a building hitting the right proportions).

What if venustas is translated as beauty instead of delight? Venustas is defined by Vitruvius as “when the appearance of the work is pleasing and in good taste, and when its member are in due proportion according to correct principles of symmetry” (trans. Morgan, 17). “Pleasing and in good taste” seem to be individual aspects, while “due proportion” and “principles of symmetry” (symmetria “the proper agreement among member”) seem to have more in common with the architecture itself.

Beauty may be more of a relational concept than something solely out in the world or solely inside the viewer. If this is true, beauty requires ‘good taste” as a virtue on the part of the participant and “due proportion” as a virtue on the part of the architecture. Proportion/harmony is a necessary but not sufficient condition for delight.

The idea of venustas being a good resulting from the presence of the virtue of proportion/harmony/symmetry also finds evidence in Vitruvius’s description of the Doric column: “Thus the Doric column, as used in buildings, began to exhibit the [proportions which provide the strength and beauty] of the body of a man” (trans. correction mine, 103).

Beauty, as conceived by the Renaissance architect, is an absolute thing often connected with the ideals of Form. This results in making delight the sole result of proportions that are recognized by an innate faculty (such as Alberti says). This a priori conception of beauty we may call absolute. Absolute beauty takes one half of Vitruvius’s equation (good taste + due proportion = beauty) and elevates it a supernatural level (due proportion + innate recognition of due proportion = beauty) and thus eliminates it as a separate factor by mechanizing it.

In contrast, beauty achieved only by individual delight leads to arbitrary beauty as the result of fashion in which no opinion is more correct. This definition takes Vitruvius’s original equation and removes talk of good proportion and even “good taste” (taste=beauty). The word “beauty” may even be eliminated in favor of “meaning.” Postmodernism does just this. Fully relative aesthetics, or just the turn to meaning, divorces delight from firmness and commodity (i.e. the decorate shed). Venturi, in Learning from Las Vegas, promotes the idea that we should take “fun” as a serious architectural measure. Delight in meaning is not connected to proportion here, but to the “ugly and ordinary” of the Vegas strip and “the fairground eclecticism of Caesar’s Palace” (Kruft 441). The equation is further rewritten (taste=meaning).

If we return to Vitruvius’s original categories, but modify “delight” to be the third architectural virtue, how does the architect implement firmness, commodity, and proportion? Virtues are not fixed and are not mechanized. They are ambiguous in this sense, but not meaningless because they are particular:

There is no such thing as a disembodied virtue, except as an abstraction. Virtues are not themselves particular existents, they are modes of the existence of particular individuation. (Holt, “Virtuoso Epistemology”, 3)

The simple truth is that architecture is hard work and that there is no way to implement virtues other than becoming an expert.

Towards a More Ancient Conception of Proportion

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sat, 17 May 2008 17:59:00 +0000

Here is a rough draft of some preliminary research from my summer research fellowship on the concept of Delight in architecture.

Venustas: Delight and Symmetry

Vitruvius wrote that all architecture must be built with reference to firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (M. H. Morgan translates these categories as durability, convenience, and beauty). These categories are most often referred to in English as firmness, commodity and delight after Henry Wooten’s 1624 book The Elements of Architecture in which he wrote:

In architecture as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the Operation. The end is to build well. Well building hath three Conditions. Commoditie, Firmenes, and Delight. A common division among the Delivers of this Art . . . (1-2)

Firmness and Commodity have been, for the most part, well situated as technical terms: firmness deals with construction and material while commodity deals with function and economy (for a list of how these have been translated in the last 100 years see David Smith Capon, Corbusier’s Legacy, 349-353). For Vitruvius, delight, comes down to symmetry, proportion, and eurythmy, and the 17th century French theorist Claude Perrault does an excellent job of clearing up the relationship between these terms:

. . . to express the Relation that many things have one to another, as to their greatness or different Number of Parts, Vitruvius indifferently makes use of three words, which are Proportion, Eurythmy, and Symmetry. But we have thought it proper only to make use of the word Proportion, because Eurythmy is a Greek word, which signifies nothing else but Proportion; and Symmetry, although a word commonly used, does not signify in the Vulgar Languages what Vitruvius understands by Proportion; for he understand by Proportion, a Relation according to Reason; and Symmetry, in the vulgar Languages, signifies only, a Relation of Parity and Equality. For the word Simmetria signifies in Latin and Greek Relation only. (Perrault, An Abridgement of the Architecture of Vitruvius, unknown trans., Alel Swall and T. Child Publishers, 1692, 29-30)

Symmetria is not, as Perrault notes, equality or balance, but is simply parts in proper relationships to one another. According to Vitruvius, proper proportion results in pleasing architecture:

beauty, when the appearance of the work is pleasing and in good taste, and when its members are in due proportion according to correct principles of symmetry. (trans. Morgan, 17)

Renaissance interpretations often insisted that proportion is supernatural and manifest in nature and in the human body. Vitruvius was held up as the infallible guide (see Sebastiano Serlio, The Complete Works on Architecture and Perspective, 1540, Book 3) that had led architects to the true and right proportions. Vitruvius descriptions of the proportion of human bodies and nature and his mythical stories of the origin of the orders was recounted as and upheld as truth. Alberti, one of the earliest and most prominent renaissance theorist, was a Neoplatonist and held that beauty results from the Forms. Beauty is the result of transcendental mathematical proportions that are often not even found in nature. He latches onto a concept of beauty based on lineaments (as opposed to matter) that is immaterial. In De re aedificatoria, he writes:

All the intent and purpose of lineaments lies in finding the correct, infallible way of joining and fitting together those lines and angles which define and enclose the surfaces of the building. (trans. Rykwert, Leach, Tavernor, 1988, Book 1, 7)

He goes on to write:

When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the
workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind. (Book 9, 302)

Despite what the Renaissance theorist may have wanted, Vitruvius is simply not an absolutist about beauty. This is true for two reasons: 1) Vitruvius emphasizes the expertise of the architect 2) Vitruvius is a particularist about when comes to actually defining delight.

First, Vitruvius’s emphasis on the expertise of the architect setups up delight as something achieved by the architect, not the result of codified rules. The mechanization of beauty certainly comes along with the sort of innatism that Alberti perpetuates, but also the same absolutism from which early English architects drew. Wooten, in The Elements of Architecture, writes:

. . . the great Paterne of Nature, to which I must often resort: for surely there can be no Structure, more uniform then our Bodies in the whole Figuration: Each side, agreeing with the other, both in the number, in the qualitie, and in the measure of the Parts: and yet some are round, as the Armes, some flat, as the Hands, some prominent, and some more retired: so as upon the Mater, wee feel tha Diversitie doth not destroy Uniformitie . . . (20-21)

Alberti, Wooten, and most of the other architects all emphasized the education and expertise of the architect, but this expertise often seems to emphasize the mastery of the Forms and rules. A strong mechanization starts to emerge out of any notion of absolute rules. Vignola, in Rules of the Five Orders of Architecture written in 1562, codified the orders and wrote that:

I have made an otherwise difficult part of architecture so easy that every ordinary talent, provided he has some enthusiasm for this art, can at a glance and without much bothersome reading, understand the whole and muse use of it at opportune moments. (Mallgrave, Architecture Theory, 45)

Interestingly, Architecture Graphic Standards (the most used professional’s handbook to architecture) still uses Vignola’s proportions as the basis for the classical orders. Vitruvius, on the other hand, emphasizes the manipulation of basic rules to conform to the situation:

There is nothing to which an architect should devote more thought than to the exact proportions of his building with reference to a certain part selected as the standard. . . . it is next the part of wisdom to consider the nature of the site, or questions of use or beauty, and modify the plan by diminutions or additions in such a manner that these diminutions or additions in the symmetrical relations may be seen to be made on correct principles, and without detracting at all from the effect. (trans. Morgan, 174)

Secondly, particularism in beauty means that particular buildings require particular moves:

We must therefore follow the rules of symmetry required by each kind of building. (84)

In fact, Vitruvius sees that posterity has made refinements in beauty:

. . . posterity, having made progress in refinement and delicacy of feeling, and finding pleasure in more slender proportions, has established seven diameters of the thickness as the height of the Doric column, and nine as that of the Ionic. (104)

Vitruvius promotes visual corrections, not to maintain a perception of an exact proportion, but simply to maintain harmony and beauty. Visual corrections are meant to compensate for the clumsy and awkward. Alberti, on the otherhand, rejects these visual corrections because they take away from the absolute and pure proportions which the mind should be able to perceive instantly. Later scholars, such as Francis Blondel, who upheld the authority of ancients said visual corrections should be used to correctly maintain visual proportions.

We may also add a third point that I am not sure how present it is in Vitruvius and that is teleology. The aim of architecture, according to Wooten, is to build well.

Enlightenment Reactions

The Renaissance’s redefinition and manipulation of delight into absolute beauty had some necessary results, a major of which came as the result of the emergence of historical studies of ancient architecture. In les edifes antinques de rome (1682), Desogodets proved that most ancient works of architecture did not follow Vitruvius’s rules. Claude Perrault did a similar study in his Ordonnance des cinq espéces de colonnes selon la méthode des Anciens (1683). The overemphasis of absolute beauty resulted in the rise of dualistic theories of beauty.

The English architect Christopher Wren, in his Tracts (begun in the mid-1670’s) distinguished between natural and customary beauty. Proceeding in a prototypical empiricist fashion (whether it is epistemological our justificatory, I am not sure), Wren defined Natural beauty as geometric, uniform (equal), and proportioned and customary beauty as the result of familiarity. Customary beauty tests the architects skill, natural beauty tests truth. Wren says we need customary beauty, but also calls this kind of beauty “the great Occasion of Errors” (Soo, Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture and Other Writings, Tract I, 154). However, because Wren still counts proportion to be part of Natural beauty, he still committed to certain sort of absolute beauty. In Tract I he writes:

Geometrical Figures are naturally more beautiful than other irregular; in this all consent as to a Law of Nature. Of geometrical Figures, the Square and the Circle are most beautiful; next the Parallelogram and the Oval. Strait Lines are more beautiful than curve; next to straight Lines, equal and geometrical Flexures; an Object elevated in the Middle is more beautiful than depressed. (154)

In the end, Wren still accepts Vitruvius’s authority: “Vitruvius hath led us the true Way to find the Originals of the Orders” (156). However, he has begun to acknowledge the role of fashion in architecture: “aim to accommodate his Designs to the Gust of the Age he lives in, though it appears to him less rational” (188).

Claude Perrault, takes his dualism a step farther and lumps specific proportions in with custom. Perrault distinguishes between positive (absolute) beauty and arbitrary (customary) beauty. All that can be classified under the positive beauty is:

. . . the richness of materials, the grandeur and magnificence of the structure, the exactness and neatness of the performance, and the symmetry, which denotes proportion. (A Treatise of the Five Orders of Columns in Architecture, London, Benjamin Motte, 1708, vi)

Much of what Perrault lists as absolute beauty could easily be classified under firmness and commodity (keep this in mind as we proceed into the modern era). Arbitrary beauty, on the other hand includes most of what the architect does:

Now, even though we often like proportions that follow the rules of architecture without knowing why, it is nevertheless true that there must be some reason for this liking. The only difficulty is to know if this reason is always something positive, as in the case of musical harmonies, or if, more usually, it is simply founded on custom and whether that which makes the proportions of a building pleasing is not the same as that which makes the proportions of a fashionable costume pleasing. For the latter has nothing positively beautiful or inherently likeable. . . (1708, 50)

Perrault, in a quite ironic way, rescues Vitruvius by “inventing” (or “discovering”) arbitrary beauty. Arbitrary beauty cannot be mechanized and has no absolute foundation, so it requires careful and extended study to understand and use well. He saves Vitruvius from innatism and neoplatonism which had been manipulated into his text by writers like Alberti. Far from relegating the ancient notion of architecture to uselessness, Perrault made the architect expert again.

Decor: Architecture today

The dualism of beauty is the foundation of the attitude of modern day architecture. “Modernity,” according to Baudelaire in 1863, “is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable” (Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 10). The history of modernity has wavered between these two halves in the forms of what is commonly called modernism and postmodernism.

Modernism picked up the robust rationality, objectivity, and mechanization of absolute (positive, natural) beauty. Delight as a separate category is relegated to secondary importance while firmness and commodity become of absolute importance. Aesthetics is not lost, but it formalized into spatiality, form, and abstract entities.

Corbusier writes about the “Engineer’s Aesthetic”:

“Our engineers produce architecture, for they employ a mathematical calculation which derives from natural law, and their works give us the feeling of HARMONY.” (Towards a New Architecture, 12)

Corbusier rejects Architecture as styles, describing the current attitude of schools (in 1931) as those who “enter into the town in the spirit of a milkman who should, as it were, sell his milk mixed with vitriol or poison” (16). Schools teach “styles” because they are behind the times.

However, Corbusier does not reject the role of Mass, Surface, Plan, Regulating Lines, etc that architecture deals with, but these are no longer connected to style (Latin: aspectos, keep this in mind). It seems to me that the modern movement resurrected a renaissance conception of beauty while rejecting the notion of decor which is integral in Vitruvius’s theory. Decor is not the application of a style, as Vitruvius writes:

Propriety (Decor) the perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles. It arises from prescription (Greek thematismo), from usage, or from nature. (trans. Morgan, 14)

Postmodernism replaces proportion with meaning and does focus on decor, but draws out an entirely different notion of decor. Robert Venturi’s decorated shed, the epitome of postmodern decoration, focuses on the application of decoration to an otherwise ordinary building (Learning from Las Vegas, 90-92).

Meaning relegates decor to a system of symbols and consequently something that has little to no useful relationship to firmness and commodity. The Vitruvian notion of proportion and symmetry however necessarily mixes and reciprocates with firmness and commodity. Proportion knits while semiotics divorces. Language, as used by the post-modernist, in architecture tends to be largely post-hoc. It’s generative character is quite limited to the application of style (aspectos). In this sense, meaning is anemic. Furthemore, the focus on meaning forces Venturi to embrace ugly architecture (which is not a problem in itself, but is the necessary result of his position).

The resort to meaning also gives up many tools in judging between good and bad architecture. It may be a great democratic leveler, but who wants democracy in the aesthetic environment?

Modernism wants to equate construction with delight while postmodernism wants to divorce them. Vitruvius, however, rejects both ends of the dichotomy and gives primacy to the skill of the architect to work in each unique situation.

A New Notebook

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:54:00 +0000

The last page of my sketchbook . . .

Out with the old and in with the new.

69th Philosophers' Carnival

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:13:00 +0000

is here.

A Thought on Etsy and 'Indie' Art

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Mon, 12 May 2008 05:04:00 +0000

How about a couple of quick thoughts on Etsy and what I am going to term (probably incorrectly) 'indie' art? This is partly the result of talking about Mr. Will Bryant's latest T-shirt: "I am the Internet."

The modernization and mechanization, combined with accompanying capitalism, that much of the developed world lives in has begun a slow process of removing the maker from their made product. Marx pointed this out in the fact that the working class, under the control of capitalist, is distanced from their final product. For example, assembly lines often have workers repeating the same task which is only a part of the final made object, which they often never call their own until they go to Walmart and buy it.

This disassociation of the maker from the made not only distances us from what we make, but also from the fact that what we have is made by someone else. Modernist architecture (and much of its accompanying art) has made purposeful attempts to remove the handcrafted nature of commodities (I think here of Corbusier's "Engineer's Aesthetic" and much of Donald Judd's work). Modernism's vicious attempts to commodify and abstract labour has resulted in a lot of sterile architecture to which the American public's reaction has been mostly negative.

Many modernist just cannot understand Kitsch. Why would people mess up beautiful clean, pure, and rational masterpieces by putting up flowerprint wallpaper, crocheted pillows, and cheap imitation of paintings of landscapes? (An interesting exception to this attitude was Adolf Loos who actually liked people to bring in their own furniture and stuff into his modernist houses).

So in this consumer society of mass production, and to a large extent corporate domination (a sort of high modernism is now the most popular style for corporate offices and towers, this is certainly not an accident), people are finding ways to return individuality and connectedness to the act of making. Etsy brands itself as "your place to buy and sell all things handmade." The irony that individually made, substantive things are being brought back to prominence on the internet, a virtual world largely controlled by forces much greater than the individual (corporations, governments, the market, it's sheer "bigness"), should not be lost or glazed over.

When I say, 'indie' art, I mean to point out a style that seems to be emerging in music, visual and plastic arts, and even in architecture (look at England's FAT architects). For example, Architecture in Helsinki's latest album cover (and the music inside):

Also, Kate Bingaman's work at Obsessive Consumption (which I absolutely love):

This art clearly exposes and highlights the individual creative act of making. Drawings are not "finished products" that glorify pure, rationalized forms, but are instead a part of life. I think this also further illustrates the postmodern condition as events, as a process, rather than as a product (the condition of modernism).

It seems to me that the implication of movements such as etsy, flickr, twitter, etc, is that although the claim that "I am the internet" seems absurd, we are actively trying to make it true (blogging may be the ultimate example of this very desire).

We could try to react to the all consuming nature of the postmodern experience of digital media, branding, big government and big business, etc, by throwing away our cellphones and laptops and living in the woods, catching fish with self-made hooks, and eating sawdust pancakes (isn't this the plot of My Side of the Mountain that I read in elementary school?). However, this sort of ecological functionalism (I think Pallasma promotes something like this) seems to be a backwards looking desire for the "good old days". Instead, the reaction of artists like Bryant and Bingaman (I only chose this guy and gal as examples because I know them, there are plenty more), is to actually embrace the postmodern culture and forge an identity within it. Architects could surely benefit from paying more attention to people like this. So these are some very quick, preliminary, and probably shallow remarks (that surely have been made by someone already), but I am the internet, and so can you!

Normal and Revolutionary Science in Heidegger

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:48:00 +0000

The real 'movement of the sciences takes place when their basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is transparent to itself. The level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In such immanent crises the very relationship between positively investigative inquiry and those things themselves that are under interrogation comes to a point where it begins to totter. Among the various disciplines everywhere today there are freshly awakening tendencies to put research on new foundations. (Heidegger, Being and Time, 29)

Reading Heidegger this evening, I couldn't help but notice the striking similarity this passage seems to bear to Kuhn's conception of scientific revolutions.

In Kuhn's paradigmatic model, real ontological questioning only happens during revolutionary periods in science, just as Heidegger says. Normal science, that is the practice of science governed by a paradigm, is described as a process of puzzle-solving. The scientist engaged in normal science is bound to a set of given expectations. Results are expected. Kuhn says that normal scientific practice is, in fact, more of a test of the practitioner - whether she can get the correct results. In normal science, anomalies are dismissed as irrelevant, as a mistake, or as research problems to solve.

Crisis only arises when anomalies persist. Normal science breaks down and scientists return to doing philosophy (ex. Einstein's 1905 paper or relativity, classical mechanics in the 17th century). Revolutions occur in crisis and a new paradigm is defined.

When science is in a revolutionary period, for Heidegger, real ontological inquiry is done. Normal science only engages "the world" on the ontical level. Normal science deals with the entities of the world, but is limited in its true enquiry into Being. Revolutionary science, on the other hand, is returns to an examination of Being.

A thought on the rationality of revolutions:

The period of revolutionary science and the subsequent paradigm shift for Kuhn is described as a conversion experience. This is the result of the incommensurability of theories. Feyerabend's description of anarchic science (see Against Method) picks up on a similar theme and labels the relationship between rational theories as irrational. Each paradigm is, to varying extents, a coherent whole, but cannot bear a rational relationship with other paradigms.

Heidegger, in contrast, says that the space between paradigms is when Being is most openly examined. Kuhn and Feyerabend (although Feyerabend more explicitly) depend on a mechanized conception of rationality, but an appeal to a more robust version of rationality could resolve this. Mechanized rationality tends to depend on some sort of foundational epistemology (empirical or rational) in which first principles are known first (think Descartes). A contrasting viewpoint tells us that first principles are not known first, but last. It seems to me that this makes sense in light of a more ancient conception of rationality (that of Aristotle and Plato). Heidegger seems to give indication of this viewpoint:

When one makes an inquiry one may do so 'just casually' or one may formulate the question explicitly. the latter case is peculiar in that the inquiry does not become transparent to itself until all these constitutive factors of the question have themselves become transparent. (BAT, 25)

Of course, Meno's problem is often the attacked leveled at this way of inquiry. How can I look for simething if I don't know what it is, and if I know what it is why am I looking for it. This seems like a case of vicious circular reasoning. However, Heidegger responds:

It is quite impossible for there to be any 'circular argument' in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds of it and exhibiting them. (BAT, 28)

Inquiry into Being is an attempt to unfold and reveal. Normal science helps to set the subject matter, but revolutionary science attempts to lay it bare.

I'm Back, Baby!

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Mon, 05 May 2008 04:35:00 +0000

Where have I been for the past 2 months?

Conferences

After presenting at the "MidSouth Undergraduate Conference", I headed out to Sofia, Bulgaria for the "100 Years of Merleau-Ponty Conference" to present my paper Carnal Language and the Sedimentation of Architecture. Bulgaria was fabulous and quite interesting. I can not help but love the complex and contradictory nature of the city. Architectural and social ideals clashed in a beautiful way. Of course, I have plenty of photos on flickr.

The conference was also wonderful. It was a great chance to meet several people that I have been reading: Len Lawlor, Dwaine Davis, and William Hamrick.

After Bulgaria, Aaron Speaks and I headed up to New York to present a joint paper on a conceptual design project entitled Reversing and Folding the Language of Architecture at Stony Brook Manhattan's First Annual Art and Philosophy Conference. We were on a fabulous panel with Simona Josan and Mussetta Durkee.

Of course, New York presented a great chance to see some wonderful new architecture. Renzo Piano's New York Times Building, Rem Koolhaas's Prada Store, and Frank Gehry's IAC Building.

Finally, I headed off to Dartmouth for Aporia's First Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, which was by far the best undergrad conference I have attended. It was to my great surprise and honor that I won second best essay for my paper "Experiencing Complexity: The Aesthetic Argument against Reductive Materialism." This paper can be found in the current issue (Spring 2008).

I have also had a paper entitled "The Epistemic Nature of Beauty: Locke, Descartes, and the Architectural Theory of Claude Perrault" accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of Logos, Cornell's undergraduate journal.

University Politics

Around the same time, I and a few other architecture students wrote an open letter about our university president. Soon after he resigned, although he said nobody asked him to leave. We can mark one for democracy here.

Architecture Studio

During this same time, I finished up the 4th year of architecture studio with my Pella Design Competition Thesis "Radically Public." The program was an old theater to be expanded and converted into a Modern Southern Art Museum.

Of course, the full size images of the boards can be found on my flickr.

This project has opened up a research area I hope to pursue in my 5th year thesis work: publicness and counter-culture. I am more and more interested in architecture as an accumulation strategy. Architecture where meaning is derived not from the built work, but from events and happenings.

What is next? Summer Research

After securing a summer research fellowship from the MSU Honors College, I am going to be pursuing three major projects over the next few months. This means plenty of blogging is soon to come.

1) Anarchy, Anti-Utopia, and Virtuoso Epistemology: The Architecture of Knowledge

This project is a study of reactions to foundationalist epistemology. Foundationalism implicitly assumes a strong architectural analogy, and in this paper I am beginning to explore the counter reactions and architectural analogies/illuminations. The paper centers around Baudrillard, Feyerabend, Koolhaas, Rowe and Koetter, Kuhn, and Holt.

2) Delighting in Architecture

This project is a joint study with Dr. Lynn Holt on the ancient concept of delight in architecture. The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius defined good architecture by three measures: firmitas, ultilitas, venustas. These Latin terms have been most often translated into English as firmness, commodity, and delight. This project is an attempt to setup up delight as a technical term and try to understand its usefulness for architects today.

3) The Language of Architecture: Koolhaas and Gehry

This project will be a continuation of my paper "Carnal Language and the Sedimentation of Architecture." It will be based around a month long study of buildings in Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, and England.

When I dropped the ball on blogging the last two months, my wife picked it up on her new blog.

So I'm back to blogging this summer, and I promise more substantive philosophical and theoretical posts will be coming soon.

Bulgaria, Here I come!

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:42:00 +0000

If you would like to make a short trip over the next week, why not come over to the 100 Years of Merleau-Ponty in Sofia, Bulgaria? The conference program is all Professors, PhD Students, and me, which is slightly intimidating.

I will be presenting a paper entitled "Carnal Language and the Sedimentation of Architecture" (PDF).

Abstract:

What does a building mean? 21st century architecture has been engaged as a problem of language, but the dichotomization of the role of language by modernist and structuralist approaches to architecture leads to a built environment that can either not reference itself or not reference the world. Modernist architecture attempts to make architecture speak by reducing meaning to transcendence while structuralist architecture attempts to reduce meaning to immanence. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy rejects this dichotomization of the role of language and instead sets up language and the flesh as diacritical structures. His theory of language can be substantiated by a broader understanding of the role of signs in the built environment. When extended into the practice of architecture, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy can effectively explain language in a way that references both immanence and transcendence, and thus guide against approaching meaning in a reductive manner.

Lab Drawing 6

noreply@blogger.com (Bryan) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:39:00 +0000

Lab Drawing 6, originally uploaded by bryan.norwood.

Drawing 6 of the series.

The entire series can be found here.