Ben's thoughts behind/before his blunt questions

1) Who Gets It and Who Wants It?..
The global network and network within cities is great for those who see a newly connected universe, but surely it is a chimera of fairness for others, where the lack of parity in resources becomes blatantly obvious.Who gets What design, and anyway does the Who necessarily want the What? Might there be a wealth of design in poverty & a poverty of design in wealth?

As designers, how do you make sense (and provide for) gross imbalance of resources & stuff across the globe? Or, to put it another way: what happened to ethics?
..And What are People Going to Do All Day?
Edmund Scarry: What Do People Do All Day? If we are not tasked with constantly making things: what are humans going to do? How do we design for that?

We engage in off-site global slavery for an excess of First World consumer stuff that nobody really wants. Treaties are made to cultural prevent upsets: is it time to make a treaty to stop off-loading beyond-thrift-store, baled-up, Junk-for-Jesus, used-clothing around the world? (NYTimes You-Tube: The Kenya Riots, Feb 14th 2008: Why is everyone is wearing cast-off corporate picnic tee shirts?

2) Urban/Rural Dichotomies
The Favela Syndrome: designing outside the system: hacking state organized urbanism & consumer culture: how do the two systems of being coexist? When people speak of 50% of the world’s population living in cities, what about the other 50% ? Why is so much design energy given to world cities and so little on the countryside, further exacerbating the schism between urban & rural states of being. How do we deal with design imperialism in the face of multiple ways of doing things by others?

Starved of happenstance and the incidental (which rural states take for granted) the urban dweller turns to the design & manufacture of the visceral to make up for the loss. Are we suffering from bipolar urbo-rural mood swing disease?

3) The 6th Sense
Buckminster Fuller No More Second Hand God. Page v.
Man is born with an extraordinary inventory of universal phenomena. Most of the inventory is invisible, operating either infra or ultra to our sense apprehending….We are given facilities to permit and induce our progressively greater apprehension and comprehension of the universal phenomena.

Urbanistas have a reputation for being cosmologically insentient. How do we explore, calibrate, expose, and design for qualities that are traditionally invisible, such as body/mind energies leaking from the pineal-eye? What are the perameters of the intangible? How do we design for more than the presence of a product and, what is the white space, that others do not explore, that surrounds ‘Design without Objects’ or ‘A World without Objects’?

What happened to the notion of being reflective? The hyper-cycle of consuming stuff could prompt its rejection, which in turn leads to a resurgent interest in the ineffable: is this the Ghost Dance revisited? How does the ineffable engage with the material, a designed sublime, where constructs of ‘no-thingness’ sit content?

How do we design for the need for the visceral and need for the ethereal/not being tied down at one and the same time? what happens to the moon & month, the moonstral cycles of being?


4) Design Doctrine..
‘Humans were given the mandate to use the world as they see fit’: has this theologically driven pitch run its course? What is being done in design to accept and follow the contribution of other living creatures, acknowledging that animals, plants, geothermal and weather systems all have equal pull? Has the anthro-centric vision of the world, as humanity’s sandbox, become untenable? What did the Biomorphic Design agenda leave out? Put another way: does Mother Nature really care an iota what we do?
..Suburbo-Smalltown-Christocentric Design
Why is there an absolute negation of what mainstream Christocentric suburbia/exurbia/small-town-folks are interested in?: Why has haute-design chosen to side-step red-state evangelical culture. (Christian-radio, Effingham Illinois 2/14/08: Program discrediting democrat presidency: Barak Hussein Obama (“Barak: name given to the donkey that Mohommad rode on the night-flight from Jerusalem to Heaven what he met the former prophets. Obama educated in madrassa as a schoolboy. Despite his conversion from Islam to Christianity, how can we be sure about the Muslim within?”)

5) Positivist Materialism..
What gets left out when engaging positivistic design? Is change the only way that a designer can operate? Where to go from happy-happy joy-joy. What does hyper-mutating design do with the jingle Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without!? Is constantly morphing change really a delaying tactic for what may well be Design on Credit? [How do we engage concepts such as the repetition of a built structure like the Ise Shrine, where change is measured by what happens in the repetition of its creation and what happens to the structure over time as it engages the elements?]

..& Junk-bonding Metaphor
Metaphor: the implication of something without its material presence. The positivism of design has sidestepped the telling of stories, an oral tradition, neither written or built. The great eBay shuffle: redistributing manufactured goods to trigger memories/projections of desire, reminiscence or quiet that they imply. Network intrigue versus cultural richess, the quality of lingering, wondering, wandering.
6) Contradiction
What happens to design at points of contradiction, uncertainty and global tensions? Designing a solution for all aspects feeds contradiction, for it can deny some and embrace others simultaneously. How is the symbiosis between warfare & peacefare (to build and to destroy at the same time) different from nature’s symbiosis?
How is the happy-happy joy-joy carnival of design sensibility reconciled against a backdrop of an excluded underclass, who live out what the Have’s term: ‘Suffering”? How do we deal with the swing between optimism and pessimism, the realm between, is it possible to design for an interstitial state?

Ben's Blunt (asked and un-asked) Questions

I) BLUNT QUESTIONS (a close version of the following questions was sent to each of the participants prior to the roundtable)

1) Who Gets It and Who Wants It?
Who gets What design, and does the Who necessarily want the What?

2) Urban/Rural Dichotomies
The Favela Syndrome: designing outside the system: hacking state organized urbanism & consumer culture: how do the two systems of design coexist?

3) The 6th Sense
How do we explore, calibrate, expose, and design for qualities that are traditionally invisible and intangible , such as body/mind energies and the pineal-eye?

4) Design Doctrine
‘Humans were given the mandate to use the world as they see fit’: has this theologically driven pitch run its course?

5) Contradiction
Designing a solution for all aspects feeds contradiction, for it can deny and embrace simultaneously. What happens to design at points of contradiction, uncertainty and global tensions? How is the symbiosis between warfare & peacefare (to simultaneously build and destroy) different from nature’s cyclical symbiosis?

6) Positivist Materialism
What gets left out when engaging positivistic design? Is constant change the only way that a designer can operate? What does hyper-mutating design do with the jingle Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without! ?

Question concerning the politics of design

1. should an architect always feel a responsibility to change the way people think?

2. then is it ok to build architecture that is merely a temporal manifestation of current thought?

3. i ask this question because i believe that many architects are struggling with the idea that their work should stand the test of time. isn't that what theorists are most concerned with, and commercial architects give up on?

Here goes the first installment of (not-dumb never asked) questions.......


1. Questions to the Conference

Do you feel the chair you are sitting in reflects your personality, and/or your own design sensibilities? Was your choice of seat conscious? Additionally, what are a few of your favorite chairs?

Would you agree that you all are, in essence, curators? On the point of collaboration and co-authorship, where do you see the role of the curator? Do you see curating as a form of art/design as relevant as any other?

2. If everything is design, what is good design and why?

Design is the idea, the invention, the process, the materials, the product, the visual, the effect, the usage, ect. Does the overall health of the design, environmentally and physically, make it good or bad? Does the functionality, or ability to problem-solve make it good or bad? Does the appeal and emotive response to it make it good or bad? Is it the harmony of all three? Is good and bad subjective to personal opinion? If so, to who’s opinion, the audience, the designer, or the outside critics of the design world? Does aiming at a specific audience make a design elitist or better functioning?

Collaboration?

What is collaboration? Is it intentional team-work? Is it the osmosis/zeitgeist idea of complex systems of human interaction? Can one individual come up with a design? Do so many things effect design that an individual’s idea is just a reaction to it? Just how great do you have to be in order to stand out? Does a designer have to encompass all aspects of design or can a person concentrate on one and still sleep at night? Is collaboration always about working together, or can healthy competition for money, power, fame, ect., fuel new, possibly better, designs? Is an individual’s desire to work alone a bad thing if in the end every action has a reaction?

why debate? Designing is just a job!

Whether design is everything or nothing, is it not alright if a designer makes, does, and thinks in his or her own way?

3.-How did Bruce come up with the conclusion that we need 4 worlds to support out consumption?

-What would you say design is, and do you think design is being denied?

-if design is denied, why do you say is denied, and what do you classify as denying design, and who do you think is withholding design.

4. To Bruce Mau:
What is it that you do? How does it fall under the cloud of design? Would it be appropriate to ask if you are really a designer, or is your practice as yet unnamed, maybe "pre-apocalyptic-engineering" would be more apt... Would you feel more comfortable at another school? Your definition of design seems to be more based on a process or a series of material selections and manufacturing decisions. What implications do you think your design process is supposed to have on the practice of invention in design?
To Zoe Ryan :
You've been attacked several times; but you seem to be refusing to defend yourself without aligning with a member of the panel. If you were to assume that none of these characters are on your side or willing to back you up, what would you say?
To Mr. Kipnis:
If design exists in order to affect the way that people understand the world, what are successful examples of this affective design?
To Aaron Betsky:
Your comments about design seem to threaten the practice in an almost opposite method from Mr. Mau; but with the same effect, mainly, that architecture, design, as a medium driven by realization and commodity could cease to exist if it becomes only an ephemeral grouping, in miniature, of what could be, or with the passing of time, what could have been. If your intention to demote architecture to an artistic medium in order to free up the thinking of the practice was regularized, how would you sleep at night?

5. so here are some domb questions:

so what do you think is "good" design?
what should be though, sought, and taught?
what do you think young designers and yet-to-be designer's task?
what do you think you have in common?

that is the question

First of all, don't miss this Friday's presentation by Bjarke Ingkel of BIG (http://www.big.dk/) at room 1100 in the Art and Architecture Building at UIC at 6:00 p.m.

In the spirit of the axiom "the dumbest question is the one never asked," here are the questions that were never asked of the discussants. As with most axioms, the penetrating wit and seductive eloquence of these questions truly debunks the aphorism that unasked questions are necessarily dumb. Therefore since brevity is the sole of wit and tedious the limbs and outstretched flourishes......


The questions will follow this post

More matter with less art

Today our contemporary architecture class returned to the well-cleaned carcass of the AIC roundtable two weeks ago. As with any stock, the carcass goes a long way.

1. We begin by visiting student blogsites:

http://del.icio.us/n_institute
http://chameleonsdish.blogspot.com/
http://glenna1.wordpress.com/
http://youvegotsomeissues.blogspot.com/
http://spanengarchi.blogspot.com/

2. Issues and allusions:

What is the aesthetic of nothingness? One example, which Betsky cited, was Doho Suh's "Perfect Home."

How does the "alchemy of collaboration" unfold? Do we adhere to Kipnis's notion (osmosis/rhizomatic) or Mau's (linear/"softball"/economic)? The class vied between the former's complex notion and the latter's more legible one. Arguments against Kipnis concentrated upon the almost ethereal, rarefied and esoteric formulation of his argument that design/ideas/art bleeds, that it does not obey any strict discursive or aesthetic cartography, that it is detectable but not plottable. So how is this informative? what does this do? Hearing this discussion, where does an aspiring designer go with it? Do they surrender to the whims of stochastic fancy?
As for the anti-Mau, he was faulted for being overly reductive and, as such, inaccurate to the point of obsolescence. Is the very legibility of Mau's theories the problem? Is something so easily apprehended complicit/amendable to the retarding influence of power? Conversely, does this suggest that we can only elude capture by flaying about in madly discursive syllogisms and semantics? Can we only be free by getting lost? What is the point of that?

We then proceed to a debate about the validity of blogs: Do we or should we trust them? Are blogs as democratic as they promise or just an e-gossip-rash, an irritation, with only a parasitic relationship to any laudable political project? Some students claim that blogs do not contribute anything substantive to popular discourse. They merely proliferate and reiterrate. Others countered with the now whetted claim that blogs are nothing less than personal publishing devices that foster, unlike print media, dialogue.

3. Everybody posts the questions they wanted to ask at the conference.



4. Tom Wolfe's "Bauhaus to Our House" excerpt:

"O BEAUTIFUL, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?

I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors—and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.

Without a peep they move in!—even though the glass box appalls them all.

These are not merely my impressions, I promise you. For detailed evidence one has only to go to the conferences, symposia, and jury panels where the architects gather today to discuss the state of the art. They profess to be appalled themselves. Without a blush they will tell you that modern architecture is exhausted, finished. They themselves joke about the glass boxes. They use the term with a snigger. Philip Johnson, who built himself a glass-box house in Connecticut in 1949, utters the phrase with an antiquarian's amusement, the way someone else might talk about an old brass bedstead discovered in the attic.

In any event, the problem is on the way to being solved, we are assured. There are now new approaches, new movements, new isms: Post-Modernism, Late Modernism, Rationalism, participatory architecture, Neo-Corbu, and the Los Angeles Silvers. Which add up to what? To such things as building more glass boxes and covering them with mirrored plate glass so as to reflect the glass boxes next door and distort their boring straight lines into curves.

I find the relation of the architect to the client in America today wonderfully eccentric, bordering on the perverse. In the past, those who commissioned and paid for palazzi, cathedrals, opera houses, libraries, universities, museums, ministries, pillared terraces, and winged villas didn't hesitate to turn them into visions of their own glory. Napoleon wanted to turn Paris into Rome under the Caesars, only with louder music and more marble. And it was done. Is architects gave him the arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine. His nephew Napoleon III wanted to turn Paris into Rome with Versailles piled on top, and it was done. His architects gave him the Paris Opéra, an addition to the Louvre, and miles of new boulevards. Palmerston once threw out the results of a design competition for a new British Foreign Office building and told the leading Gothic Revival architect of the day, Gilbert Scott, to do it in the Classical style. And Scoot did it, because Palmerston said do it.

In New York, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt told George Browne Post to design her a French château at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, and he copied the Château de Blois for her down to the chasework on the brass lock rods on the casement windows. Not to be outdone, Alva Vanderbilt hired the most famous American architect of the day, Richard Morris Hunt, to design her a replica of the Petit Trianon as a summer house in Newport, and he did it, with relish. He was quite ready to satisfy that or any other fantasy of the Vanderbilts. "If they want a house with a chimney on the bottom," he said, "I'll give them one." But after 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEO's, commissioners, and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one's bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.

And why? They can't tell you. They look up at the barefaced buildings they have bought, those great hulking structures they hate so thoroughly, and they can't figure it out themselves. It makes their heads hurt.

(rear) Ends of the beginning

Here are the chair images that attend the previous post.

1. Nimrod chair--Kipnis
2. Ego chair--Mau
3. Chair one--Ben

"Thinking and Making in the Modern World" roundtable round-up:

Let's begin with the end: what chairs were supporting the discussants' (rear) ends?

1. Jeff Kipnis: Marc Newsom "nimrod chair"
2. Ben Nicholson: Konstantin Grcic "chair one"
3. Bruce Mau: "Ego Chair"(?)

Aside from the need to support girth--this is an architecture confrence after all, so loads are on our minds (and chairs)--what do the chairs signify about its occupant?

"Kipnis' chair corresponded with his flamboyance"
"Ryan was by far the most reserved, the most physically and philosophically lightest, and had a chair to match"

Observations on participants' presentations:

Kipnis:

6 minute presentation consisting of a series of concatenated images:

1. Monte Python "Life of Brian" scene wherein Brian attempts to dissuade his rabble of disciples to think individually:

Brian: "Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You are all individuals!"

Disciples: "Yes! We're all individuals!"

Brian: "You are all different!"

Diminuitive man in crowd: "I'm not..."

The Crowd: "Shhh!"


The images that follow include: Warhol paintings of Mao in a capitalist-pig-embodiment boardroom; Anish Kapoor trumpet over central asian cabal; Coop Himmelbau BMW plant design (?) = sculpture outside the Piazza del Vecchio in Florence; Zaha = poo shaped sculpture = Lynn sculpture; Mood river shots. Seemed to imply, sans words, the proximity and overlap of art/architecture and media in general, regardless of ideology that provoked the works.

Kipnis' images underlined his later diatribe against Mau concerning "affective" (kipnis) vs. "complex system" thinking: interest in disequilibria/ how to tell a good story. Kipnis told the "best story" in the sense that his narrative complemented his form and bravado.

Zoe Ryan:

General consensus that her talk was the most long winded, "condescending" and tedious of all discussions. Audience responded to Ryan--Kipnis dialogue as football fans would to a spectacular tackle....ooooooooohhhhh!

Bruce Mau:

Showed animated graph from www.gapminder.org. Claimed that the world has unequivocally improved according to this graph because both infant mortality rate and no. children/women are declining world wide. Also presented image of 4 worlds signifying how many planets we currently need to support our consumption. Next slide lauded our rate of progress: 21st century = 20,000 years of human development." Kipnis would later challenge Mau's aphasia towards desirable dis-equilibria: that statistic on the rate of progress would not exist without the debt we are incurring on natural resources. We need 4 worlds to support 20,000 years of growth in 100 years.

"approx. 90% of inventions fail because the context is not ready for it"__paraphrasing Mau. Is Bruce assuming the responsibility of mediating potentially failing or fail-able inventions (e.g. the Segway in "Massive Change") and context? Is Mau attempting to put the horse-power before the horse before the cart? Or is Mau just, as Kipnis called him, a "salesman."

Aaron Betsky:

__"Design doesn't matter"......."Design = visual masturbation"
__architecture is just "ornamental activity;" "gilding"
__"what does architecture do?"......"[Buildings] are cultural endeavors that try to understand the physical world we inhabit and give it back to us in a better form." Isn't this basically what metaphors and signs do? Is this just a reiterration of archi-writing (Derrida) and Eisneman's "autonomous discourse of architecture."
__"I am looking for an architecture that activiates"
__"Buildings are where architecture goes to die;" the day after this conference Betsky delivered a talk on "Nothing." A great discussion concerning "nothing" and "architecture," undoubtedly a conversation that greatly informed Betsky's notions, is in the book "The Singular Objects of Architecture" concerning conversations between Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel.

Contemporary Arch Class 2_19_08

Class discussion regarding information gleaning:

1. JSTORE : accessed via flaxman library
2. Google books : easy preview resource--no stealing possible
3. Google scholar