"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.