Method

27.02.2011  In the outstanding novel Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street, David Payne tells the story of a little boy, Sun I, who is born of a Chinese mother and an American fighter pilot in China. His mother dies at birth and his father returns home to theUnited States; he is left alone and grows up in a monastery. His mentor and teacher is the chef, Wu, who takes good care of him. The monastery is on a high rock upon a river. One of their daily chores is to carry water from the river to the monastery up a rocky path. The boy remembers that whenever they arrived at the top of the rock his buckets were empty, all the water spilled, whereas Wu's were always full. Here are Sun I's thoughts:
'It was true. By some extraordinary luck or skill Wu never seemd to lose a drop, though he hurried along the treacherous stair at twice my pace. (I tried to cut my losses by moving slowly, plotting my course in advance and picking each footrest with deliberate care.)  
    "I don't understand it," I confessed to him. "You must know some kind of trick. Explain your method."
    . . . "You haven't yet caught on. It's precisely this-excess of method-that confounds you, leaves the buckets nearly empty. . ."
     "If you're so smart, how do you do it then?"
     "How do I do it? . . . I close my eyes and think of nothing. My mind is somewhere else. My legs find their way without me, even over the most uneven ground. How can I tell you how I do it? . . . I can't even remember myself!" (Payne, 1984, pp. 18-19)'
-from How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, 2007, pp. 370-1


See also Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. If we divorce this for a second from the obvious connections with the over obsessiveness over process in the architectural discourse, what else can we take from this story? Is it possible that true intelligence resides in the body, not the mind? Or better still that the balance in this story between body and mind illustrates true intelligence. Maybe the abstract expressionist painters were on to something half a century ago when they allowed the subconcious (could this be the body) control their paintings. Overly rationalized buildings are not intelligent if they are impoverished in sensory stimulation in relation to the body.

Statement 1.0

21.02.2011 This thesis takes the stance that architecture should occupy the void, or the space between, the traditional categories of form and content. Throughout various movements in art and architecture the debate between form and content has forced designers and artists to choose a side. Modernism for example was entirely concerned with form. In the eyes of the Modernist architect the emotional content needed to be stripped away from the program to explore the most pure form of the built work. On the side of the coin, Post-Modernism studied the essence of the forms by cartooning them and using pure forms in unconventional manners. Supramodern architecture is essentially a combination of both lines of thinking in that it studies the relationship of meaningless form with the content stripped away.

The Lacuna is the Cartesian gap between form and content. Descartes drove the wedge that formally split the concepts of form and content in his writing “Discourse on Method”. By dividing rational thought and emotional feeling, he introduced a dualism which infected the thinking behind every discipline, not the least of which was architecture. The underlying assumption behind the dualism is that there is a ‘good’ side and a ‘bad’ side. In other words, the emotional side corrupts the rational side and therefore the rational should assert its dominance over the emotional. The Lacuna accepts the idea of a dualist approach to the world, however not in a hierarchical manner. There is a difference between rational and emotional thought yet neither can exist without the other. 

Another assumption at work is the fundamental link between architecture and culture. The built world is driven by the culture and in fact it is no less than a physical manifestation of the beliefs of a culture. Thus to understand where architecture is going, it is necessary to understand where culture is going. The Capitalist Empire (it is widely misnomerred as the global culture, however the myth of democracy is the driving factor) is in the early stages of a shift from the material culture of industrialization to the post-material virtual world. Industrialization stripped the imbedded content from objects such that the container of the form could be filled with content in service of selling more objects. In the virtual world there is no longer a need for the object only a need for the image of the object.

The movie, The Matrix, deals with the idea of a virtual world head on. At the beginning of the movie, we only see people in what we believe to be real life, and they are depicted as soulless, emotionless beings. Facial expressions are kept to a minimum. We soon discover that everybody is only a “digital projection of your virtual self.” Aka an image. The human race has been conquered by (the) machines empowered by artificial intelligence and the Matrix is merely a computer simulation fed into the brains of people who are encapsulated in pods in a comatose state from the moment of their birth. There is no more object and no more sensory perception. There are numerous similarities between the Capitalist Empire and the machines of The Matrix. Is it possible that we are already living in the Matrix?

There were a handful of people who had managed to escape the grasp of the Matrix and were living underground in the real world because the surface world had been rendered completely uninhabitable save for the unconscious human storage towers. The characteristics of the real world in the movie embodied a highly sensory experience bordering on the grotesque. I am using the grotesque in this sense to refer to experiences which have no precedent in our memory. Although the allegory of the cave is strongly embodied in the real world, the general living conditions are extremely removed from our experiences of house and home.

The real human beings in the movie are able to plug in to the Matrix and operate within the context of the simulation either to pull more people out of the Matrix or to accomplish other tasks. The protagonist in the movie is a human who after some time training in the Matrix while still living in the real world, learns to manipulate the Matrix. His powers also then extend into the real world where he is able to affect the machines in the same manner as the Matrix. In other words, He learns to operate in the Lacuna. This means that it is time for architecture to embrace the immaterial world. That is, the objectform is no longer of any importance. The form of experience is hugely important. The content of our experience is hugely important. Architecture should be about memory and experience first and foremost and in order to occupy a place in our memory, it has to connect with us on an emotional level. Emotions are driven by sensory perception. The emotion of fear is based on the memory of something that caused harm to us, such as a predator in the caveman age. This memory includes the sound of the animal, the smell of the environment you were in, and mostly the unconscious memory of your body’s reaction to the situation. When faced with this situation again, the rational mind uses the emotional feelings of the mind to illicit a response. In the case of the predator, it is more than likely a response of flight. Thus, there is no separation between emotions and rational thinking. They work in tandem in the memory of an experience. Architects are no longer responsible for designing objectforms. They are responsible for designing experiences. The form of the experience and the content of that experience are the products. The media used are the sensory inputs. What does it mean to design the immaterial?

Designing the Grotesque

2.2.2011This student(Isaie Bloch) project from Austria illustrates the meaning of the term the Architectural Lacuna. The grotesque structure ignites a curiosity in our minds. It is representative of something that we cannot yet understand.
Descartes' Discourse on Method laid the foundation for Modernist culture as we know it. The dualism he proposed divided the world and placed it into categories of polar opposites. Since his proposal, we have seen architecture as superior to nature. In fact, we have seen it as harmful to architecture. In recent times the reaction against this has flipped the view somewhat to encompass a view that buildings are harmful to nature. Realistically both are true. If you are a pessimist. This building occupies the space between buildings and nature.
Network theory has taught us a valuable lesson about the way in which the world operates. It is simply not possible to view the world as an abstract form of cause and effect. The Modernist spirit of control attempted to simplify everything to its root cause and believed that controlling each one individually would result in the desired effect. Network theory proposes a system of nodes and links. In a system certain nodes can be removed or altered and indeed have the effect that was pursued. However its not always that simple. Some nodes are more tied in then others. If we reduce our view of the World Trade Center to that of one simple node, we need not look any further for an example of what happens when one node is removed.
Is it possible that the oversimplification of life in the Modernist view stripped away emotional thought and feeling? The perfection of the world offered by the Modernist utopia has left us desperate to feel something, anything. The pursuit of the grotesque, the imperfect, and the ugly embraced by the avant garde is rooted in this. In contrast to the Greek ideal beauty, the Modernist Empire, contemporary society acknowledges that the most interesting experience of any day exists in the space between. The Architectural Lacuna is interested in studying what Descartes wasn't. The rational and the emotional are inextricably linked and it is the job of the architect to design the link.