We finished up today looking at a word that doesn't exactly have explicit existence in the texts we examined, and that was intensity.
Up until that point we were examining the work of Eisenman, van Berkel, Lynn, and Balmond and charting the consistency of terms like fluidity, movement, vector, dynamic, event, etc. All of these imply situations of change whether continuous or catastrophic.
There were some good problems; form os one of the categories of architecture's ontology, how does Lynn's essay make that specific? Event is an ethico-political and historic potentiality in Eisenman, but in what sense does the reframing of architecture lead to a critical attitude if that attitude is apropos of nothing in particular? The programmatic reconfiguration of space as always multiple in van Berkel leads to a transformation of the generic, but in what sense does that multiplicity change our understanding of the urban experience which in many ways already is multiple? Balmond for sure is maybe the most precise, situating all of this in a radical transformation of structure.
But then note how this precision also answers the problem for Lynn.
All of these essays are poised to attack Modernism and the legacy of Cartesianism and Euclidean geometry, all the while invoking the Fold from Deleuze and Catastrophe theory for Thom.
The question is why.
I'd like each of you to wanswer that by introducing a very very short essay on intensity using as precisely the words of these authors
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1 comment:
just a quick question...all of these guys are railing against modernism, but speak little of what came before it (aside from the nod to the baroque's folds)...is this because modernists essentially did away with any argument for historic styles? or does the drive for progress just not concern itself with anything but the immediate past? and as an extension, does NOT addressing historic styles (which modernism has lambasted) actually in a way legitimize modernism? i'm not trying to be contrary, i'm just really curious about why i'm not supposed to be interested in design methodologies that just happen to be decades/centuries old.
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