Between

Is between inclusive or exclusive?

Dunno why that question just struck me, but I think in perceiving it as exclusive we may be making a mistake. I also think that between is exclusive in Western culture, but inclusive in Asian culture. Though I could be wrong.

I suppose I should acknowledge that the between I am referring to here is the between that is the social and the political. The thing is that the Western tradition puts the social as something that happens between people but is exclusive of those people the social is happening between. While Asian cultures are more like to think of the social that is between as inclusive of the people it is between.

These two models are significant in what they say about the social, the political, and how it is that people interact. And perhaps by thinking of between as exclusive of what the between is between, we are creating a socio-political situation that impedes communication and negatively influences personal involvement. In other words, we are defining the very sources of the between as not part of the between and thus something that stands apart from the process that is between.

Between, in the social sense, is really something that must be inclusive of those that it stands between, so that it does not stand apart from that which defines it, but rather those that define it stand together as a functioning unit of between. I don't mean this in the sense of traditional Asian cultures, because there are other flaws with the model there. Though between is inclusive it it functions to define those who define it, rather than just letting them define the between that is between them. As such, it may be an odd quasi-circumstance where between is both inclusive and exclusive, or is claimed as inclusive but functions as exclusive.

And I have no idea of where I am going with that, it is the just the germ of an idea.

Quantifying Education

In the big push to quantify education, I have come up with some measurement systems of my own that I would like to present here. I feel these will be invaluable in advancing our ability to effectively measure key components in education, as well as applying educational measures to other endeavors in life.

FTWE

Primarily a measure meant for post-secondary educational organizations, though also appropriate to private and charter schools, the Full Tuition Waiver Equivalency is the measure of the number of full tuition waivers could have been given out to students if that money had not instead been spent, for instance, on a fireworks display to celebrate the president of the college winning a golf tourney that the school paid to send them to.

All proposals for non-necessary expenses should be proposed both in dollar values and in FTWE. By using FTWE as a measure of expenditures, it is hoped it will make people much more sensitive to the nature and amount of their expenditures, given the sense of increased need to justify them that will potentially arise.

(5m²)_x

The Five More Minutes measure (5m²) is the amount of effort required to maintain student attention for five more minutes after some significant breakpoint is reached. The subscript "X" is the time factor (in hours) involved before this significant breakpoint. Further research is required in the rate of progression in this equation, though it appears to approach infinity somewhere shortly after three hours. The measure is somewhat complicated by the fact that it is non-zero when the time factor itself is zero. Though the range of results from a positive non-zero value to infinity does allow us to say with certainty that the time factor cannot function as a simple multiplier.

This measure is not meant purely as a school measure, beyond the ability to assess effort required, so much as a baseline for the measurement of other seemingly impossible tasks. For instance: "You've got to be kidding, that's at least (5m²)_2.5, if not significantly more! I want danger pay."

Publish or Perish

Being a book reviewer is beginning to convince me that the publishing industry might be a better place if more academics picked the perish option instead. Can one get tenure for picking the perish option? Maybe schools should give it some thought. Especially those with publishing units.

Think of it as akin to the government paying farmers to leave fields fallow to help prop up the value of agricultural produce. Rewarding faculty for not publishing (just teaching) in order to prop up the value of academic produce, or at least that portion of it that is in print. Particularly because academic produce has a very long shelf life and people are really still working on digesting products that were marketed a century or more ago.

If we don't take such a drastic action, are we at risk of a knowledge bubble collapse? We may already be approaching that point. Certainly, people are throwing new academic produce out there faster than it can be digested by anyone, thus limiting it to smaller and smaller targeted markets. The problem with targeting these small markets is that academic produce, as with all produce, is unhealthy if one consumes too much of one type, instead of consuming a balanced diet of knowledge. This means that the glut of specialized knowledge contributes less and less to the overall health of the knowledge economy and its consumers.

How the City Hurts Your Brain

How the City Hurts Your Brain from the Boston Globe.

Now, personally, I find cities exhilarating, at least dense metropolitan ones that still have pre-automobile sensibilities about them. I start moving at their pace. Put me in the countryside and I quickly start to find the lack of distractions to be most ... distracting. I guess I'm just weird that way. After all, most of the most creative and intelligent people in the world live off in the middle of nowhere and always have, right?

But the comments in the article about the importance of green space and nature is interesting. Because it is not just some nature that is really important. It is the diversity of that nature that makes a difference. So perhaps the problem is that our brain reads urban settings as a sort of monoculture, like an empty field. This doesn't refute the argument in the article, it just changes it a little. It also allows us to ask how we create urban forms that aren't monocultures.

The other reason I find the need for complexity interesting is the difference between Frederick Law Olmstead and a typical Japanese formal garden. A Japanese formal garden is so complex, so carefully laid out, that it compels your attention at every moment. Suddenly, every little detail becomes cogent and tangible and needing your attention. On the other hand, I have an Olmstead park a few blocks from where I currently live. I cut through it alot, but it doesn't compel me to attend to it. If anything, I am too busy watching for creeps lurking behind trees as I wend through the interesting bits and avoid the intimidating wide open spaces. But the article is right on the point that such natural complexity does help to clear the senses.

Perhaps for truly high level functioning, we need the energy, dynamism, and synergy of the city, of the properly people-oriented city, combined with the ability to step away into the cleansing realm of nature to bring those energy levels back down. So how do we do a better job of building spaces like that?

Non-Believers

It dawned on me a little after Obama's speech last Tuesday ...

The terms used to refer to those who don't believe in god, particularly God-with-a-capital-G, are all words that define the person, or people, in question in opposition to something they don't believe in.

• a-theist
• non-believer
• i(r)-religious

Not that there aren't positive words out there that don't purely define one in opposition to something that doesn't exist to them, they just tend not to get used, or only get used in specific contexts for instance:

humanist

naturalist

positivist

realist

some, but not all, existentialists

Maybe I was just thinking about it because, at least according to Obama's speech, beyond most (but not all) the major world religions there were the non-believers. Yet, not only are there many other religions, but there are also many spiritual people who don't "have religion," as it were.

That and too much religious rhetoric in a political speech from the leaders of a country that claims to have separated church and state begins to creep me out. The reason it creeps me out is that it starts the dialog from a position of exclusion. Even in acknowledging other belief systems, in order to be faith, by definition, it must start from the premise that those other belief systems are misguided or wrong (but we will treat them as equals until they finally come around).

The Constitution

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

An interesting point which I brought up two days ago. So here is the complete sentence.

In modern grammatical usage, "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" applies to both "a Citizen of the United States" and "a natural born Citizen". So technically, in order to be President someone had to be alive and a U.S. citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted.

Even ignoring the amount of political bickering because the founding fathers did not define "natural born citizen," but merely allowed it to be assumed as something everyone understood, this reading poses an interesting problem. If we delete the part of the statement that is self-negating because it is an impossible requirement, we get:

No person shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I am pretty sure the meant to say:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

But the comma means that is not what the did say.

Very interesting.

Skin or Veneer

One of the threads Rem Koolhaas weaves into Delirious New York is how the classic sky-scraping office building was an agent in the divorce between surface and interior, between the building's skin and its program. Stepping into a building ceased to be entering the building, and instead became passing through a gate into a program not revealed until you were standing in its midst. This, of course, was a given in the multi-use nature of such large structures.

What happened then, was that architecture was split into two components, program and skin. The interior of the building was designed to address a certain need. The exterior was designed to address another. These two needs did not necessarility have anything to do with each other.

This split has led to some very interesting pieces of architecture, by allowing much more room to play with the architectural skin. For instance, we currently have a spate of water-themed structures whose programs relate to wter in some way from people like Zheng Fang (the Beijing Water Cube) and Zaha Hadid (Ebro River Bridge Pavillion, 2012 Olympic Aquatic Center). These push the envelope of what architecture can be in very interesting ways. But what makes then interesting is that the divorce of program and skin has allowed them to find new ways to reestablish that connection, ways that might not have been thought of had that divorce not taken place.

But this split has also led to problems.

There is a great deal of architecture where the skin does not talk to the program of the interior. And as much architecture where the skin does not talk to the program of the surrounding urban landscape.

Thus a building may look beautiful (or at least masterful) on its own, but fail both its occupants and its context.

Nor does this divorce end at the skin. The past decade saw a spate of buildings with glorious atria, simply because the people handing out the awards had a thing about atriums. As a result, some buildings lost a third or more of their space to the skin of the building thrusting its was into the interior. For all the raves about the aesthetic quality, getting a third less building than you bargained for is not a win.

I won't name names, but I know of a college that built a new library so they could close down and renovate their old library. Unfortunately, and against the wishes of the library staff, the administration opted to build what was in effect an atrium with some office space around it. The librarians now have nicer offices, but the old library is still open and still in need of renovation because there is no place to move the books. Interestingly, in reading a retrospective of new architecture on the campus recently, the new library was not mentioned.

A huge atrium is just an attempt to expand the skin of a building into the building, usually at the cost of the program. Not all buildings are reception halls. One of the few places I have seen huge atria put to good use is in hotels where a complex and ornate entrace space houses reception areas, restaurants, bars, and services, all in a dynamic multilayered structure that can even find the time to feel initimate in places not in need of a sweeping vista.

So enough ramble. Points.

When designing a skin for a building, we don't want a veneer, we want a skin. It needs to breathe, interacting with its environment, and letting bits of it in as well as bits of what is inside out. It needs to appropriate house what is contained with in. Architectural design starts with the program. It is okay for the program to evolve in coordination with a skin that fits it, but it should not be forced to conform to a skin that does not. The skin can be echoed inside the building, but it should not dominate it.

Design for the next context up can perhaps be misinterpreted here. It is too easy to see the skin as the building and thus the context for the program, but it goes the other way. The skin, as is the building itself, is defined by the program. The program is designed by the social and economic forces that drive it. But the program, and the building, are also defined by the program of the physical structure (urban or not) around it.

Perhaps prt of the problem is that it is not a question of "context", but of "contexts". What are the next contexts up in the ladder? Are the commensurable.

For instance, the building can have multiple programs that may have conflicting needs that have to be resolved. A paper recycling plant using green architectural methods and sustainable resources. To the extent possible, the perfect pairing, but the recycling plant is still going to need heavy machinery and produce large (albeit both treatable and recyclable) waste flows.

The Hearst Tower in Manhattan takes such conflicts literally. While building a new building to meet their own needs, they also did not present another faceless glass tower to the street, instead letting it grow out of the original stone and steel building on the site. The atrium in the structure, though perhaps excessive, creates an intentional divide between the two programs, and, in effect, puts the tower on top of the old building instead of inside it. This gives the space of the old building a life it would not have if it were just a facade standing as the base of a new tower.

The idea of there being a single program, or a single solution, takes us back to the magick bullet. Things are much more complicated than that. But before this posting becomes a book, let's close with the following oversimplified diagram. I'm sure I'll find other reasons to harp on this topic later.

[Update: Wow, this essay is so totally a mishmash of thinly thought out threads poorly strung together. Oh well, what I get for using this as a journal of ideas ... I should go back to scrawling on paper first). It did, however, give me some good ideas that may show up in more focused commentary later.]

Movement

I have already spoken about movement in this blog. It is really one of my favorite topics. And I really do think it is underepresented in the discussion of architecture and urban form.

What? No wait! That can't be. The discussion of movement is one of the most critical parts of urban design. The same can be said about occupant flows in architecture.

True. But I have one word for you.

Reification.

Movement has been reified in the discussions. Moreover, it is not necessarily any particular form of movement that has been reified, but movement itself.

In urban form movement is considered in design, but it is too often considered as where to do put roads so people can drive from point A to point B. The question of "do we need roads in the first place", or "where will we park when we get there", is less often asked. The reason why the discussion of movement of urban form is critical is acknowledged by urban planner itself. Urban planning is heavily skewed towards building structures for the effective flows of people and goods. It is less often about whether those flows are really necessary in the first place.

Of course, by definition, some flow is necessary. But the question is not what flows are necessary, but how to maximize flows. I am admittedly, looking mostly at the United States and its car obsessed culture in making this point.

Comparatively, in Japan, it is possible to live in the country-side without a car, let alone in the city. The necessary avenues of movement are there to move people from point A to point B and back again. And yet, much of Japan is still of a very old urban form, where except for the main arterials, there are many places where automobiles are not even considered in the design and layout of the region.

Much of the Japanese urban landcape is pedestrian based. Even in newer urban spaces, like the perfect grid of central Fukuoka City, there are very few cars on the side roads that were built for them. They are more sort of long narrow parking lots for the shops on them. And I can assure you that you definitely feel like you are invading non-automotive space when driving down them. Compare that feeling to stepping into a sidestreet in New York City.

The practical upshot is that movement can take many forms in urban design, yet much urban design can get caught up in specific kinds of movement. Currently it is the automobile. Before that it was the trolley car, before that the railroads, before that the barge canals, before that navigable bays and channels, and long before that the processional routes to the temples.

But there is an important shift that occurred somewhere around the rise of Mercantilism. That is movement ceased to be about how people move and become more about how good and resources move. In other words, urban form became less about people and more about the flow of goods and services. In other words, it became about things.

This brings us back to my mention in a previous post about modern architecture and urban form being about the technology and the people. Movement is no longer really seen as something that people do, but rather as a technique. Which is to say, it is no longer a verb, to move, but has been reified into a thing, movement.

Its thingness can be clearly seen in a work like the OMA redesign of the Seattle Public Library. The stacks form a beautiful flow, progressing gracefully through the building from one end of the catalog to the other. The entire building has a nice organic feel to it in terms of the way things flow through it.

So why can't people find their way around the building?

Well, besides the need for better wayfinding, the fact that the building itself represents or captures a certain type of flow or movement, does not mean that this movement is commensurable with the needs of humans moving through it. In fact, the self-contained, fluid spiral of movement that is the building's conceptual structure, may actually be disorienting to people since it's self-contained nature creates and illusion of seamlessness that make the interfaces with exterior elements more difficult to find. Interfaces such as ... exit doors.

A beautiful building, of course, and it captures a representation of organizing knowledge whose structure is seemingly continuous and lends itself to being represented as a flow. In those senses it is very much a success. The failure of people to find their way around it is, by contrast, almost a triviality. It is easily fixed by some improved signage to help with wayfinding.

The problem arises in that this building is not unique in its failure to adequately address the way in which people will move through space in relation to the final structure. Though, admittedly, compared to most of what is out there, it makes a darn good attempt.

Whenever designing a structure for human use or habitation, we need to make sure the human factor does not get missed in the design. Talking about movement needs to start with how it is that people move about and what can be done to maximize the valency of simple human movement. Not transportation, movement. Movement, in the end, is a something that people do, not an abstract concept to be represented in material form, except as art.

The Shape of the Divine

In Everyware, Adam Greenfield talks about the coming age of ubiquitous computing and makes an interesting assertion: in the creation of a responsive technosphere that responds to our every action we are reestablishing the ideal of an animistic universe. The spirits would be man-made and in that sense not separate from us, but everything could have the potential for a rudimentary consciousness and ability to respond to us, to interact with us, and to be fickle and not do quite what we wanted. (It will be interesting to see what rituals grow out of this.)

More to the point, he asserts that this drive towards creating an animistic universe exists because it has been absent from our cultural traditional for so short a time in the grand scheme of things that it's absence is a mere blip on the cultural radar. Nor is he alone in this assertion. David Noble, in The Religion of Technology present us with the argument, echoed by many others, that religion is still a motivating force in much of our technological development. Bruno Latour takes it a step further and says we have not even got past being proper Platonists yet, let along having come any further along the ladder of social and cultural advancement (We Have Never Been Modern), an the greatest flaw of modernism was failing to realize its own ideals in favor of merely assuming we were right and and didn't need to address the big picture because external variables were inconsequential.

The divine has always been part of our built environment. And, in many ways, it can be seen as the part of our built environment that does try to capture the big picture. That big picture may, in and of itself, have been incomplete, otherwise why keep looking, but it was present.

The history of the divine in the built environment is talked about enough that I am going to move rapidly to the present. I just want to take a moment to point out that the point of the divine in the built world is to make the the building, the space, the thing created, an object of transcendence, to move us, or inspire us, toward perfection. From the Greek search for perfect forms to the Medieval cathedrals to the exuberant displays of wealth of the Baroque and Rococo back to the search for pure and clean forms of modernism, there has been a notion of the transcendent all the way across history.

With the rise of the Industrial era, phasing into the Modern, and then the post-modern, there appears to be a break from this history of the divine, a removal of God-with-a-capital-G from the picture within the Western tradition. Yet, there are two key points here. One is that God-with-a-capital-G was a relative late-comer to the roots of the Western tradition, only spending the last 2000 years as something other than the belief of a small, rather oppressed, minority. Moreover, such monotheism seems to be something unique to the Western tradition (allowing for its origins in what we now define as the Middle East). From a perspective of the global Web of beliefs it is just a drop in the bucket, regardless of its current popularity..

Back to the beginning and the point about a return to animism. The divine has been present, though as it was before, it is again, not focused on one God, but rather on that which we hold to be transcendent, having properties if the divine. If the works of David Noble, David Nye, and others are to be believed, that thing which we hold to be transcendent is that elusive creation known as technology. Certainly it fits the criteria of the divine, and overarching, ubiquitous, undefinable force that has a perpetual and significant impact on our lives, or relations, and how we conduct ourselves.

We have replaced transcendence through external agency with transcendence through our own means, but the idea of transcending, of reaching the divine has not gone away. Much of what has come after the rigors of Modernism can be seen as a casting about for new forms to realize then, when Modernism itself clearly failed to produce. The monolith has failed us, so let's try the fluid, the imperfect, the incomplete, the ironic, the retro, the contradictory. Yet, as with the Modern, much of it is still a veneer over the simple necessities of functionality and usability. This is not to say that wonderful things do not sometimes result, but so do ridiculous things, much like everything that came before.

But today's changes in the built environment are also caused by another force: the monotheistic mindset. In holding our own creations as transcendent, we persist in doing so from the stance of one right answer, one true path to transcendence.

I would propose that the one true path we have fixated on is movement. Moving as fast as possible, through space with vehicles, through time with acceleration of technological advance, in place through media that brings the entire world into the here and now. But except for the last item, that is not transcendence. For movement to be transcendent, it must obliterate time and space and put everything in the here and now. The vehicle to move people between perfect spaces was the core of the Modern. Now we instead try to move spaces to people through idealized abstractions.

And that is the next item.

The Magick Bullet

This is connected to the notion of utopia and the perfect form.

The magick bullet is the one perfect solution that is going to make everything better. An idea that is in many ways part and parcel of utopian idealism, implicit in the hubris to assume that your solution will in fact succeed where others have failed and will make the world a better place. Such is hubris well spent, normally, but it is hubris nonetheless. Particularly because most such ideations get fixated on one solution to one problem or one set of solutions to one set of problems, on the assumption that fixing that will cause everything else to fall conveniently into place.

Thus we are first presented with Plato's Republic, ruled by carefully schooled philosopher kings, who are more equal than others, and who will bring the world to a grandeur akin to Hesiod's Golden Age. And from there we progress through the Western tradition (I confess not having enough knowledge on other traditions to speak meaningfully about them) in a series of what are essentially debates on who is fit to rule and why, each manifest in material form and represented in architectural and urban forms. Of course, the argument about who is fit to rule in this context is not one of who is the wisest, for the scholars long ago realized that wisdom has many faces. It is not a matter of how much wisdom, but rather whose wisdom and correct and contains the greater truths that will lead the world toward perfection.

Although it is easy to find the historical record of this, bringing it closer to the modern time makes it more difficult to see who is propounding what. And there is a reason for that.

Somewhere in the evolution of modernism and its children we made the shift from which ideas and ideals, in their realization, will provide the magick incantation that will make the world a better place. Now we instead are caught up in which devices and forms will provide this for us. Certainly the first glimmer of this can be seen in things like Ebenzer Howard's Garden cities, but it is much more evident in the new urbanism. In the new urbanism, it is not a set of ideals that make the place a good place, but the correctness of its form. The new urbanism builds infrastructures for living. And, as people are finding, just because it is built to look like the perfect place ...

So we hunt for forms that will somehow allow us to transcend to a better world, not only in highly planned urban forms, but also in architectures that attempt to be the voice of the new, somehow invoking deep insights in the masses, leading to a realization of an elightened populace through expanded consciousness. At least, I can think of no other motivation for such experimentation beyond ego. Not that much of it isn't beautiful to behold. But we tend not to hear as much about functionally aesthetic as we do pure aesthetic. We hear much more about Frank Gehry's latest melted contribution than we do about things like the ACROS building in Fukuoka. Unless, of course, we are reading books by Ken Yeang and studying sustainable design.

Although sustainable design fits this mould of forms and technologies as magick bullets. Who knows, it may even validate the idea that good forms make good people and all this bickering about who's ideals were right are an antiquated way to try to make things better. It is also a nice segue into the other aspect of the topic: technology and devices as solutions.

Much architecture and urban form in the modern age is built around the idea that certain technologies will automatically make things better. Certainly an inarguably visible one is the automobile and the idea of personal transport. If everyone is free to move where they will, as they will, the world will be a better place. The problem, of course, is that the resources of the world are not sufficient to support everyone in the world having a car, except maybe as a place to live, There is just not enough room to put everyone on the roads. Besides, where would they go where we to succeed?

The problem with expecting technologies and devices to move us toward utopia (barring being able to find it on a map and driving there) is two fold:Oone is that the forms we devleop begin to become more focused on accomodating that device or technology and less on human needs. The other is the surrendering of agency to that technology to allow it to assist us, even though it is an agency that the technology does not possess. In other worlds we expect something an inanimate object to actively assume the role of caring for us. This is where the magick bullet comes into the picture.

The point of the magick bullet is that even though it is supposed to be an inanimte object, technology, or concept, devoid of agency, it is nonethelss infused with a divine agency (thus the magick bit) which allows it to function in a way that goes far beyond its expected parameters and create some effect, hopefully for the better.

In many ways it is taking the idea of unintended consequences and trying valiantly to ascribe them to something by laying claim to an unkonw agency, and then extending that to the assumption that there is yet more agency to be discovered if we can just purify our bullet and find its true form.

I would hope that for some of you, in the context of the discussion, the notion of "purify" is cause for a momentary discomfort. It should be. The world is a messy place, and works much better when allowed to stay that way.

Beause of this shift from representation of ideals as forms to the presentation of the ideal device or technology in the way on which we build our structure and urban forms we have created a model for both architecture and urban form that are no longer about place. They are no longer about capturing our ideals both projective and in the historical trappings of our culture. Rather they are about representing the machine which constructed them. The putatively post-modern of today (and whatever we chose to name what has come after it) is not so much about the destruction of form as it is about representing the limits of technology. Put simply: look what I can do with my toys.

Certainly this has happened across history, just look at cathedrals. The difference is that prior forms were grounded in cultural context, a context of human society, not of machine. The beginning of this loss of the human component is as old as the Industrial Revolution, though it did not really gain strength until the height of modernism, where the worship of clean and crisp efficiency stripped away the old cultural trappings, which now only return in ironic, rather than iconic, forms.

When we find people competing to design the largest, tallest, or most abstract building yet to grace the skyline of Dubia, or of Mumbai, we see forms not generated for people, but to praise the machine. In other words, we have not escaped modernism, only purified it (there's that word again) and abstracted it, so it is an empty vessel that no longer contains a assumption of the same clean efficiencies with.

Utopia and the Perfect Form

Architecture and urban form are representations of notions of the perfect world, either with form as container, reflection, or shaper of some ideal state. From Plato's philosopher kings ruling over the agora and the ancient Chinese urban plans reflecting the order of the universe to Paolo Soleri's arcologies and the new urbanism that is the most recent incarnation of the the new towns / garden cities movement and is elegantly iconized in Harmony, Florida.

There is a great deal of questing in both architecture and urban design for the perfect form, as if creating the perfect form will cause the social order within it to naturally fall into place.

The problem with this is not that it overlooks the sloppiness of everyday life. Much of it does address this. There is a ready wealth of discourse on the failings of Harmony, Florida as corporate ownership shifted hands and many corners cuts and promised amenities sacrificed for higher profits. Paolo Soleri, a dogged utopian, openly states he is proposing new tools to think with, not solutions guaranteed to perfect the world.

The problem, instead, if we are to accept the ideas of Karl Mannheim in this context, is that in realizing utopian ideals in material form we begin the shift from their representing a utopian goal to an ideological one. The manifest form of an ideal cannot address every possible permutation required to achieve perfection, and therefore becomes a standard-bearer calling for an urealizable state, an inconvenient paradox necessary to justify its own existence. An ideal made manifest produces a form that is no longer a continuing progression toward realizing that ideal, but rather a static representation of that status quo at its time of inception. Almost by definition, the material fights against progress except in very narrowly defined and sanctioned channels.

Movement as Fetish

Is it just me or has movement become a fetish? I mean, it has been a fetish since the Marinetti's Futurism, if not from the inception of the steam locomotive. But even the locomotive moved at a relatively human scale, and modernism, with its clean, crispness held motion in check in its fixation on primal, rigid forms.

In many places I look movement seems to have been promote to the driving factor in much of what passes for design today. I don't just mean in engaging online environments, but in everything we do.

From the way we build our cites to the way we build our corporations, from networking to miniaturization to the deconstruction of form. We run wires between places and keep trying to make things smaller so everything can be here and now and we don't have to go anywhere else, or be anywhere else to acquire it. And yet no thought is given to that terminal of here and now and how it should be designed. It is just an abstract node in the network. The only people getting good design of the here and now are wealthy people who hire their own designers to build something customized for them (and, ironically, in this age of growing awareness of disparity, the severely impoverished rural citizens of industrialized nations ... and sometimes non-industrialized ones).

The egotistical architecture of the moment ... which is to say, what is hot, because organizations, municipalities, and people that want to flout their egos commission egotistical architecture ... is the architecture of the fluid. Amorphous deconstructions of buildings that look like they are in the midst of flowing apart, or appear incomplete, like something waiting to happen, each a fluid form caught in transition between stable states.

All this seems to come at the cost of designing for both people and place. Foresaking the rough form of the tactile in favor of the smooth and only purportedly sensual. The sleek interface of an iPod is not sensual. Silk is sensual. So is tree bark. An iPod is austere. A very aesthetically pleasing austere, but austere. It seems we have cast aside the underlying structures on which we build our modernist facades, but kept the modernist facades. Not so much for their aesthetics, as their efficiency. Clean is only one form of aesthetic, and only one form of beauty. Baroque is another. Organic yet another. They are also more expensive to manufacture than clean and austere. And it looks like things would flow off it so smoothly. The clean lines we have retained from modernism are symbolic of movement, and are realized as such by divorcing them from the primal and static forms they used to enshroud.

On the other hand, at least the iPod is well designed. That is because it is a conduit for bring everything to the here and now. But the here and now? Cheap balloon frame houses, too large for any practical use, or for most to afford in sprawling developments of uniform mediocrity. Safe for kids? Probably. Healthy for the human psyche? Well, that's a different story. The modern suburban housing track differs from old, cramped industrial row houses only in scale and the surface veneer, not in substance.

People and place need mixes of aesthetic. Uniformity and austerity create neutral spaces meant to abstract people from the space they are in. Spaces that are easy to slip through on the way to somewhere else. We need dynamic spaces that are about interactions, not about movement. At least from this perspective, there is something to recommend the architecture of egotism, even when it is fixated on movement in its forms of representation: it mixes things up, it adds to the melting pot of ideas, it competes with the other structures that are architectures of ego around it, and it creates a locus around which to build place. Of course, only really relevant for markets, civic and cultural buildings, but there is some seed of inspiration to be found there.