Shape of We

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It was our last day in California. We stopped along the beach to watch skateboarders. What struck me besides the shadows crisp against the metal was the lack of chaos -that there were only a few skateboarders on the course at a time, that turns were being taken. It occurred to me there was some sort of unspoken rule system being followed. A body language and a body of language I didn’t previously notice and I didn’t understand. This is how we move through the world, I thought. Into and out of bodies of language. How much have I missed? There must be a world out there that contains all of the meanings that get lost.

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Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings at Tate Modern

This video brought to you by Tate.org.uk Participatory art was a new concept when the exhibition Bodyspacemotionthings first went on show at the Tate in 1971. Created by the American artist Robert Morris, it consists of a series of beams, weights, platforms, rollers, tunnels and ramps that people can clamber all over. It closed just four days after opening, due to safety concerns over the wildly enthusiastic reaction of the audience. Take a look at this 2009 recreation of the piece and listen as curators Catherine Wood and Kathy Noble talk about Morris's vision of art and participation.

Short video on Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings where his fascination with how people experience space through their bodies, not just through sight was taken to his most extreme.

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“Where in this city, screens flicker

with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, 

victimized hirelings bending to the lash, 

we also have to walk...if simply as we walk

through the rain soaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

of our own neighborhoods. 

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement still six stories high,

or the long-legged young girls playing ball in the junior high school playground. 

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, 

our animal passion rooted in the city.

From Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language, pg. 25

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“Every living thing has a physical boundary that separates it from its external environment. Beginning with the bacteria and the simple cell and ending with man, every organism has a detectable limit which marks where it begins and ends. A short distance up the phylogenetic scale, however, another, non-physical boundary appears that exists outside the physical one. This new boundary is harder to delimit than the first but is just as real. We call this the ‘organisms’ territory.’ ...In man, it becomes highly elaborated, as week as being very greatly differentiated from culture to culture...

Since none of of us is taught to look at space as isolated from other associations, feelings cued by the handling of space are often attributed to something else. In growing up people learn literally thousands of spatial cues, all of which have their own meaning in their own contacts.”

From Edward T. Hall’s “The Silent Language”, pgs. 164-165

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Marc Kushner: How Do Buildings Make Us Feel?

Architect Marc Kushner explains why architecture tends to swing drastically between traditional and experimental styles — and why the future of building design is going to be different.

Part of the latest TED Radio Hour on the power of design in our lives. The whole podcast is worth a listen but the interview with architect, Marc Kushner, is quite compelling:

“We are always in architecture. And if we’re not in architecture we’re surrounded by architecture. So, think about anything else that has that much presence in your life that you don’t respond to emotional. You spend as much time around buildings and you do around loved ones.”

He goes on to say “I remember an office building, actually, and it looked like every other suburban office building except it was this really weird baby blue. It just struck me that someone went out on a limb here. It made me think that were possibilities that ordinarily you don’t see explored.”

But it is his points about how our relationship to architecture is changing and what that means for architecture that is really exciting. He expounds on the pendulum of architecture swinging back and forth and back and forth, between architects trying new things and giving the public what’s familiar, and how the internet and, more specifically, social media have essentially negated the pendulum...”The norm is experimentation now.”

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“Vectors are mathematical symbols for expressing the direction and magnitude of forces active within or upon a system...If we can see vectors as forms of potential and kinetic energy, then we can see buildings and the city itself that was, too. If we can see these things not simply as objects, but as embodied energy, then we can see ourselves and others not as material objects, but as living systems interacting continuously with other systems, both animate and inanimate...

The energy system’s view of the city and its life has strong political implications, in particular regarding prevailing ideas of identity and, its corollary, property. Individuals, in such a view, are identified not so much by what they ‘own’ or who they ‘are’, according to the social roles they play, but by what they ‘do’, how they interact with others, including the inanimate systems in their environment. In the same way, buildings, public spaces, and other forms of property can no longer be identified according to building types set by pre-determined economic and functional categories but by how they perform in a landscape shaped by complex interactions. What architects do with their own initiatives or those of others seriously impacts networks of interacting human and other energy flows, as well as the energies latent in the city.”

-From Lebbeus Woods’ blog post “Architecture of Energy” dated June 5, 2009

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Unfinished Spaces -Trailer.

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Structures for structures. New on old. Temporary on permanent.

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“Area provides clues to cultural values.” - David Bergman

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“Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city park. My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and assume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city, and only then did my hectic mind finally show some pity and still itself, only then did dreamless sleep arrive.”

From Open City by Teju Cole