25 KiB
las.quotes.city theme
###??
- Cities as Meta-Cities The Centre for Conscious Design
Sorted
Myrto Kostaropoulou - Cities as Meta-Cities
Zoli professes: “Each time, a city is inscribed into a long cultural sequence, of which it is the utmost incident”3. A city is a condition which more or less efficiently meets its citizens. Also it is a context within which consciousness develops. How would a historian describe the contemporary urban period in about 50 years from now?
people.WilliamGibson
- ??
interview about cities
Necessity being one of invention's many mothers, I have a certain faith in our ability to repurpose almost anything, provided it becomes sufficiently necessary. Then again, I suspect we've abandoned cities in the past because they were too thoroughly built to do some specific something that's no longer required.
The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don't live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it's still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.
life in the metacity
YES
Cities are reduced in choice by Disneylanding themselves. It will become too perfect, there will be no more growth, and there will be a reduction of choice. But the visitors are expecting certain disneyfication in the city.but "of every Disneyland: you can't repurpose a theme park" (88).
people.JanPatocka
Polis
Proto má v základech dějinného procesu tak velký význam vznik epické a potom zvláště dramatické poezie, v níž člověk přihlíží vnitřním a pak vnějším okem k dění, jehož se účastnit znamená propadnout orgii; dějiny vznikají jako povznesení z úpadku, jako pochopení,že život dosud byl životem v úpadku a že existuje jiná možnost či možnosti, jak žít, než na jedné straně mozolení za naplněným žaludkem v bídě, nedostatku, důmyslně kroceném lidskými technikami – a na druhé straně orgiastické chvíle soukromé a veřejné, sexualita a kult. Řecká polis, epos, tragédie a filosofie jsou různé stránky téhož elánu, který znamená vzmach z úpadku. !patocka.polis.png.annotations/patocka.polis.png.annotations
people.JaceClayton
Recorded sound vibrates between history and pleasure. Live Sound exists only in the present. It cannot linger. This is one of the reasons why sound defines public space even more than architecture. Kids jamming that week's hit, neighbors fucking behind a thin wall, the call to prayers divine layer competing with traffic's blare, the loud low boom of something blowing up-and its opposite, hilltop garden quiet. #las
YES
Architecture real or imagined-prompts memory so etfficiently because our brains are hardwired to recall things-in-places and unusual or -disturbing scenes. Memory-quiz champion envision fantastic images that correspond to what they want to remember and "place" each icon in some specific nook of their mental building. These mnemonic aids are called memory palaces. Their effectiveness speaks to how when a place is destroyed or erased, all the personal histories linked to it slip further into the past. #las
people.VilemFlusser
City as wave through
YES
When it comes to cities, we should learn to think topographically rather than geographically and see the city not as a geographical place, but rather as a flection in a field. This is not a comfortable undertaking, as it involves one of those notorious paradigm shifts. When we were forced to see geography as the surface of a globe rather than as the description of a flat area, we ran into problems: Do the occupants of the southern hemisphere stand on their heads?
The three spaces of the city intermingle with one another today like fuzzy sets. The public space pushes into the private thanks to cable (as in the case of television). Private space pushes into public thanks to machines (like cars). The city really no longer contains distinct private and public spaces, and the theoretical space is so thoroughly integrated into both that it is no longer recognizable because it has changed so much. Theory means contemplativeness, and it is sacred because it rises above the flow of commerce. From this we get the weekend, vacation, retirement, and unemployment.
YES
We are those who are individuals who come together in the city. The old image of the city rests upon this image of humanity. This image of humanity has become unsuitable. Everything is divisible, and there can be no individual. Not only can atoms be split into particles but so can all mental objects; actions become “aktomes,” decisions become “dezidemes,” perceptions become stimulations, representations become pixels.
A striking aspect of this image of the city, when one has mobilized the necessary imagination for it, is its immateriality. In this image there are neither houses nor squares nor temples that are recognizable, rather only a network of wires, a confusion of cables.
We must stop wanting to recognize ourselves and others and instead seek to recognize others and to find ourselves in them again. We must break out of the capsule of the self and draw ourselves into concrete intersubjectivity. We must become projects out of subjects. The new city would be a projec- tion of projects among human beings. That sounds utopic, which it cer- tainly is, because the new city is not geographically locatable; on the contrary, it is everywhere where humans open up to one another. But pre- cisely because it sounds utopic it is realistic.
incubation.flusser.odsubjektukprojektu
1000p subplot
!
concepts.situationism
fulldocs.We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire
fulldocs.Theory of the Dérive
YES
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.
Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:
“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.
But from any standpoint other than that of police control, Haussmann's Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Today urbanism's main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles. We might be justified in thinking that a future urbanism will also apply itself to no less utilitarian projects that will give the greatest consideration to psychogeographical possibilities.
The revolutionary transformation of the world, of all aspects of the world, will confirm all the dreams of abundance. The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places--all this seems to be neglected. In any case it is never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.
YES
Certain of Chirico's paintings, which are clearly provoked by architecturally originated sensations, exert in turn an effect on their objective base to the point of transforming it: they tend themselves to become blueprints or models. Disquieting neighborhoods of arcades could one day carry on and fulfill the allure of these works.
I scarcely know of anything but those two harbors at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain--which are at the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances--that can rival in beauty the Paris metro maps. It will be understood that in speaking here of beauty I don't have in mind plastic beauty--the new beauty can only be beauty of situation--but simply the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.
For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marien proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby--the future belongs to them--the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history, from Tamerlane to Ridgway. Here we see reappear one of the main demands of this generation: educative value.
Formulary for a New Urbanism
YES
All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
YES
Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning; night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The man of the cities thinks he has escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of his dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.
YES
Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
people.WalterBenjamin
arcade project
YES
The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur's final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage ... they took the form of the bohème. To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function.
Drawing on Fournel, and on his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, his flâneur was a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism. For Benjamin, the flâneur met his demise with the triumph of consumer capitalism.[7]
Fournel wrote: "The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world ... which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd."[8][1]
R&D neeeded
<>>?::{{>"?"}}
- City Walks and Tactile Experience
- Bertolt Brecht 1935 Questions From a Worker Who Reads
- cubitt
- sound and city
- Online Sound and virtual architecture
- www.mitpress.mit.edu/leonardo/journal/hplmj.html
- ISEA96 proceedings
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210505-how-cities-will-fossilise
Mundaneum
V rámci Světové výstavy EXPO 1910 která se konala v Bruselu vytvořil Otlet s La Fontainem instalaci Mundaneum jako utopickou vizi kosmopolitního „města intelektu.“ Za podpory belgické vlády se Otletův plán začal formovat do podoby enormní kolekce kartiček a dokumentů, tehdy nejmodernější technologie pro skladování informací. S iniciativou byla spojená i vyhledávací služba – uživatelé mohli poštou zaslat dotazy a za poplatek 27 franků na tisíc kartiček obdrželi odpověď. (ibid., s. 188–189)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum
> [](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum#cite_note-6)The Mundaneum was originally housed at the [Palais du Cinquantenaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinquantenaire_Museum "Cinquantenaire Museum") in [Brussels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels "Brussels") (Belgium). This was originally renamed Palais Mondial, before the name Mundaneum was adopted. Otlet commissioned architect [Le Corbusier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier "Le Corbusier") to design a Mundaneum project to be built in [Geneva, Switzerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva,_Switzerland "Geneva, Switzerland") in 1929.[[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum#cite_note-:0-5) Although never built, the project triggered the [Mundaneum Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mundaneum_Affair&action=edit&redlink=1 "Mundaneum Affair (page does not exist)"), a theoretical argument between Corbusier and Czech critic and architect [Karel Teige](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Teige "Karel Teige").
- http://www.mundaneum.org/en
udc # Universal Decimal Classification concepts.knowledge managment.methodologies
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/0AXRA53tkh4A8A
Are we human
- tom wilkinson - article
- Colomina and Wigley - book
- incubation.interface
- to follow
- Frederick Kietler - Magic architecture
- An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale
The twenty-first century is also the age of allergies, the age of the "environmentally hypersensitive" unable to live in the modern world. Never at any one time in history have there been so many people allergic to chemicals, buildings, electromagnetic fields (f Uf), fragrances. ' . ' Since the environment is now almost completely man-made, we have become allergic to ourselves, to our own hyperextended body in a kind of autoimmune disorder. - colomina wigley
We have become sedentary beings, that is our lot. The house eats away at us in our immobility, like consumption. We will soon need too many sanatoria. . . . Engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, moral and joyful. Architects are disenchanted and idle, boastful or morose. That is because they will soon have nothing to do. We have no more moneylo pile up historical keepsakes. We need to cleanse ourselves... .The diagnosis is clear. Engineers make architecture. . . . People still believe, here and there, in architects, just as people blindly believe in doctors. - Le Corbusier
people.ClaudeBragdon
MAN THE SPACE-EATER
Man has been called the thinking animal. Space-eater would be a more appropriate title, since he so dauntlessly and persistently addresses himself to overcoming the limitations of his space. To realize his success in this, compare, for example, the voyage of Columbus' caravels with that of an ocean liner; or traveling by stage coach with train de luxe. Consider the telephone, the phonograph, the cinematograph, from the standpoint of space-conquest—and wireless telegraphy which sends forth messages in every direction, over sea and land. Most impressive of all are the achievements in the domain of astronomy. One by one the sky has yielded its amazing secrets, till the mind roams free among the stars. The reason why there are to-day so many men braving death in the air is because the conquest of the third dimension is the task to which the Zeit-Geist has for the moment addressed itself, and these intrepid aviators are its chosen instruments—sacrificial pawns in the dimension-gaining game.
All these things are only the outward and visible signs of the angel, incarnate in a world of three dimensions, striving to realize higher spatial, or heavenly, conditions. This spectacle, for example, of a millionaire hurled across a continent in a special train to be present at the bedside of a stricken dear one, may be interpreted as the endeavor of an incarnate soul to achieve, with the aid of human ingenuity applied to space annihilation, that which, discarnate, it could compass without delay or effort. // junction >> Edward O. Wilson
people.MarkFisher
flatline constructs
- Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 28 Compare this passage from Abstraction and Empathy. “In the Ionic temple and the architectural development ensuing upon it the purely constructional skeleton, which is based solely the laws of matter […] was guided over into the more friendly and agreeable life of the organic, and purely mechanical functions became organic in their effect. The criterion of the organic is always the harmonious, always the balanced, the inwardly calm into whose movement and rhythm we can without difficulty flow with the vital sensation of our organisms. In absolute antithesis to the Greek idea of architecture, we have the, on the other hand, the Egyptian pyramid, which calls a halt to our empathy impulse and presents itself to us as a purely crystalline substance. A third possibility now confronts us in the Gothic cathedral, which indeed operates with abstract values, but nonetheless directs an extremely strong and forcible appeal to our capacity for empathy. Here, however, constructional relations are not illumined by a feeling for the organic, as is the process in Greek temple building, but purely mechanical relationships of forces are brought to view per se, and in addition these relationships of forces are intensified to the maximum in their tendency to movement and in their content by a power of empathy that extends to the abstract. It is not the life of an organism which we see before us, but that of mechanism. No organic harmony surrounds the feeling of reverence toward the world, but an ever growing and self-intensifying restless striving without deliverance sweeps the inwardly disharmonious psyche away with it in an extravagant ecstasy, into fervent excelsior.” (115
fulldocs.Transmitting Architecture-The Transphysical City
In this effort to extend our range and presence to nonlocal realities, architecture has been a bystander, at most housing the equipment that enable us to extend our presence. The technologies that would allow the distribution or transmission of space and place have been unimaginable, until now. Though we learn about much of the world from the media, especially cinema and television, what they provide is only a passive image of place, lacking the inherent freedom of action that characterizes reality, and imposing a single narrative thread upon what is normally an open field of spatial opportunity. However, now that the cinematic image has become habitable and interactive, that boundary has been crossed irrevocably. Not only have we created the conditions for virtual community within a nonlocal electronic public realm, but we are now able to exercise the most radical gesture: distributing space and place, transmitting architecture.
Once we cast architecture into cyberspace, these concerns take on both theoretical and practical urgency. The architect must now take into active interest not only the motion of the user through the environment, but also account for the fact that the environment itself, unencumbered by gravity and other common constraints, may itself change position, attitude, or attribute. This new choreographic consideration is already a profound extension of responsibilities and opportunities, but it still corresponds only to "movement-image". Far more interesting and difficult is the next step, in which the environment is understood not only to move, but also to breathe and transform, to be cast into the wind not like a stone but like a bird. What this requires is the design of mechanisms and algorithms of animation and interactivity for every act of architecture. Mathematically, this means that time must now be added to the long list of parameters of which architecture is a function.
We cannot know the real in its entirety. As much shields as bridges, our senses isolate us from the outside world, even as the cognitive mechanisms that translate raw input into meaningful pattern isolate us from within. In either case, what we do know is known through sampling: continuous reality, if indeed it is continuous, is segmented and reconstituted to fit our understanding. follow incubation.concepts.post-digital
Adjacent
!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/machu-picchu-white-paper-khang-vu-tien/-