I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make music and architecture that same the share the same sets of corressponding data. Where the variable integral elements can obey the constraints of ratios and geometrical frameworks etc that funtion analogously to each other. I recently came across a book at a used bookstore called pamphlet architecture 16 Architecture a s a translation of music. What I have found in this book, as well as in my own musings about architecture and music, is that there are as many intersections between music and architecture, between shaping sound and structuring space as there are forms of music, or types of buildings. There is not one hard and fast translation, which is what I ha ve been wraking my brain over. This dilemma, the dilemma of arbitrary assignment to form plagued me for quite a while, and prevented me from earnestly beginning my pursuit into this endeavor. One chapter from this delightful pamphlet began to change my attitude.
“Let’s say, simply for a point of departure, that there exixts a definable membrane through which meaning can move when translating from one discipline to another. What I mean by membrane is a thin, pliable layer that connects two things and is, in this case, the middle position of music + architecture. The membrane is similar perhaps to the role of a semi-tone or semi-vowel in the study of phonetics, a transitional sound heard during articualtion linking two phonemically contiguios sounds, like the y sound head between the ie and the e of quiet. I am suggesting that something similar occurs, a y-condition in the middle position of music + architecture when translating one to the other.
Louis Kahn once described great architecture as that which starts with the immeasurable, proceeds through the measurable, and retuns to the immeasuralbe. He was describing a process by which the spark of genius in an idea is carried by way of investigation, drawing, na d construction into a finished opiece of architecture. In this case, starting at the immeasurable is beginning to explore the y-condition of music + architecture. Although music+ architecture have different phenomenal presences, the underlying organization of their respective formal sttructures and colloquialism are similar. The aim of this investigation is to explore as a design tool the idea of translation defined as a “rendering of the same ideas in a different language from the original.” This is accomplished by searching for a methodlolgy that may led to a means of expression for the y-conditi9on of music + architecture. The y-conditon explores the two art forms in a comparative way, as far as necessary liomits will allow, and through experimentation discovers that there exists between them a consisten and organic union. A relationship starts in the physical laws of light and optics on the one hand, and sound and hearing on the other. In theeir rudimentary media of expression, such as notes, meters, tones and lines, colors and geometrical forms, the union is carried on by their respective systems of artistic and imaginative compsition, design and execution.
The focus of the y-condition project ws to create and define a methodology. because the exploration in itself was more important than the specifics of any one programm, I chose a program and site that exist only in theory. I searched for a program that by its very6 nature is resosnant with theories of minimal music.
BAS Arquitectos
Using Elizabeth’s essay as a jumping point for my own project, I was able to get a firm foundation upon which to build my first real virtual environment. I envisioned the structure, the space itself as a literal translation of a song I had been working on in ableton live. the placement of the midi notes on a piano roll, their proximity to each other as events and their durations formed the basis for the structure. Since the body of the musical piece is broken into two sections, where the notated primary form repeats itself 4 times, twice of which is done in reverse, I decided that the actual form of the builing itself should be restricted to emulate only the first sequence of notes.
As i was modeling and designing the space I listened to the track over and over again
I had alredy begun a way to compromise the lack of thre dimensionality by determining that the axis of proximity (z) would be characterized by the number of effects and their levels of automation. The literal floors of the space would be represtented by the automation lines corresponding to gain or volume. The building itself is comprised of a shell broken into 6 levels with windows that correspond to the lengths of grouped measures with the architectural form encased within it. Due to the minimal, sparse and acoustically BIG sound of the music, I chose poured concrete as the represntative material to create a very long brutalistic space.
The song was composed with the formal principals of minimalist music in mind, and are aspects which I have gone through minor strain to translate into architecture. Simplicity, repetition, illusiosn/perception, events, phase-shifting, complexity and sudden alterations of density.
Minimal music focuses on repetitive cycles where the basic form is repeated and where smaller units with different rhythms are added like a wheel work.
The music is modular in that the schemas (wheels of repetition) can be redistributed and connected in different ways yeilding multiple outcomes.
The mayan perception of time bodes well to the minimal ethos of composition, with the day as the pulse.
Minimal repetition: Creats a feeling of movement. The Pulse pulls attention away from the details of the form to the overall process. The piece of music is literally the process.-incorporate chaos theory so that the cycles start at the same and gradually fall out of phase creating new space. Construct THAT in maya.
Object-Space relationships: Sudden alterations of density. One modular figure is stretched and contracted over a constant pattern of sound material.
Layered Planes: Creates textures of musical planes by meshing different tempos and rhythmic patterns. Penetrates the inner essence of sound by bringing out the simplicity and complesxity. The various planal layers have points of alignment in accordance with classical harmonic modal tendencies forming dispersed chord progressions with long decays that necessitate a gradual transposition of incidental harmonies generated by the components of the music’s overall modular structure.
Phase-Shifting: Focuses on repetitive cycles where the basic form is repeated and phase shifted. This is a device used where a fixed part repeats the basic pattern throughout the piece while the second parts accelerate to take it out of phase.
(If each percussive event can stand in for a place where a beam would be set [start easy with minimal techno] the downbeat and the snare hit alternate with the downbeat being constant and forming the edge of the outer wall.
Music and architecture both objectively shape, occupy, frame, and activate space while they also functionally contextulize, and semantically define space. This inverse relationship helps us to think aesthetically and formally about the intersections.
oNE OF THGE DEFINING aspects of virtual architecture that separates it from physical architecture is it’s lack of site. The liberation of context determined by location opens up a huge realm of aesthetic possibilities. Virtual architecture is architecture for architecture’s sake. Direct control of sounds and spaces mean that a poetic expressionistic element is inadvertantly and inextricalbly intoroduced to what would other wise be a dry and logically constrained field.
Bifurcated Aural Space: A Definition
Music and architecture intersect in a multitude of ways, and the discrete abstract dimension, the digital domain, in which they intersect, I refer to as Bifurcated Aural Space.
Space in it's totality divided into two dimensions, the physically tangible, and the seemingly intangible, or occupied space and neutral space. But thanks to recent developments in experimental physics and mathematics, it has been revealed that our still cherished perceptions of these spaces are fundamentally flawed, and that their interrelations posses implications to our notions of reality and aesthetic and phenomenological perceptions of culture and artefact that have been hitherto unthinkable. In addition to our overall goal of this project's revelation of such hidden dimensions and criteria, our desire is to create a common language in which virtual architectural objects can be expressed sonically The objects themselves and, their virtual dimensions, material attributes, and the manners in which they occupy space can be simultaneously expressed as musical structure and composition.
For centuries, artists, philosophers, musicians and architects have mused on the possible intersections that exist between music and architecture. Due to the extremely advanced state of computer technology, this has become a quickly expanding field of interest, the implications of which have the potential to advance development in building practices, musicology, acoustics, geometry and computer science.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Reflections on Architecture in the Age of it's Virtual Disappearance
Media has taken over from reality, and media has become reality. I notice this more and more with my students. Architecture students dont' want to draw, they want to use a computer. An architect who can't draw is like a writer who can't write. In any case, what has happened to architecture is very symbolic to what has happened to the culture at large. In what I call the mechanical paradigm, on had to show the truth of structure in othe rowrs if there wre things holding a building up you wante dot ssee how the force of gravity was held up by the structure of a piece of architecture in a mechanical way. Now, in what I call the electronic paradigm, we don't need to show how buildings stand up, and you get the wildest kinds of forms...but they're all ornamental, they don't actually reflect structure, they only appear to reflect structure. There has been a loss of integrity in a certain way as to how architecture portrays itself in the society, and I have always argued that one of the ways that we can understand culture is by looking at the architecture that the culture has produced. You can measure the changing relationships between social and cultural entities by looking at how the urban topography of a city etc. evolves over time. The evolution of universities is a prime example from the religious to the secular. Now we are no longer s architects tie to a mechanical necessity. we don't need to show how we build things, it's a paradigm that can be summarized by Alberti's statement that the point of architecture is not to simply make something stand-up, but to also give the illusion that it stands up.
-Peter Eisenman
Abstract:
The subject of this article is to address issues pertaining to both virtual and concrete architecture related to absence as an aspect of architectural design, theory and phenomenology that transcends culture as well as time. The goal of this essay is to high-light the existence of the notion of virtuality in architecture that pre-dates the advent of the digital revolution to help shed light on where it may be taking the discipline of architecture in the future as well emerging as a multi-faceted discourse in it’s own right. To help illustrate these ideas, I have drawn liberally from a 1993 interview with architect and theorist Paul Virilio from the book The Virtual Dimension.
Architecture in the Age of Oblivion
Architecture it has been found, is not only inescapably beholden to time as the modernists thought, but in the current age has become time as well, or perhaps more fittingly, a reflection of how we perceive and engage time. What defines architecture now, in the wake of its de-materialization into fields such as computer programming has expanded it's conventional definition and created something else in the absences of it's monumentality and mechanistically determined past. The architecture of game design and social networking in particular have made architecture something which truly transcends time and breaks its bonds from it. Pure information. An architecture which the inhabitant not only moves through, but an architecture that moves through the very inhabitant within it. Altering their perception, opening new doors, closing off old ones, and creating new possibilities previously unimaginable while at the same time, precluding others that have conventionally held significance. The formlessness, or rather the structurelessness inherent in much of contemporary architecture has been such an event that has so radically twisted the notions of what architecture is, that a critical fragmentation has occured that threatens to render a traditional sense of rigor and integrity obsolete. But, the creation and propogation of these new forms and ways of being do not have to spell the end of architecture as we know it altogether.
It is in this way, in creating a music out of architecture, that one most poetically describes and illustrates this state of being, this essential transcendence of form into something totally liquid, something that literally moves through you in waves and particles.
Andreas Ruby:
At your last seminar in the College International de Philosophie you stated: "Due to the continuous flow of optical apperances, it is becoming difficult, if not impossible, to still believe in the stability of the real, in the fixing of a visuality which is constantly fleeing away. The public space of the building suddenly vanishes behind the instability of the public image." Should not one conclude then, that reality itself has become unstable today? That it is less defined by the materiality of architecture but rather by the ephemerality of the images with which we perceive the world?
Paul Virilio:
Centuries ago, matter was defined by two dimensions: mass and energy. Today there comes a third one to it: information. But while the mass is still linked to gravity and materiality, information tends to be fugitive...and counts more than mass and energy.
Andreas Ruby:
Your writings about disappearance as a new mode of appearance are linked to a set of scientific approaches giving new emphasis on time, for example the theories of chaos, catastrophe, and complexity. Analyzing the development of forms, the theory of morphogenesis severely shakes up every discourse about form in architecture. It defines form no longer as something static but constantly changing and re-emerging in new configurations. Could this altered notion of form affect architecture?
Paul Virilio:
It is not easy to answer this question since, for me, architecture is just about to loose everything that characterized it in the past. Step by step it looses all its elements. In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter. It anticipates the media buidings in some Asian cities with facades entirely made of screens. In a certain sense, the screen becomes the last wall. No wall out of stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary is the screen.
What used to be the essence of architecture is more and more taken over by other technologies. Take a staircase: it becomes increasingly replaced by elevators which are no longer designed by architects but by engineers. When people wanted to climb up to the sky, they built towers, now you just take an airplane. Something of the tower became transposed to the airplane, but the tower has lost its interest as a monument as such. The same applies to the dissolution of the staircase in the elevator, [or the book and record store to the internet].
One of the consequences of virtual space for architecture is a radical modification of its dimensions. So far, architecture has taken place within the three dimensions and in time...unlike the three known dimensions of space, this dimension can no longer be expressed in integer numbers but in fractional ones...to some degree, virtuality has been haunting architecture for a long time. It announced itself in a set of spatial topologies. The alcove for example, is a kind of virtualized room. The vestibule could be called a virtualized house. A telephone booth then virtualizes the vestibule: it is almost not a space, never the less it is the place of a personal encounter. All these types of spaces prepare for something and engage a transition. Thus virtual reality tends to extend the real space of architecture toward virtual space. That's why it is no longer a question of simply putting on a head-mounted display, squeezing into a data suit, and promenading within virtual space.
In terms of architecture, it is important to create a virtual "room" in the middle of architectural space where electromagnetic spirits can encounter each other...you will be able to walk around Alaska, swim in the mediterranean, or meet your girlfriend on the other side of the globe. This is a new, fractional dimension of space that should be built, just as one has built houses with living rooms or offices.
Andreas Ruby:
This would be the space of the future?
Paul Virilio:
The space of the future would be both of real and of virtual nature. Architecture will "take place", in the literal sense of the word, in both domains: in real space (the materiality of architecture) and virtual space (the transmission of electromagnetic signs). The real space of the house will have to take into account the real time of the transmission.
Andreas Ruby:
But time in general appears to be one of the hidden issues in the history of architecture. Architectural design seems to focus more on the three dimensions of built space than the temporal dimension that emerges as we start to use that space- which is probably due to the traditional design tools of architecture.
Paul Virilio:
Absolutely. There is a dynamics of space, or of the space-time experience by the individual. And this dynamic escapes rom the ordinary graphic represtations of space such as plan sectionk and elevation. But on needs to integrate time and movement as spatial parameters into the design oferman choreographer Rudolf Labour in the 1920s) not in order to work out choreographic notations, but to account in a more subtle way for the capaciies in terms of movement that can unfold in a space. By "constructing" the dancer's movements in a certain space, the choreographer assigns a value to a movement. It would be a challenge to explore the potential of this approach for architecture, especially since there are now computer programs capable of analyzing complex patterns of movement in space.
Andreas Ruby:
Introduction:
The image that accompanies Paul Virilio’s interview, 'Architecture in the Age of its Virtual Disappearance' is a black and white photograph of the "Cathedral of Light" designed by top ranking Nazi Albert Speer for one of the infamous Nuremburg Rallies that was held at the time the picture was taken, on September 11, 1937. The quote that accompanies the image was made by British Ambassador Neville Chamberlain who described it thus, "The effect was both Solemn and beautiful, it was like being in a cathedral of ice." It consisted of 130 anti-aircraft search lights spaced 40 feet apart and likely could have been visible from outer space. The Cathedral of Light was of course designed to inspire the army and the German people and display not only the technological and military prowess of the third reich, but to also demonstrate a sort of aesthetic dimension as well.
While a great deal of this article deals with the growing dominance of digital technology in the tradition driven field of modern architecture, that's not really what at heart is being addressed (as much has already been said about it already). What is interesting about the Cathedral of Light is that it is a genuinely virtual space. It’s structural material comprising it’s massive columns are beams of light being projected through space to create the illusion of an impossible structure that at the same time acts on the viewer as if it were indeed a ‘real’ or concrete work of architectural engineering. In an odd sense but not too distant sense, the digital age in which we now live where flat screens, and 3d imagery have become undeniably ubiquitous, the Cathedral of Light can be taken as a kind of predecessor to these objects which are increasingly encroaching on and in some cases usurping the functional and aesthetic territories that once were the exclusive domain of architecture. Going farther back to consider such works as The Palace of Versaille’s Hall of Mirrors, The Crystal Palace, and the Ise Shrine, one sees how the absence, or perceived absence of material that makes empty space become perceivable occupied, has long been as important an aspect as other engineering an d design concerns and that now in the digital age, it is this misleadingly empty space that is redefining and transforming architecture at its core. No other feat of engineering could have had the same effect on the Nuremburg spectator as the Cathedral of Light, and in spite of its creator’s nefarious motivations behind it, none the less it can help us understand on a fundamental level the role of virtuality and absence and how it is currently becoming manifest.
The Palace of Versailles's Hall of Mirrors was a true engineering marvel of its day. The technology used to produce mirrors and other surfaces which we now take for granted had reached a point of maturation that obviously begged for experimentation. He brings up how the manner in which the mirrors and candle light are used to not only compensate for lack of space within the Hall, but to create a genuine virtual space in it's own right. A space that is arguably related to the Cathedral of Light and others, and that fits into an essential architectural tradition which can help shed light on the expanding definition of architecture in the 21st century.
Der Lichtom in Nuremburg at NAZI party rally (1938)
Aside from the Cathedral of Light, which was intended to inspire the German people, we should take some time to make a point about a new architectural material that does not simply REFLECT light, but which generates it as well.
If mirrors and glass, materials which are designed to inadvertantly display the dissolution of traditional architecture, the picture screen is surely another. There has always been a question of what is space and what is not space, and to what end it defines the building. at issue essentially, is what is defined as space, and what is defined as material? in the past, glass was a material, but not a defining structural material used in architecture itself. This changed with Mies Van Der Roe of course. Some time in the not too distant future, we may see a structure that is made ENTIRELY of screens (or almost entirely) something that could in essence be the contemporary equivalent to the Crystal Palace in London, a true technological feat in it's own time.
Hall of Mirrors in Versailles
The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, England
Mies Van Der Rohe
When looking to non European countries, one finds yet more correlations between space, and non space, to the borders of what is architecture and what is not. One such is of course, the Ise shrine in Japan. The Shrine has been perpetually built up and torn down every 17 years for centuries in order for the shrine to appear to be perpetually new and clean. While physically, the shrine is not there after it's been torn down and while it is not technically the same structure, in actuality, and by it's own merit, it must be considered to be among the oldest free standing structures in Japan if not the world. There is a virtual element to it, and a very strong one at that, for even while it has been totally dismantled, the space is heavily guarded and scrutinized so that it can be built up exactly where it is supposed to stand since it has been continuously rebuilt throughout it's history.
the Ise Shrine Japan
In traditional Korean architecture, there is what is known as the Madang, an empty space that functions as just that. Empty space. It is not a courtyard, or commons area, it is intended to help structure the architectural environment of whatever it is housed in.
"Centuries ago matter was defined by two things, mass and energy. Now we must include a third, information. While mass is still linked to gravity and materiality, information tends to be fugitive. The mass of a mountain for example is something invariable, it's immobile; it's information however changes constantly. For a prehistoric man, the mountain is a nameless mass. It's information is to be an obstacle in his way. Later the mountain slowly ceases to an obstacle. It takes on other meanings, for instance that of the holy mountain. It gets painted in perspective, photographed, analyzed and exploited for resources. The mountain for us contains a whole world of information."
"If you concede that architecture, in a primary sense, has to deal with statics, resistance of materials, equilibrium, and gravity. Any architect works with the mass and energy of a building and its structure. But in terms of information, architecture still stays somewhat behind the behind the present development.
"Your writings about disappearance as a new mode of appearance are linked to a set of scientific approaches giving new emphasis to time, for example the theories of chaos, catastrophe, and complexity. Analyzing the development of forms, the theory of morphogenesis severely shakes up every discourse about form in architecture. It defines form no longer as something static but constantly changing and re-emerging in new configurations. Could this altered notion of form affect architecture?
"It is not easy for me to answer this question since, for me, architecture is just about to loose everything that characterized it in the past. Step by step it looses all its elements. In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter. It anticipates the media buildings in some Asian cities with facades entirely made of screens. In a certain sense,the screen becomes the last wall. No wall out of stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary IS the screen.
LCD Screen wall
What used to be the essence of architecture is more and more taken over by other technologies. The terminology defining architecture has been dispersed through the fields of technology, economics, and music. Contemporary architecture is increasingly becoming something which is nearly unrecognizable. The largest contributing factor to this development, the dissolution and dispersal of architectural space, is mobility. The territory of the internet is no longer confined to nodes that can be placed on a map listing public libraries, coffee shops and hot spots. It is now a space as ubiquitous as the very air we breath (and we must be in agreement that it is fundamentally a space that we inhabit).
Because of the increasing replacement of hitherto material elements of architecture by technical substitutes, a term like high-tech architecture appears tautological. "High technology" would be enough; it is unnecessary to add "architecture". It is certainly not by chance that many architects today use the vocabulary of airplanes and space shuttles. to design something immobile they apply the aesthetics of a vehicle-which bears some paradox in itself.
You could put it another way by saying that architecture today integrates elements that used to be part of something else. A hybridization of hitherto unconnected genres merging together into something new. As for example the encounter of tectonics and electronics in virtual space.
One of the consequences of virtual space for architecture is a radical modification of its dimensions. So far, architecture has taken place within the three dimensions and time. Recent research on virtual space has revealed a virtual dimension. Unlike the three known dimensions of space, this dimension can no longer be expressed in integer numbers but in fractional ones. It will be interesting to see how this is going to affect space. To some degree, virtuality has been haunting architecture for a long time. It announced itself in a set of spatial topologies. The alcove, for example, is a kind of virtualized room. The vesituble could be called a virtualized house. A telephone booth then virtualizes the vestibule; it is almost not a space, nevertheless it is the place of a personal encounter. All these types of spaces prepare for something and engage a transition. Thus virtual reality tends to extend the real space of architecture toward virtual space. That's why it is no longer a question of simply putting on a head-mounted display, squeezing into a data-suit, promenading within virtual space-as Jason Lanier, Scott Fisher, and many others do.
The space of the future would be of both a real and virtual nature. Architecture will "take place," in the literal sense of the word, in both domains: in real space (the materiality of architecture) and virtual space (the transmission of electromagnetic signs). The real space of the house will have to take into account the real time of the transmission.
Architects try increasingly to design space directly with spatial means (the model, for example) instead of taking the two dimensional detour of the drawing. To reach beyond the limitations of ordinary computer aided design, there are attempts to apply virtual reality as a design tool for architectural design. After having defined a space within a conventional computer model on the screen, one enters this space virtually to continue to design "from within".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJMMnb0qrXA&feature=related
Against the Technological Interpretation of Virtuality: Giovanna Borradori
The Technological interpretation of virtuality undermines it's phenomenological raison d'etre, yet at the same time, allows it to come into full fruition in the world of the everyday. Virtuality has in a sense, been a specter haunting architecture from it's inception. From the Ise Shrine, which, though it has been continuously torn down and rebuilt for centuries, is the longest free standing piece of architecture in Japan, to the nomadic territories of the plains indians who carried their architectures upon their backs and had to envision them more clearly in their absence than in their presence.
An image, for Bergson, is a certain existence which is more that that which an idealist calls a representation, but less than what a realist calls a thing- an existence placed halfway between the thing and the representation:. Matter is not out there, in the world, but a mix of self and world, perception and memory.
-Peter Eisenman
Abstract:
The subject of this article is to address issues pertaining to both virtual and concrete architecture related to absence as an aspect of architectural design, theory and phenomenology that transcends culture as well as time. The goal of this essay is to high-light the existence of the notion of virtuality in architecture that pre-dates the advent of the digital revolution to help shed light on where it may be taking the discipline of architecture in the future as well emerging as a multi-faceted discourse in it’s own right. To help illustrate these ideas, I have drawn liberally from a 1993 interview with architect and theorist Paul Virilio from the book The Virtual Dimension.
Architecture in the Age of Oblivion
Architecture it has been found, is not only inescapably beholden to time as the modernists thought, but in the current age has become time as well, or perhaps more fittingly, a reflection of how we perceive and engage time. What defines architecture now, in the wake of its de-materialization into fields such as computer programming has expanded it's conventional definition and created something else in the absences of it's monumentality and mechanistically determined past. The architecture of game design and social networking in particular have made architecture something which truly transcends time and breaks its bonds from it. Pure information. An architecture which the inhabitant not only moves through, but an architecture that moves through the very inhabitant within it. Altering their perception, opening new doors, closing off old ones, and creating new possibilities previously unimaginable while at the same time, precluding others that have conventionally held significance. The formlessness, or rather the structurelessness inherent in much of contemporary architecture has been such an event that has so radically twisted the notions of what architecture is, that a critical fragmentation has occured that threatens to render a traditional sense of rigor and integrity obsolete. But, the creation and propogation of these new forms and ways of being do not have to spell the end of architecture as we know it altogether.
It is in this way, in creating a music out of architecture, that one most poetically describes and illustrates this state of being, this essential transcendence of form into something totally liquid, something that literally moves through you in waves and particles.
Andreas Ruby:
At your last seminar in the College International de Philosophie you stated: "Due to the continuous flow of optical apperances, it is becoming difficult, if not impossible, to still believe in the stability of the real, in the fixing of a visuality which is constantly fleeing away. The public space of the building suddenly vanishes behind the instability of the public image." Should not one conclude then, that reality itself has become unstable today? That it is less defined by the materiality of architecture but rather by the ephemerality of the images with which we perceive the world?
Paul Virilio:
Centuries ago, matter was defined by two dimensions: mass and energy. Today there comes a third one to it: information. But while the mass is still linked to gravity and materiality, information tends to be fugitive...and counts more than mass and energy.
Andreas Ruby:
Your writings about disappearance as a new mode of appearance are linked to a set of scientific approaches giving new emphasis on time, for example the theories of chaos, catastrophe, and complexity. Analyzing the development of forms, the theory of morphogenesis severely shakes up every discourse about form in architecture. It defines form no longer as something static but constantly changing and re-emerging in new configurations. Could this altered notion of form affect architecture?
Paul Virilio:
It is not easy to answer this question since, for me, architecture is just about to loose everything that characterized it in the past. Step by step it looses all its elements. In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter. It anticipates the media buidings in some Asian cities with facades entirely made of screens. In a certain sense, the screen becomes the last wall. No wall out of stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary is the screen.
What used to be the essence of architecture is more and more taken over by other technologies. Take a staircase: it becomes increasingly replaced by elevators which are no longer designed by architects but by engineers. When people wanted to climb up to the sky, they built towers, now you just take an airplane. Something of the tower became transposed to the airplane, but the tower has lost its interest as a monument as such. The same applies to the dissolution of the staircase in the elevator, [or the book and record store to the internet].
One of the consequences of virtual space for architecture is a radical modification of its dimensions. So far, architecture has taken place within the three dimensions and in time...unlike the three known dimensions of space, this dimension can no longer be expressed in integer numbers but in fractional ones...to some degree, virtuality has been haunting architecture for a long time. It announced itself in a set of spatial topologies. The alcove for example, is a kind of virtualized room. The vestibule could be called a virtualized house. A telephone booth then virtualizes the vestibule: it is almost not a space, never the less it is the place of a personal encounter. All these types of spaces prepare for something and engage a transition. Thus virtual reality tends to extend the real space of architecture toward virtual space. That's why it is no longer a question of simply putting on a head-mounted display, squeezing into a data suit, and promenading within virtual space.
In terms of architecture, it is important to create a virtual "room" in the middle of architectural space where electromagnetic spirits can encounter each other...you will be able to walk around Alaska, swim in the mediterranean, or meet your girlfriend on the other side of the globe. This is a new, fractional dimension of space that should be built, just as one has built houses with living rooms or offices.
Andreas Ruby:
This would be the space of the future?
Paul Virilio:
The space of the future would be both of real and of virtual nature. Architecture will "take place", in the literal sense of the word, in both domains: in real space (the materiality of architecture) and virtual space (the transmission of electromagnetic signs). The real space of the house will have to take into account the real time of the transmission.
Andreas Ruby:
But time in general appears to be one of the hidden issues in the history of architecture. Architectural design seems to focus more on the three dimensions of built space than the temporal dimension that emerges as we start to use that space- which is probably due to the traditional design tools of architecture.
Paul Virilio:
Absolutely. There is a dynamics of space, or of the space-time experience by the individual. And this dynamic escapes rom the ordinary graphic represtations of space such as plan sectionk and elevation. But on needs to integrate time and movement as spatial parameters into the design oferman choreographer Rudolf Labour in the 1920s) not in order to work out choreographic notations, but to account in a more subtle way for the capaciies in terms of movement that can unfold in a space. By "constructing" the dancer's movements in a certain space, the choreographer assigns a value to a movement. It would be a challenge to explore the potential of this approach for architecture, especially since there are now computer programs capable of analyzing complex patterns of movement in space.
Andreas Ruby:
Introduction:
The image that accompanies Paul Virilio’s interview, 'Architecture in the Age of its Virtual Disappearance' is a black and white photograph of the "Cathedral of Light" designed by top ranking Nazi Albert Speer for one of the infamous Nuremburg Rallies that was held at the time the picture was taken, on September 11, 1937. The quote that accompanies the image was made by British Ambassador Neville Chamberlain who described it thus, "The effect was both Solemn and beautiful, it was like being in a cathedral of ice." It consisted of 130 anti-aircraft search lights spaced 40 feet apart and likely could have been visible from outer space. The Cathedral of Light was of course designed to inspire the army and the German people and display not only the technological and military prowess of the third reich, but to also demonstrate a sort of aesthetic dimension as well.
While a great deal of this article deals with the growing dominance of digital technology in the tradition driven field of modern architecture, that's not really what at heart is being addressed (as much has already been said about it already). What is interesting about the Cathedral of Light is that it is a genuinely virtual space. It’s structural material comprising it’s massive columns are beams of light being projected through space to create the illusion of an impossible structure that at the same time acts on the viewer as if it were indeed a ‘real’ or concrete work of architectural engineering. In an odd sense but not too distant sense, the digital age in which we now live where flat screens, and 3d imagery have become undeniably ubiquitous, the Cathedral of Light can be taken as a kind of predecessor to these objects which are increasingly encroaching on and in some cases usurping the functional and aesthetic territories that once were the exclusive domain of architecture. Going farther back to consider such works as The Palace of Versaille’s Hall of Mirrors, The Crystal Palace, and the Ise Shrine, one sees how the absence, or perceived absence of material that makes empty space become perceivable occupied, has long been as important an aspect as other engineering an d design concerns and that now in the digital age, it is this misleadingly empty space that is redefining and transforming architecture at its core. No other feat of engineering could have had the same effect on the Nuremburg spectator as the Cathedral of Light, and in spite of its creator’s nefarious motivations behind it, none the less it can help us understand on a fundamental level the role of virtuality and absence and how it is currently becoming manifest.
The Palace of Versailles's Hall of Mirrors was a true engineering marvel of its day. The technology used to produce mirrors and other surfaces which we now take for granted had reached a point of maturation that obviously begged for experimentation. He brings up how the manner in which the mirrors and candle light are used to not only compensate for lack of space within the Hall, but to create a genuine virtual space in it's own right. A space that is arguably related to the Cathedral of Light and others, and that fits into an essential architectural tradition which can help shed light on the expanding definition of architecture in the 21st century.
Der Lichtom in Nuremburg at NAZI party rally (1938)
Aside from the Cathedral of Light, which was intended to inspire the German people, we should take some time to make a point about a new architectural material that does not simply REFLECT light, but which generates it as well.
If mirrors and glass, materials which are designed to inadvertantly display the dissolution of traditional architecture, the picture screen is surely another. There has always been a question of what is space and what is not space, and to what end it defines the building. at issue essentially, is what is defined as space, and what is defined as material? in the past, glass was a material, but not a defining structural material used in architecture itself. This changed with Mies Van Der Roe of course. Some time in the not too distant future, we may see a structure that is made ENTIRELY of screens (or almost entirely) something that could in essence be the contemporary equivalent to the Crystal Palace in London, a true technological feat in it's own time.
Hall of Mirrors in Versailles
The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, England
Mies Van Der Rohe
When looking to non European countries, one finds yet more correlations between space, and non space, to the borders of what is architecture and what is not. One such is of course, the Ise shrine in Japan. The Shrine has been perpetually built up and torn down every 17 years for centuries in order for the shrine to appear to be perpetually new and clean. While physically, the shrine is not there after it's been torn down and while it is not technically the same structure, in actuality, and by it's own merit, it must be considered to be among the oldest free standing structures in Japan if not the world. There is a virtual element to it, and a very strong one at that, for even while it has been totally dismantled, the space is heavily guarded and scrutinized so that it can be built up exactly where it is supposed to stand since it has been continuously rebuilt throughout it's history.
the Ise Shrine Japan
In traditional Korean architecture, there is what is known as the Madang, an empty space that functions as just that. Empty space. It is not a courtyard, or commons area, it is intended to help structure the architectural environment of whatever it is housed in.
"Centuries ago matter was defined by two things, mass and energy. Now we must include a third, information. While mass is still linked to gravity and materiality, information tends to be fugitive. The mass of a mountain for example is something invariable, it's immobile; it's information however changes constantly. For a prehistoric man, the mountain is a nameless mass. It's information is to be an obstacle in his way. Later the mountain slowly ceases to an obstacle. It takes on other meanings, for instance that of the holy mountain. It gets painted in perspective, photographed, analyzed and exploited for resources. The mountain for us contains a whole world of information."
"If you concede that architecture, in a primary sense, has to deal with statics, resistance of materials, equilibrium, and gravity. Any architect works with the mass and energy of a building and its structure. But in terms of information, architecture still stays somewhat behind the behind the present development.
"Your writings about disappearance as a new mode of appearance are linked to a set of scientific approaches giving new emphasis to time, for example the theories of chaos, catastrophe, and complexity. Analyzing the development of forms, the theory of morphogenesis severely shakes up every discourse about form in architecture. It defines form no longer as something static but constantly changing and re-emerging in new configurations. Could this altered notion of form affect architecture?
"It is not easy for me to answer this question since, for me, architecture is just about to loose everything that characterized it in the past. Step by step it looses all its elements. In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter. It anticipates the media buildings in some Asian cities with facades entirely made of screens. In a certain sense,the screen becomes the last wall. No wall out of stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary IS the screen.
LCD Screen wall
What used to be the essence of architecture is more and more taken over by other technologies. The terminology defining architecture has been dispersed through the fields of technology, economics, and music. Contemporary architecture is increasingly becoming something which is nearly unrecognizable. The largest contributing factor to this development, the dissolution and dispersal of architectural space, is mobility. The territory of the internet is no longer confined to nodes that can be placed on a map listing public libraries, coffee shops and hot spots. It is now a space as ubiquitous as the very air we breath (and we must be in agreement that it is fundamentally a space that we inhabit).
Because of the increasing replacement of hitherto material elements of architecture by technical substitutes, a term like high-tech architecture appears tautological. "High technology" would be enough; it is unnecessary to add "architecture". It is certainly not by chance that many architects today use the vocabulary of airplanes and space shuttles. to design something immobile they apply the aesthetics of a vehicle-which bears some paradox in itself.
You could put it another way by saying that architecture today integrates elements that used to be part of something else. A hybridization of hitherto unconnected genres merging together into something new. As for example the encounter of tectonics and electronics in virtual space.
One of the consequences of virtual space for architecture is a radical modification of its dimensions. So far, architecture has taken place within the three dimensions and time. Recent research on virtual space has revealed a virtual dimension. Unlike the three known dimensions of space, this dimension can no longer be expressed in integer numbers but in fractional ones. It will be interesting to see how this is going to affect space. To some degree, virtuality has been haunting architecture for a long time. It announced itself in a set of spatial topologies. The alcove, for example, is a kind of virtualized room. The vesituble could be called a virtualized house. A telephone booth then virtualizes the vestibule; it is almost not a space, nevertheless it is the place of a personal encounter. All these types of spaces prepare for something and engage a transition. Thus virtual reality tends to extend the real space of architecture toward virtual space. That's why it is no longer a question of simply putting on a head-mounted display, squeezing into a data-suit, promenading within virtual space-as Jason Lanier, Scott Fisher, and many others do.
The space of the future would be of both a real and virtual nature. Architecture will "take place," in the literal sense of the word, in both domains: in real space (the materiality of architecture) and virtual space (the transmission of electromagnetic signs). The real space of the house will have to take into account the real time of the transmission.
Architects try increasingly to design space directly with spatial means (the model, for example) instead of taking the two dimensional detour of the drawing. To reach beyond the limitations of ordinary computer aided design, there are attempts to apply virtual reality as a design tool for architectural design. After having defined a space within a conventional computer model on the screen, one enters this space virtually to continue to design "from within".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJMMnb0qrXA&feature=related
Against the Technological Interpretation of Virtuality: Giovanna Borradori
The Technological interpretation of virtuality undermines it's phenomenological raison d'etre, yet at the same time, allows it to come into full fruition in the world of the everyday. Virtuality has in a sense, been a specter haunting architecture from it's inception. From the Ise Shrine, which, though it has been continuously torn down and rebuilt for centuries, is the longest free standing piece of architecture in Japan, to the nomadic territories of the plains indians who carried their architectures upon their backs and had to envision them more clearly in their absence than in their presence.
An image, for Bergson, is a certain existence which is more that that which an idealist calls a representation, but less than what a realist calls a thing- an existence placed halfway between the thing and the representation:. Matter is not out there, in the world, but a mix of self and world, perception and memory.
Using Harmonic Dissonance Fluctuation as a structural aspect of music mapped as architecture
The task of technically relating music to architecture is a very tricky task. Being that there are multiple ways in which the two disciplines can be equated with each other, it is necessary to find common ground between them and explore them as cohesively as possible.
The most basic and straight-forward definition of harmonic dissonance is, “An unstable tone combination…that’s tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord.” —Roger Kamien (2008), p.41[7]
Dissonant chords are are referred to as ‘active’ chords because they’re utilization intrinsically suggests and demands proportionately increased musical dynamism. They are chords which have traditionally been used to express pain, grief, and conflict. And are indeed a staple of many forms of modern and contemporary music. While it is arguable how this precedent came to be made a prescient aspect of NON pedagogical classical music, none-the less, it has remained as crucial a staple to widely consumed music of the past 50 years across the board, from Jazz to heavy metal, to experimental and conventional electronic dance music, establishing itself as crucial an element universally as the importance of consonance has been to maintaining developments of classical and folk musics in the previous century and before. (It must be noted that dissonance has always played a vital role in music of all kinds, but it’s overwhelming emphasis and development in the modern age has been unparalleled.)
In Western musical theory, a harmonic cadence (Latin cadentia, “a falling”) is a progression of (at least) two chords that concludes a phrase, section, or piece of music.[1] Cadences give phrases a distinctive ending that can, for example, indicate to the listener whether the piece is to be continued or concluded. Therefore, instances of harmonic dissonance which occur within a closural cadence, as in Schoenberg’s Opus 23 no.2 the case study for this investigation, can be said to posses their own distinctive qualities (as oppose to a cadential instance that indicates that a piece is to be continued, or an instance of harmonic dissonance occurring in another part of a given composition.)
Spatial Application:
But what does harmonic dissonance and dissonance fluctuation in musical composition have to bear against architecture? I was stricken by an image in the book “Structural Functions in Music” by Wallace Berry, in which the concluding dissonance fluctuations of Schonberg's Opus 23 are graphed. The graph's shape reminded me of the contours of the Phillips Pavilion constructed by Iannis Xenakis.
In an attempt to reconcile what I have begun musing on, I decided to take another look at the philips pavilion designed . Again, what struck me about the pavilion was the manner in which the structural intersection points could easily be represented graphically in much the same way as the Dissonance Fluctuations of the Schoenberg piece had been, and given Xenakis's pechant for dissonance and musical texture, it seemed to be a more than appropriate point of departure.
http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_past.cfm?exh=662&do=vexh&type=V
Xenakis’s usage of hyperbolic paraboloids in his musical as well as architectural compositions are well known and acceptable expressions. For my own purposes, I decided to plot out the vertices using maya 's NURBS generator and see what came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline
Thanks largely to the introduction of NURBS surfaces in most 3D graphics programs, a vast majority of the hardcore computation needed to accurately represent paraboloidal surfaces of the hyperbolic as well as other varieties has been taken over by the computer.
Conclusion
Here then is an illustrative and expressive method of mapping musical information directly as architectural form that has been informed and inspired by a number of musical and architectural sources. The mapping of dissonance relations in music can be applied to creating a sense of surface dissonance and fluctuation in architectural spaces, which as one moves through one or the other, ultimately comes to a resolution; thus, the use of harmonic dissonance, when graphed, can be directly translated into spatial dissonance in an architectural setting yielding arguably similar effects.
The most basic and straight-forward definition of harmonic dissonance is, “An unstable tone combination…that’s tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord.” —Roger Kamien (2008), p.41[7]
Dissonant chords are are referred to as ‘active’ chords because they’re utilization intrinsically suggests and demands proportionately increased musical dynamism. They are chords which have traditionally been used to express pain, grief, and conflict. And are indeed a staple of many forms of modern and contemporary music. While it is arguable how this precedent came to be made a prescient aspect of NON pedagogical classical music, none-the less, it has remained as crucial a staple to widely consumed music of the past 50 years across the board, from Jazz to heavy metal, to experimental and conventional electronic dance music, establishing itself as crucial an element universally as the importance of consonance has been to maintaining developments of classical and folk musics in the previous century and before. (It must be noted that dissonance has always played a vital role in music of all kinds, but it’s overwhelming emphasis and development in the modern age has been unparalleled.)
In Western musical theory, a harmonic cadence (Latin cadentia, “a falling”) is a progression of (at least) two chords that concludes a phrase, section, or piece of music.[1] Cadences give phrases a distinctive ending that can, for example, indicate to the listener whether the piece is to be continued or concluded. Therefore, instances of harmonic dissonance which occur within a closural cadence, as in Schoenberg’s Opus 23 no.2 the case study for this investigation, can be said to posses their own distinctive qualities (as oppose to a cadential instance that indicates that a piece is to be continued, or an instance of harmonic dissonance occurring in another part of a given composition.)
Spatial Application:
But what does harmonic dissonance and dissonance fluctuation in musical composition have to bear against architecture? I was stricken by an image in the book “Structural Functions in Music” by Wallace Berry, in which the concluding dissonance fluctuations of Schonberg's Opus 23 are graphed. The graph's shape reminded me of the contours of the Phillips Pavilion constructed by Iannis Xenakis.
In an attempt to reconcile what I have begun musing on, I decided to take another look at the philips pavilion designed . Again, what struck me about the pavilion was the manner in which the structural intersection points could easily be represented graphically in much the same way as the Dissonance Fluctuations of the Schoenberg piece had been, and given Xenakis's pechant for dissonance and musical texture, it seemed to be a more than appropriate point of departure.
http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_past.cfm?exh=662&do=vexh&type=V
Xenakis’s usage of hyperbolic paraboloids in his musical as well as architectural compositions are well known and acceptable expressions. For my own purposes, I decided to plot out the vertices using maya 's NURBS generator and see what came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline
Thanks largely to the introduction of NURBS surfaces in most 3D graphics programs, a vast majority of the hardcore computation needed to accurately represent paraboloidal surfaces of the hyperbolic as well as other varieties has been taken over by the computer.
Conclusion
Here then is an illustrative and expressive method of mapping musical information directly as architectural form that has been informed and inspired by a number of musical and architectural sources. The mapping of dissonance relations in music can be applied to creating a sense of surface dissonance and fluctuation in architectural spaces, which as one moves through one or the other, ultimately comes to a resolution; thus, the use of harmonic dissonance, when graphed, can be directly translated into spatial dissonance in an architectural setting yielding arguably similar effects.
The Phenomenology of Time, Space and the arts beholden to them
The speculative connections between music and architecture have been on the minds of various
thinkers for centuries. Beyond acoustics, the closest links between architecture and music exist in within the
dimensions which we take so much for granted: time and space- which even in the last century have gone through a radical phenomenological transformation thanks for Quantum Physics in which time is a malleable aspect beholden itself to functions of space. Inasmuch as architecture and music exist within time and space, their respective aesthetic functions are shaped solely by the existence of space and time's common physical denominator, gravity. Without gravity, the ravages of time would be null, and the existence of space would be formless and arbitrary.
Architecture's Relation to Time:
The unease provoked by the interesection of time and architecture is triggered by conflicts that run at deeper levels of modern consciousness. It is not just that time in the form of past history and future duration eats away at the flesh of architecture and suberts its spirit, as the Modernists believed. Critical theory, cognitive science, and metaphysics are fields in which architecture and time are often seen to contradict and undermine each other. In wasys seemingly fundamental t cognitive life, architecture and time are considered antithetical both in the surface hostilities already reviewed and as regions of inherent incompatibility. They appear so antithetical that it can be difficult even to contemplate them in the same conceptual space. THis conflict is embedded in the structure of western thought and linguistic practice but t came into the open only in odern times as the ideology of chronicide.
Only by adopting an expanded definition of the word Architecture, can we overcome the conventional restraints that have kept our culturally inherited conception of Time's relation to Architecture stagnant despite the increasing expansion of our understanding and experience of both. Our current understanding of Architecture is rooted in the renaissance conception of the fine arts, including painting and sculpture which are united by the concept of design. One of the great legacies of the seismic shift in Architectural thinking ushered in by the emergence of Post-Modernity, has been to define architecture as existing beyond the confines of engineering, practicality, modes of visual and spatial aesthetics, and self-contained contextual designation. It's existence and phenomenological importance are rooted in a human need as essential as eating, sleeping, or social cohesion: in effect, it is the embodiment of all aspects of human human survival. The fact that language, music, and architecture are universal expressions of human culture is undeniable. What distinguishes Architecture form these other forms however, is it's linkage to the fine arts. Where language and music are primarily aural expressions that exist independently of a correlative visual syntax such as print or notation, our experience of architecture is just as much aesthetically visual as it is spatial and socially contextualized. Indeed, it is from Architecture that the other fine arts, sculpture and painting, emerged before becoming discrete and autonomous practices in and of themselves. The impact that architecture has had on it's companion expressions of language and music is irrefutable as well. Gregorian and Tibetan chant can be considered a sonified aspect of the architectures which gave rise to their orders, with cathedral acoustics playing the deciding role in the evolution of western liturgical music, which literally echoes in Opera, and the subsequent musics of the Baroque, and classical period. The cathedral literally becomes the source of music. With language as well, what would be the purpose of recording histories, poetry, or literature without a providing a sanctuary from the elements for the fragile material that carry their meaning. The printed word, the structure of music, the existence of painting, sculpture, and social order all emerge from that one discipline that creates space while negating time and allowing it to become a malleable aspect of the human experience.
"From its origins, in its very invention architecture was bound up with and made great demands on the human capacity for rational thought and action. This conversely made architectural thought and practice a deeply rational thing, who's logic aligned necessarily with the all powerful forces and contingencies of the world that architecture categorically needed to accommodate. Thereby, through a long and incompletely understood process of intellectual formation, many primary cognitive concepts came to be closely connected with architecture and expressed through its terms. Embedded in this condition are fundamental dimensions of language and thought, ranging from speech habits to ingrained cognitive structures. This is manifest in everyday life whenever we say that we plan something, build a strcuture in any aspect of our livs, construct an edifice of meaning for knowledge, cover a subject or find a foundation or ground for the structur of an argument and so forth ad infinitum. The innermost logical and operative relationships of computers, systems, and networks are considered to have- to be- an architecture. Such architectural metaphor is commonly spun out further.
One uses metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction...relte to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs...the appeal of architecture and of architectural imaery alike is that they meet essential needs, and do so in a way that nothing else can.
Architecture is the primary way that we humans endow the world with spatial order. Music, once understood space, became the second...
(Building in Time, Trachtenberg, pg. 9)
Architecture finds contention with the outer world's temporal experience of time through gravity and the elements, Music finds it's contention with our own inner world of temporal experience through memory.
So the next question which must be posed, given quantum mechanics relations of time to space, can architecture itself BECOME time rather than exist as an object which resists it? If this can be accomplished, what implications, if any, does it have to the arts which it has delivered?
Tho understand how this multilevel conflict is implicated in modern architectural culture, we need first to gather a wider view of what is meant by the word "architecture". Only thus will it be grasped how virulently chronophobia works at a deeper discursive and cultural level. Whenever one uses the term architecture as though it had some self-evident and clearly defined meaning, one could not be further from the truth. Architecture is a polysemic, protean concept. It involves more than built buildings, or designs for them, or theory about designs, or the practice of making them, or the history of all these things
Non-Linearity: Music outside of Time and the Persistence of Memory
In as much as gravity is a critical function of architecture, so too memory is to music. The perceptual faculties that allow us to sequentially and heirarchically make sense of events that happen over time posses a physiological structure of their own that in addition to allowing us to make sense of the present, also allows us to make predictions based on past criteria. Music, can therefore be understood in this context as evolving to satisfy these faculties as they exist physiologically, which has led to much discussion of an idea of a universal music, or principles of music that transcend culture, time, and context. Architecture and Music contrasted in this regard can be said to reflect two distinct yet related experiences and necessities: Architecture reflecting the necessity for shelter and the evolution and sustanence of culture, and Music, the necessity to appease the mechinations of the human mind's capacity to perceive and understand the passage of time and our relation to it. It is no wonder then, that one influences the other. The purpose of this section however, is not to go into detail about how architectures and musics influence each other, but how the discrete psychological experience of music can be compared and contrasted and the psychological experience of architecture, and how our respective macro and micro temporal memories and experiences direct the evolution of these practices.
A series of standing waves which cancel each other out and create a silent space dependent upon the proximity of
people in a room. The location of the person is tracked by a motion sensor or camera, and if any one of them moves
outside of the proper designated space, the structure collapses by producing a horrid noise.
C.)HOW ARCHITECTURE IS RELATED TO TIME
-It takes a great amount of time to build a building and it structurally has to be designed to withstand the ravages
and passing of time
-Architecture is static, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience temporally is dependent upon how one moves
through the structure.
D.)HOW MUSIC IS RELATED TO TIME
-Music is an aesthetic expression of the passage of time and it's structure is totally beholden to our concept of
and experience of time, time determines how formal musical aesthetics are defined.
-Music is kinetic, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience temporally is based on how the music moves through
time and there is only one expression of those connections that can be experience at one time: which is to say
that despite the fact that various note combinations can yeild a variable amount of musical output, since music
traces the passage of time, only a very finite number of expressions can be conceived at one time and indeed, an
entire composition is judged based on these finite expressions.
E.)HOW ARCHITECTURE IS RELATED TO SPACE
-Architecture is the art of framing empty space, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience of space is based
not only on how the architecture itself looks, but also how architecture creates the space being inhabited.
-Architectureconceptually charges space based on scale, aesthetics, and function, one's perception of space is inferred
rather than directly acted upon.
-The emergence of virtual space has made the possibilities of what is architecturally feasible greatly expanded
than it has been in any other period in history. Digital technology has also given birth to liquid architecture
which is functional architecture that is not beholden to the laws of engineering and temporality that normally apply
and the virtual structures themselves are directly maleable and fluid. In this way, digital technology has made
Architecture a static as well as kinetic form.
F.) HOW MUSIC IS RELATED TO SPACE
-Music both frames space conceptually and affects space perceptually and physically. That is to say that music
that would be played in a church is inherently different than that which would be played in a night club.
Given spaces have correspondingly appropriate forms of music. Sound, which IS music, is combined pressure waves
acting in a given environment on physical space and it's propogation is dependent on how an instrument is constructed
to have a given effect on space consistently over time.
-The emergence of digital technology as applied to music and sound has created music from sounds that could otherwise
not be created by a musician using traditional means. Digital technology has made music a static form, which is to
say that the creative act is no longer restricted to performance, but is expanded to listening and becomes more
akin to activities such as drawing and writing. Digital technology has made music both a static and kinetic
activity simultaneously.
G.) WHY COMBINE MUSIC AND ARCHITECTURE
-Our experiences of music and architecture are inherently separate, yet critically related. In order to experience
a more mind expanding experiential perception of time and space, by combining music and architecture into a new
field aesthetic field, new possibilities present themselves not only for the expression and creation of this new
form, but also to help continue to advance music and architecture separately.
Part 1: WHY EARLY COMPUTER LOGIC?
-the most obvious material thread connecting music with architecture is digital representation of information.
Depending on the interface and how one encodes data, one body of information can be represented as different things.
That is to say, a body of data written in Csound can be conversely represented as architecture in autocad if the
right conditions are applied. Architecture was one of the first disciplines to embrace digital technology, and many
developments in digital technology can trace their routes back to languages and logic that were developed for
architectural application. Being that this is the case, the matrices, graphs, etc. that one encounters lend them
selves to being more heavily depenedent on drawing and pen/paper activities than strictly digital which co-incides
with my own predilicitions toward drawing, painting and writing. The geometric and mathematical
principles involved in representing architecture digitally can be appllied to the geometrical theory of music developed
by Dmitri Tymozcko.
thinkers for centuries. Beyond acoustics, the closest links between architecture and music exist in within the
dimensions which we take so much for granted: time and space- which even in the last century have gone through a radical phenomenological transformation thanks for Quantum Physics in which time is a malleable aspect beholden itself to functions of space. Inasmuch as architecture and music exist within time and space, their respective aesthetic functions are shaped solely by the existence of space and time's common physical denominator, gravity. Without gravity, the ravages of time would be null, and the existence of space would be formless and arbitrary.
Architecture's Relation to Time:
The unease provoked by the interesection of time and architecture is triggered by conflicts that run at deeper levels of modern consciousness. It is not just that time in the form of past history and future duration eats away at the flesh of architecture and suberts its spirit, as the Modernists believed. Critical theory, cognitive science, and metaphysics are fields in which architecture and time are often seen to contradict and undermine each other. In wasys seemingly fundamental t cognitive life, architecture and time are considered antithetical both in the surface hostilities already reviewed and as regions of inherent incompatibility. They appear so antithetical that it can be difficult even to contemplate them in the same conceptual space. THis conflict is embedded in the structure of western thought and linguistic practice but t came into the open only in odern times as the ideology of chronicide.
Only by adopting an expanded definition of the word Architecture, can we overcome the conventional restraints that have kept our culturally inherited conception of Time's relation to Architecture stagnant despite the increasing expansion of our understanding and experience of both. Our current understanding of Architecture is rooted in the renaissance conception of the fine arts, including painting and sculpture which are united by the concept of design. One of the great legacies of the seismic shift in Architectural thinking ushered in by the emergence of Post-Modernity, has been to define architecture as existing beyond the confines of engineering, practicality, modes of visual and spatial aesthetics, and self-contained contextual designation. It's existence and phenomenological importance are rooted in a human need as essential as eating, sleeping, or social cohesion: in effect, it is the embodiment of all aspects of human human survival. The fact that language, music, and architecture are universal expressions of human culture is undeniable. What distinguishes Architecture form these other forms however, is it's linkage to the fine arts. Where language and music are primarily aural expressions that exist independently of a correlative visual syntax such as print or notation, our experience of architecture is just as much aesthetically visual as it is spatial and socially contextualized. Indeed, it is from Architecture that the other fine arts, sculpture and painting, emerged before becoming discrete and autonomous practices in and of themselves. The impact that architecture has had on it's companion expressions of language and music is irrefutable as well. Gregorian and Tibetan chant can be considered a sonified aspect of the architectures which gave rise to their orders, with cathedral acoustics playing the deciding role in the evolution of western liturgical music, which literally echoes in Opera, and the subsequent musics of the Baroque, and classical period. The cathedral literally becomes the source of music. With language as well, what would be the purpose of recording histories, poetry, or literature without a providing a sanctuary from the elements for the fragile material that carry their meaning. The printed word, the structure of music, the existence of painting, sculpture, and social order all emerge from that one discipline that creates space while negating time and allowing it to become a malleable aspect of the human experience.
"From its origins, in its very invention architecture was bound up with and made great demands on the human capacity for rational thought and action. This conversely made architectural thought and practice a deeply rational thing, who's logic aligned necessarily with the all powerful forces and contingencies of the world that architecture categorically needed to accommodate. Thereby, through a long and incompletely understood process of intellectual formation, many primary cognitive concepts came to be closely connected with architecture and expressed through its terms. Embedded in this condition are fundamental dimensions of language and thought, ranging from speech habits to ingrained cognitive structures. This is manifest in everyday life whenever we say that we plan something, build a strcuture in any aspect of our livs, construct an edifice of meaning for knowledge, cover a subject or find a foundation or ground for the structur of an argument and so forth ad infinitum. The innermost logical and operative relationships of computers, systems, and networks are considered to have- to be- an architecture. Such architectural metaphor is commonly spun out further.
One uses metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction...relte to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs...the appeal of architecture and of architectural imaery alike is that they meet essential needs, and do so in a way that nothing else can.
Architecture is the primary way that we humans endow the world with spatial order. Music, once understood space, became the second...
(Building in Time, Trachtenberg, pg. 9)
Architecture finds contention with the outer world's temporal experience of time through gravity and the elements, Music finds it's contention with our own inner world of temporal experience through memory.
So the next question which must be posed, given quantum mechanics relations of time to space, can architecture itself BECOME time rather than exist as an object which resists it? If this can be accomplished, what implications, if any, does it have to the arts which it has delivered?
Tho understand how this multilevel conflict is implicated in modern architectural culture, we need first to gather a wider view of what is meant by the word "architecture". Only thus will it be grasped how virulently chronophobia works at a deeper discursive and cultural level. Whenever one uses the term architecture as though it had some self-evident and clearly defined meaning, one could not be further from the truth. Architecture is a polysemic, protean concept. It involves more than built buildings, or designs for them, or theory about designs, or the practice of making them, or the history of all these things
Non-Linearity: Music outside of Time and the Persistence of Memory
In as much as gravity is a critical function of architecture, so too memory is to music. The perceptual faculties that allow us to sequentially and heirarchically make sense of events that happen over time posses a physiological structure of their own that in addition to allowing us to make sense of the present, also allows us to make predictions based on past criteria. Music, can therefore be understood in this context as evolving to satisfy these faculties as they exist physiologically, which has led to much discussion of an idea of a universal music, or principles of music that transcend culture, time, and context. Architecture and Music contrasted in this regard can be said to reflect two distinct yet related experiences and necessities: Architecture reflecting the necessity for shelter and the evolution and sustanence of culture, and Music, the necessity to appease the mechinations of the human mind's capacity to perceive and understand the passage of time and our relation to it. It is no wonder then, that one influences the other. The purpose of this section however, is not to go into detail about how architectures and musics influence each other, but how the discrete psychological experience of music can be compared and contrasted and the psychological experience of architecture, and how our respective macro and micro temporal memories and experiences direct the evolution of these practices.
A series of standing waves which cancel each other out and create a silent space dependent upon the proximity of
people in a room. The location of the person is tracked by a motion sensor or camera, and if any one of them moves
outside of the proper designated space, the structure collapses by producing a horrid noise.
C.)HOW ARCHITECTURE IS RELATED TO TIME
-It takes a great amount of time to build a building and it structurally has to be designed to withstand the ravages
and passing of time
-Architecture is static, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience temporally is dependent upon how one moves
through the structure.
D.)HOW MUSIC IS RELATED TO TIME
-Music is an aesthetic expression of the passage of time and it's structure is totally beholden to our concept of
and experience of time, time determines how formal musical aesthetics are defined.
-Music is kinetic, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience temporally is based on how the music moves through
time and there is only one expression of those connections that can be experience at one time: which is to say
that despite the fact that various note combinations can yeild a variable amount of musical output, since music
traces the passage of time, only a very finite number of expressions can be conceived at one time and indeed, an
entire composition is judged based on these finite expressions.
E.)HOW ARCHITECTURE IS RELATED TO SPACE
-Architecture is the art of framing empty space, which is to say that one's aesthetic experience of space is based
not only on how the architecture itself looks, but also how architecture creates the space being inhabited.
-Architectureconceptually charges space based on scale, aesthetics, and function, one's perception of space is inferred
rather than directly acted upon.
-The emergence of virtual space has made the possibilities of what is architecturally feasible greatly expanded
than it has been in any other period in history. Digital technology has also given birth to liquid architecture
which is functional architecture that is not beholden to the laws of engineering and temporality that normally apply
and the virtual structures themselves are directly maleable and fluid. In this way, digital technology has made
Architecture a static as well as kinetic form.
F.) HOW MUSIC IS RELATED TO SPACE
-Music both frames space conceptually and affects space perceptually and physically. That is to say that music
that would be played in a church is inherently different than that which would be played in a night club.
Given spaces have correspondingly appropriate forms of music. Sound, which IS music, is combined pressure waves
acting in a given environment on physical space and it's propogation is dependent on how an instrument is constructed
to have a given effect on space consistently over time.
-The emergence of digital technology as applied to music and sound has created music from sounds that could otherwise
not be created by a musician using traditional means. Digital technology has made music a static form, which is to
say that the creative act is no longer restricted to performance, but is expanded to listening and becomes more
akin to activities such as drawing and writing. Digital technology has made music both a static and kinetic
activity simultaneously.
G.) WHY COMBINE MUSIC AND ARCHITECTURE
-Our experiences of music and architecture are inherently separate, yet critically related. In order to experience
a more mind expanding experiential perception of time and space, by combining music and architecture into a new
field aesthetic field, new possibilities present themselves not only for the expression and creation of this new
form, but also to help continue to advance music and architecture separately.
Part 1: WHY EARLY COMPUTER LOGIC?
-the most obvious material thread connecting music with architecture is digital representation of information.
Depending on the interface and how one encodes data, one body of information can be represented as different things.
That is to say, a body of data written in Csound can be conversely represented as architecture in autocad if the
right conditions are applied. Architecture was one of the first disciplines to embrace digital technology, and many
developments in digital technology can trace their routes back to languages and logic that were developed for
architectural application. Being that this is the case, the matrices, graphs, etc. that one encounters lend them
selves to being more heavily depenedent on drawing and pen/paper activities than strictly digital which co-incides
with my own predilicitions toward drawing, painting and writing. The geometric and mathematical
principles involved in representing architecture digitally can be appllied to the geometrical theory of music developed
by Dmitri Tymozcko.
The post-modern challenge: Peter Eisenmann and House X
"From Structure to Subject: The formation of an Architectural Language"
The Foundation of Language
The establishment of society can be seen as the establishment of order through conventions, or more specifically,
the establishment of a language through symbolic codes. Before order, before language, there exists a primal
chaos where there ar eno rules for marrying, building, eating; in this chaos, which preceds society, there is only
an infiniite field of potential for manipulation of the individial and collective realms from the verbal to the sexual. The systematization and institutionalization of rules in these domains, the making of rules, involves at once a repression of chaos, and an invention of sicial codes of a 'language' of kinship relations, a 'language' of myth, or a 'language' which expresses the spatial organization of a tribe.
In Architecture, two moments can be isolated in history where the foundation of a new language was preceded by a kind of ritual sacrifice. The establishment of a classical language and a theoretically organized practice of architecture
in the Renaissance implied the death of the medieval builder who, in Alberti's definition, "worked with his hands", in
favor of the new rational architect who "worked with his mind". Similarly, at the beginning of this century, the
establishment of modern architecture against nineteenthy century eclecticism, the foundation of an architecture
which "had nothing to do with the styles," in Le Corbusier's terms, sacrificed stylistic variety to a high vision
of abstraction.
We have now entered an age in which architecture has been subjected to yet another sacrifice, it's very definition
and structural aspects have been subverted and re-imagined in the virtual realm, a realm in which the abstract is
made tangible. It is again cast into a state of chaos and confusion. Within this current state of chaos and
confusion, the phenomenology of architectural musicis being born to allow us to understand how and in what forms,
when architecture does become re-constituted, what information and syntactic as well as semantic data had been gleaned. It is also a means to help understand the development and current phenomenology of electronic music into something resmembling more of a classical model. These intersections give birth to new expressions of interface, coding, an d experience. Marry this with the new perception of time and space as one entity, and you have a perfect form to occupy this new scientifically supported space. Let's think about worm holes.
In both circumstances the aim was to produce a systematic organization of the codes of architectural practice, to
define an apparently finite and stable number of forms and their correlated meaning within a closed system: that is
to create the illusion of a language. But whereas in classicism a fully constituted language in this sense can be
observed in the way in which the elements of antiquity, deployed in an entirely new way, sustained a gramatical
framework, in modernism the linguistic organization was essentially illusory. for while modern architecture
apparently promoted a new symbolic organization, it did not create the conditions for its systematic development.
Functionalism, the dictum "form follows function", said much about the origin of signs, but little about their nature;
it proposed new words but no rules for their combination, no grammatical framework for their use. Where the rules
of the language were finite, those of functionalism were in constant flux, varying in response to changing needs,
changing aesthetic preference, and individual interpretations...Ultimately, the 'functionalist' sign differed differed
little from its classical counterpart; shapes were derived not from function itself, but from other disciplinary
references...in order to suggest a functional meaning. Such a relativistic approach could neither neither
establish a finite vocabulary nor its grammar and syntax- the necessary components of a specific architectural
language.
The limitations of functionalism led to a strong reaction against modern architecture and its aspirations
toward an architectural language. This reaction has taken two entirley opposed forms, both of which propose an
extension of the traditional conceptions of language or, in other terms, of the traditional modes of generating
meaning in architecture. The first, in its most extreme form characterized by the theory and practice of Robert
Venturi, advocates a reinstatement of a multivalent and eclectic language which superficially is not unlike that
constituted by the 'styles' of the nineteenth century. This position stresses the generation of signs themselves,
understands in a critical way the nature of conventional meanings, and relishes the complexity of a plurality of
meanings however organized in the whole.
The second reaction, most clearly represented by the work of Peter Eisenmann, tries to address the more basic
questions of language, the grammatical questions. What are the limits, qualitatively and quantitatively, to the lexicon
of architectural signs; what makes certain configurations architectural; which shapes can or cannot be used? And
more important, how should they be articulated?...where in Venturi we find a reaction against the singular nature
of the architectural sign in order to see it as a more complex entity, but without concern for the underlying structure
of the language, in Eisenmann we find a reaction against the architectural sign itself, and in particular the idea
of the meaning of the sign, in order to concentrate on the generation of a linguistic structure. In the process
of establishing this structure Eisenmann sacrifices not only functionalism, but humanism itelf, attempting to create
an entirely other order, a new language.
The Concept of Structure
The model of language adopted by Eisenmann is, as is well known, structuralist: it derives from his personal reading
of the theories of Chomsky which were developed to explain creativity in language (the ability of a speaker to create
an infinite number of sentences...such a model allows him to generate systems of relations among architectural forms
hitherto precluded by the classical or modernist canon.
Chomsky's linguistic model and its relation to architecture can be demonstrated in two ways. First, it may be seen as a
natural result of architecture's concern with formal and semantic organization, that is with the arrangement of forms
and meanings, and second it may be related to the convention that has permitted generations of architectural theorists, from Alberti to Le Corbusier, to refer to the 'language' of an architecture and utilize grammatical and rhetorical categories in turn to supply terms of structure and meaning to their art.
However the analogy of architecture as language is imprecise. The conventions of a language are rigid and they are
accepted as such. In architecture rules are transitory and not mandatory. Architectural signs (doors, porticos, etc)
are different from the linguistic signs because they are not socially accepted facts. The signs and the forms they
take in relation to the structure as a whole change with taste, or dynasty as in the case with Chinese architecture.
This being the case, the expression of the architectural sign requires the definition of a formal coding system.
However, in architecture the formal system has never been defined in a rigorous and exhaustive way, as for example
has the formal system in music. Architects have always worked with fragments of systems rather than with a complete
language. In Eisenmann's architecture the process of design is a process of research into formal structures and shapes
which do not exist prior to the design. At the beginning there is an idea that is both formal and conceptual, and the
design becomes an obsessive search for the corresponding shape...the design of a structure of empty positions in which the goal is to arrive at a set of shapes, every shape acquires first a syntactic meaning in contrast to other shapes that may or may not be present in the final design.
The syntactic system then is initially defined as a structure of syntactic signs seen as an interplay of empty positions
and binary oppositions. There are two differences that distinguish these signs from classical ones. Traditionally
the architectural sign is an entity- a meaning or function which belongs to a different realm: conceptual or social
for someone. One confronts signs- shapes which do not refer to something else or to someone, but only to other shapes. Second, while the sign is traditionally a dual entity that relates a form to a meaning, or an expression to a content, the syntactic signs are signals, that is, singular entities which become signs only through their relationship to other signals. For example, a square is a shape which only becomes a sign when seen in relationship to another square or to a circle- the sign value then being equal or different. These signals have no value or syntactic meaning in themselves; their value is purely relational. The shape-signals thus acquire a syntactic meaning only when they occupy a position within the formal system.
Unlike the formation of traditional signs which are coupled with actual or virtual functions and thus read as doors,
windows, etc. they are not generated from any functional logic, and so in order to become architectural, that is
to avoid being merely sculptural, they must postulate an alternative syntactic system which still serves as a
support for such functional meaning. More important, the syntactic system incorporates the capacity to overcome the functional meaning so as to go beyond that meaning to suggest intrinsic architectural notions. At every stage there are rules that permit the selection of what can be called correct configurations and the discarding of the innappropriate ones. The aim of the process is to find a law, a general rule that will combine each of the partial moves or stages into a continuous uninterrupted sequence explanatory of the process from simple beginning to a complex end. This law of development is formal and should be independent of any functional interpretation. The functional meanings are never contained in explanatory notions. With this approach design is concerned with syntax, and not with semantics, which is assumed to be known and which is seen as just the cultural, conventional attribution of functions to forms.
The Subject of Architecture:
In Architecture, representation is, so to speak doubled. For architecture provides the real context where representation-theatrical or painterly- is made possible, is realized; at the same time it is itself a represenational art. For Alberti, it represents the underlying structure of nature mediated by musical proportional intervals and the natural processes of creation.
The Foundation of Language
The establishment of society can be seen as the establishment of order through conventions, or more specifically,
the establishment of a language through symbolic codes. Before order, before language, there exists a primal
chaos where there ar eno rules for marrying, building, eating; in this chaos, which preceds society, there is only
an infiniite field of potential for manipulation of the individial and collective realms from the verbal to the sexual. The systematization and institutionalization of rules in these domains, the making of rules, involves at once a repression of chaos, and an invention of sicial codes of a 'language' of kinship relations, a 'language' of myth, or a 'language' which expresses the spatial organization of a tribe.
In Architecture, two moments can be isolated in history where the foundation of a new language was preceded by a kind of ritual sacrifice. The establishment of a classical language and a theoretically organized practice of architecture
in the Renaissance implied the death of the medieval builder who, in Alberti's definition, "worked with his hands", in
favor of the new rational architect who "worked with his mind". Similarly, at the beginning of this century, the
establishment of modern architecture against nineteenthy century eclecticism, the foundation of an architecture
which "had nothing to do with the styles," in Le Corbusier's terms, sacrificed stylistic variety to a high vision
of abstraction.
We have now entered an age in which architecture has been subjected to yet another sacrifice, it's very definition
and structural aspects have been subverted and re-imagined in the virtual realm, a realm in which the abstract is
made tangible. It is again cast into a state of chaos and confusion. Within this current state of chaos and
confusion, the phenomenology of architectural musicis being born to allow us to understand how and in what forms,
when architecture does become re-constituted, what information and syntactic as well as semantic data had been gleaned. It is also a means to help understand the development and current phenomenology of electronic music into something resmembling more of a classical model. These intersections give birth to new expressions of interface, coding, an d experience. Marry this with the new perception of time and space as one entity, and you have a perfect form to occupy this new scientifically supported space. Let's think about worm holes.
In both circumstances the aim was to produce a systematic organization of the codes of architectural practice, to
define an apparently finite and stable number of forms and their correlated meaning within a closed system: that is
to create the illusion of a language. But whereas in classicism a fully constituted language in this sense can be
observed in the way in which the elements of antiquity, deployed in an entirely new way, sustained a gramatical
framework, in modernism the linguistic organization was essentially illusory. for while modern architecture
apparently promoted a new symbolic organization, it did not create the conditions for its systematic development.
Functionalism, the dictum "form follows function", said much about the origin of signs, but little about their nature;
it proposed new words but no rules for their combination, no grammatical framework for their use. Where the rules
of the language were finite, those of functionalism were in constant flux, varying in response to changing needs,
changing aesthetic preference, and individual interpretations...Ultimately, the 'functionalist' sign differed differed
little from its classical counterpart; shapes were derived not from function itself, but from other disciplinary
references...in order to suggest a functional meaning. Such a relativistic approach could neither neither
establish a finite vocabulary nor its grammar and syntax- the necessary components of a specific architectural
language.
The limitations of functionalism led to a strong reaction against modern architecture and its aspirations
toward an architectural language. This reaction has taken two entirley opposed forms, both of which propose an
extension of the traditional conceptions of language or, in other terms, of the traditional modes of generating
meaning in architecture. The first, in its most extreme form characterized by the theory and practice of Robert
Venturi, advocates a reinstatement of a multivalent and eclectic language which superficially is not unlike that
constituted by the 'styles' of the nineteenth century. This position stresses the generation of signs themselves,
understands in a critical way the nature of conventional meanings, and relishes the complexity of a plurality of
meanings however organized in the whole.
The second reaction, most clearly represented by the work of Peter Eisenmann, tries to address the more basic
questions of language, the grammatical questions. What are the limits, qualitatively and quantitatively, to the lexicon
of architectural signs; what makes certain configurations architectural; which shapes can or cannot be used? And
more important, how should they be articulated?...where in Venturi we find a reaction against the singular nature
of the architectural sign in order to see it as a more complex entity, but without concern for the underlying structure
of the language, in Eisenmann we find a reaction against the architectural sign itself, and in particular the idea
of the meaning of the sign, in order to concentrate on the generation of a linguistic structure. In the process
of establishing this structure Eisenmann sacrifices not only functionalism, but humanism itelf, attempting to create
an entirely other order, a new language.
The Concept of Structure
The model of language adopted by Eisenmann is, as is well known, structuralist: it derives from his personal reading
of the theories of Chomsky which were developed to explain creativity in language (the ability of a speaker to create
an infinite number of sentences...such a model allows him to generate systems of relations among architectural forms
hitherto precluded by the classical or modernist canon.
Chomsky's linguistic model and its relation to architecture can be demonstrated in two ways. First, it may be seen as a
natural result of architecture's concern with formal and semantic organization, that is with the arrangement of forms
and meanings, and second it may be related to the convention that has permitted generations of architectural theorists, from Alberti to Le Corbusier, to refer to the 'language' of an architecture and utilize grammatical and rhetorical categories in turn to supply terms of structure and meaning to their art.
However the analogy of architecture as language is imprecise. The conventions of a language are rigid and they are
accepted as such. In architecture rules are transitory and not mandatory. Architectural signs (doors, porticos, etc)
are different from the linguistic signs because they are not socially accepted facts. The signs and the forms they
take in relation to the structure as a whole change with taste, or dynasty as in the case with Chinese architecture.
This being the case, the expression of the architectural sign requires the definition of a formal coding system.
However, in architecture the formal system has never been defined in a rigorous and exhaustive way, as for example
has the formal system in music. Architects have always worked with fragments of systems rather than with a complete
language. In Eisenmann's architecture the process of design is a process of research into formal structures and shapes
which do not exist prior to the design. At the beginning there is an idea that is both formal and conceptual, and the
design becomes an obsessive search for the corresponding shape...the design of a structure of empty positions in which the goal is to arrive at a set of shapes, every shape acquires first a syntactic meaning in contrast to other shapes that may or may not be present in the final design.
The syntactic system then is initially defined as a structure of syntactic signs seen as an interplay of empty positions
and binary oppositions. There are two differences that distinguish these signs from classical ones. Traditionally
the architectural sign is an entity- a meaning or function which belongs to a different realm: conceptual or social
for someone. One confronts signs- shapes which do not refer to something else or to someone, but only to other shapes. Second, while the sign is traditionally a dual entity that relates a form to a meaning, or an expression to a content, the syntactic signs are signals, that is, singular entities which become signs only through their relationship to other signals. For example, a square is a shape which only becomes a sign when seen in relationship to another square or to a circle- the sign value then being equal or different. These signals have no value or syntactic meaning in themselves; their value is purely relational. The shape-signals thus acquire a syntactic meaning only when they occupy a position within the formal system.
Unlike the formation of traditional signs which are coupled with actual or virtual functions and thus read as doors,
windows, etc. they are not generated from any functional logic, and so in order to become architectural, that is
to avoid being merely sculptural, they must postulate an alternative syntactic system which still serves as a
support for such functional meaning. More important, the syntactic system incorporates the capacity to overcome the functional meaning so as to go beyond that meaning to suggest intrinsic architectural notions. At every stage there are rules that permit the selection of what can be called correct configurations and the discarding of the innappropriate ones. The aim of the process is to find a law, a general rule that will combine each of the partial moves or stages into a continuous uninterrupted sequence explanatory of the process from simple beginning to a complex end. This law of development is formal and should be independent of any functional interpretation. The functional meanings are never contained in explanatory notions. With this approach design is concerned with syntax, and not with semantics, which is assumed to be known and which is seen as just the cultural, conventional attribution of functions to forms.
The Subject of Architecture:
In Architecture, representation is, so to speak doubled. For architecture provides the real context where representation-theatrical or painterly- is made possible, is realized; at the same time it is itself a represenational art. For Alberti, it represents the underlying structure of nature mediated by musical proportional intervals and the natural processes of creation.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Project Proposal: Gamelan Concrete
I came across a project some folks did fairly recently about synthesizing and analyzing gamelan music using C Sound and Max/MSP. The aim of the project was to sample, analyze, and create a computer music composition simulating the gamelan instruments Kemong, Kempli, Jegogan, Gong, Calung, Gangsa, and Reyong. Central to the project was analyzing pitch frequencies, and simulating the harmonic beating which takes place between the male and female tunings of several instruments. The procedure for sampling the instruments, and also utilizing a software synthesis application to analyze the sounds will be described below. Their goal was to create a computer system that would achieve this effect. I am interested in building a series of chambers that would achieve the same effect except by use of chanting techniques as oppose to simulated percussion. The object of this project is not simulate the sounds of the gamelan, but rather to create an environment in which proportionately relevant partials are generated as well as the beating effect which gives the gamelan it's specific spectral nature.
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Image is Everything
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
Marshall McLuhan
We experience architecture primarily through images. Our first impressions of the Taj Majal, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building all come from representational images of them, and every successive image that we come across of said structures, further reinforces our first impression of it because that very impression has itself been manufactured as one in a constantly growing stream of images. When one actually goes to a place like the Empire State Building, or the Taj Mahal, something interseting happens. You experience a very strong sense of cognitive dissonanace since the structure itself leaves a far different impression than the imagined, or proxy one. It's not as big as you thought perhaps. Or once you get up close to it, you realize how inaccessible it really is. Instead of taking a picture of the building from a peculiar angle, you take a picture that is based on the images you have seen already in magazines or on T.V. Otherwise, how will people know you were actually there? In this sense, the building itself must take a second place to it's image. It is the immaterial presence of teh building that defines it more than the thing itself. While this is not a new condition, it is one that has steadily been growing more prominent and complex for centuries, and which in the past 20 years has undergone a period of unprecedented growth.
Marshall McLuhan
We experience architecture primarily through images. Our first impressions of the Taj Majal, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building all come from representational images of them, and every successive image that we come across of said structures, further reinforces our first impression of it because that very impression has itself been manufactured as one in a constantly growing stream of images. When one actually goes to a place like the Empire State Building, or the Taj Mahal, something interseting happens. You experience a very strong sense of cognitive dissonanace since the structure itself leaves a far different impression than the imagined, or proxy one. It's not as big as you thought perhaps. Or once you get up close to it, you realize how inaccessible it really is. Instead of taking a picture of the building from a peculiar angle, you take a picture that is based on the images you have seen already in magazines or on T.V. Otherwise, how will people know you were actually there? In this sense, the building itself must take a second place to it's image. It is the immaterial presence of teh building that defines it more than the thing itself. While this is not a new condition, it is one that has steadily been growing more prominent and complex for centuries, and which in the past 20 years has undergone a period of unprecedented growth.
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