LBG

[Sunday 2 November]

Anyone remember Life Before Google? (Actually, I remember life before Netscape - in my early days, I used something called Webcrawler; google it, kids.) As one of the current HTS classes has it, nostalgia, or Swiss illness, used to be viewed as a medical condition, and as far as I'm concerned, there is very little to be nostalgic about when it comes to life BG. But one thing has changed for the worse: we've stopped thinking. Or rather, we - as in 'most people of today' - have changed the way we think about thinking.

 

Thinking used to be an act of actively testing ideas (an operation during which, according to Hannah Arendt, "the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to ‘go further,’ toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience"), an event that incorporated building an imaginary experiment in an imaginary laboratory using imaginary matter, the fragments of knowledge left in the mind once one stepped out of the library. In life post-Google, however, thinking is something else: the finding of information, the bouncing between sites of interest, the collection of links, the constant expansion of one's insatiable curiosity.

 

Being without the Internet equals remembering how life used to be. It's pretty boring. But it does make you think.

 

Today, then, has been a day of thinking, based on the research I did in front of the computer after the tutorial on Friday. Below are the links, and some quick notes, to show how my mind is wandering at the moment.

 

"Iconicity, i.e. form miming meaning and/or form miming form...":

http://es-dev.uzh.ch/en/conferences/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1196956778&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3&

 

Iconicity as a media typification (how is this part of my argument?):

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:EW8OmqmL48sJ:www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol9is3/spitzberg.pdf+%2Bsurette+%2Biconicity&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk

 

'Iconicity' refers to resemblance between form and meaning, between words and world, or between sign and reality:

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15989267

 

"An icon is an image that is, in and of itself, recognizable...":

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23106647

 

Eisenman's (old) way of reading iconicity: "Our work imposes a conceptual memory on the volumetric massing of an object, and in doing so attempts to subvert icons of presence, the building mass itself, with a striated network of what could be described as lines of memory": 

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/texts.html

 

Eisenman again: ""In architecture when one draws the crossing of two lines, it produces a cross which is an obvious icon of point, centre, focus, etc. The repetition of this crossing produces a grid, which is no longer concerned with centre and focus but rather with surface, texture, etc. The grid is no longer primarily iconic but rather is also an index."

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/texts.html

 

An iconic architecture, then, is one beyond the index, beyond the grid. To draw the crossing of two lines, producing a cross that is never allowed to become a grid...

 

iConic architecture:

http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/reference/CRC-formulas/node26.html

http://www.coastalbend.edu/acdem/math/campbel7/stars/conics.htm

 

"Any critique of part-to-whole relationships implicates the icon, whose monumental size or distinct form produces the semblance of a legible or rhetorically decidable order.  The icon functions within a part-to-whole relationship by metonymically representing the whole, returning it to the Albertian notion of house as city":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/675

 

Eisenman's 'post-indexical' studio at Yale - "In this project, the figure of the work is not simply the residue of the diagram, one which can be read as coming from or leading to a certain outcome, but the reinterpretation of the diagram in order to make it illegible, thereby avoiding indexicality":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/805

 

...and it goes on - "My previous work attempted to give a priority to reading as opposed to the visual image—or icon—by proposing the idea of the index. This assumed a certain capacity on the part of the subject for close reading while at the same time attempting to lessen the importance of spectacular imagery. The process, which included the trace, codes, and other reading strategies, could be understood as part of the affective experience of the architecture. However, the mediated context that is now so totalizing of experience makes it necessary to rethink these ideas of close reading and writing. This studio proposes to this aim a strategy which can be called the post-indexical":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/285

 

"By avoiding an iconic design, Eisenman has ensured that the whole cannot be apprehended from any single vantage point. There is no center, no resting spot for the eye or the body, no therapeutic catharsis. The tight weave of the project never loosens its grip on visitors, or allows them to yield attention to apperception":

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_5_44/ai_n26731917/pg_2

 

Eisenman vs Jencks:

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7877.html

 

Piranesi's Campo Marzio (iconic city plan...):

http://www.quondam.com/20/1980.htm

 

According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object:

http://designdissent1.blogspot.com/2008/05/eisenmans-six-point-plan-pt-2.html

 

Interesting text on iconicity in music:

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:xdVPRj6JJpYJ:www.lomuto.it/documenti/iconicity_in_music.pdf+what+is+architectural+iconicity%3F&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15&gl=uk

 

Koolhaas: " we try to build structures with unstable identities -- that is, buildings with depth. Take the CCTV complex, for example. Now that it's almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn't create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit":

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=241349

 

Zaha's studio at Yale ("...this project conceals the icon, carefully choreographing specific space-time moments at which the icon is revealed. Each iconic image exists in its own space-time, independent from other iconic noise or competition):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/872

 

...and again ("...a high level of Gestalt-intensity (iconicity)"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/327

 

...and again ("Reaffirming the image of the icon, these scenarios consistently reference the same iconic profile but are composed of component parts which, although autonomous, read as an integrated whole"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/873

 

...and again ("This project concerns the revelation and change in gestalt readings of underlying iconic volumes through a secondary "drapery" which produces effects that change the reading of the icons"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/874

 

Finally, let me shock you with a quote from an actual book, Peter Eisenman's Written into the Void, (p. 74?):

"Text in architecture could be considered more like what could be ccalled an indexical as opposed to an iconic condition. The difference between the two is crucial for architecture. For while iconic relationships always refer outward from any form, architectural form poses a unique problem for such an outward looking in that any iconic condition in architecture lies within and thus contains its own instrumentality. A column is both a structural element and an iconic sign of its function."