This is the start for my piece. Let me know what you think...and let me know if this isn't' where I'm supposed to post it!!


“Cornbread[+ketchup]” A woman stuck in the floor boards. She was yelling indiscernible things. A knot hole in the wood floor revealed her. The recording of her voice looped the angry cries for help. A series of suicide attempts all photographed. The collection documented both gruesome and ironic methods of killing oneself. Twenty foot high, four inch thick steel bending around itself in an elliptical fashion. Mangled car parts spray painted vibrant colors and welded together. An eight hundred square foot apartment buried entirely under three feet of soil. Rusted neon signs from rural America The date, ever so carefully painted in white on a solid black canvas. A map of the United States formed out of car license plates. A film of a woman spinning a hool-a-hoop of thorns around her waist, naked on a beach. Art. advertising Mo’s BBQ and Heineken Beer. Alias names flooding subways and city walls. New script and calligraphic styles displayed on the streets. Crowns used to proclaim writers as king. A smoking joint as the cross bar for the letter “H”. The development of scale and visual weight paired with the addition of color. Thicker letters filled in with designs ranging from stars to checkerboards. Masterpieces start to span the entire height of subway cars. Block letters, leaning letters, and Softie letters. Is it art? Graffiti movements began as early as the 1930’s in the U.S. with the Cholos of Los Angeles, but didn’t gained recognition and identity until the late 1960’s. Old school writers CORNBREAD, JULIO 204, and Taki 183 were amongst the first of these artists to give birth to the underground art movement in the boroughs of New York. Early writers targeted the subway system, using it as a line of communication between the different movements surfacing in the five different boroughs. Their tags became a symbol of presence and identity; the more “bombs” a writer completed the more recognition and status he would gain. Writers joined together and the styles began to form as one crew of writers pushed to out perform the other crews. By the mid 1980’s graffiti culture turned to embrace the physical strength, territory, and unity of gangs. The climate on the streets between crews intensified and “cross out wars” became significantly integral amongst writers. Since increased efforts from Transit Authorities, writers have turned to the streets targeting highways, walls, rooftops, and trains. For some writers, graffiti is an outlet of expression, an opportunity for the individual to make known his or her fears, hopes, and dreams. For others, it’s a territorial game; a challenge to see how many times one can tag and escape authorities. Still others see it as a means of seeking revenge from oppressors and the society that turned its back on them. Coda, a 21 year old writer from Philly said: “Basically, when I look around, I see us living in a modern day Babylon, full of temptation, sin, distraction, corruption, injustice, and misguided fools being mentally enslaved. It seems to me the only way to wake people up from this kind of numbness is to destroy what they know: their business, their places of commerce and their biggest place of gathering, the cities! Put it on their trains, on the lines they take to work, on their rooftops, on their highways, on anything just to make some people realize that culture isn’t lost and that, at the very least, a small group of kids is fighting to keep it alive.” Maybe this form of art is a documentation of the present cultural thinking. The images engage in a dialogue with the textures of the city streets. Is it something that should be painted over and fought against? The U.S. government is still facing legal battles with numbers of Native American tribes. While the issues of debate vary from region to region and tribe to tribe, the undercurrent of most of these disputes is a struggle to preserve a disappearing culture. The oral language is dying as the number of native speakers dies alongside, and developers are bulldozing burial sites and religious grounds to make way for new ski resorts. The history of these cultures heavily depends of the sacredness of the land; the earth is the written book of these cultures and we are too quick to turn our heads. Perhaps these graffiti writers, from the city streets, are spraying a timeline of our current culture. Are they defacing property? Should we wipe clean a mural that took 8 hours and 30 cans of paint; a composition that expresses an individual’s thoughts and criticisms?

$$$ Extramural Funding: A Proposal $$$

Per our class discussion today, the following are a list of points that must be addressed in the proposal:

1) a brief narrative describing the proposed work
2) significance of the project
3) time-line for completion of the project
4) potential for continued external funding for the project
5) statement justifying the requested resources necessary to complete the project

also:
a) who is our audience?
b) what is the mission of this publication?
c) how can this publication create exposure, enhance notoriety and encourage donations?
d) other?

Please provide your input/feedback to these points ASAP.
The deadline for this proposal (to be submitted by Tom, Karen and Whitney) is Friday February 9.

Thank You.

mod | 020107 | 10:12 pm -- in order to preserve space and keep this post near the top of the blog, please respond to the points by commenting on the post rather than making a separate post (click the comment link below). Thanks! -- Justin Reinhart

Book Structure

Is it our intention to represent architecture at cal poly? If so, there needs to be a mix of writing that is both general [the book’s structure…”overview” or background information, so our personal interest investigations are relevant. For example, “4th year study abroad” or “5th year thesis”] and specific [the topics discussed last week. Ie “on nomads”]. First, we should determine the general topics that MUST go into this publication. Then we can we can play around with topics that interest us personally.
any thoughts?

i am interested in this:

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/Introduction/Manufactured_Landscapes.html

interview with Charles Jencks

sig and justin are interested in this:

[clip from an interview with Charles Jencks, author of The Iconic Building]

Modern man lacks a mythology that incorporates our latest discoveries in science, but you make an eloquent case for something called “cosmogenesis.” Would you please tell us what that is and how it manifests itself in architecture?

"Cosmogenesis" has a 150 year history as a word. It is picked up by Teilhard, de Chardin, Thomas Berry and Harvard physicists. It has come to mean the universe as a continuous, unfolding event (i.e. a genesis, by a cosmic process lasting 13.7 billion years). This is the shift in worldview that sees nature and culture as growing out of the narrative of the universe. In a global culture of conflict this narrative provides a possible direction and iconography that transcend national and sectarian interests. Several architects are involved at different levels.

One can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a deep transformation going on in the sciences and in time will permeate all other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity - fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology, self-organizing systems - have brought about the change in perspective. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organizing at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

The plurality of styles is a keynote. This reflects an underlying concern for the increasing pluralism of global cities. Growing out of post-modern complexity of the sixties and seventies - Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi - is the complexity theory of the 1980s: Pluralism leads to conflict, the inclusion of opposite tastes and composite goals, a melting and boiling pot. Modernist purity and reduction could not handle this reality very well.

The Death of God, like the death of other major narratives over the last hundred years, may be confined to the west, especially visible now that the globe is experiencing the ultimate clash of civilizations. But fundamentalisms, either American or Other, are not living cultural movements however powerful they may be. They have produced no art, architecture or writing worth preserving, and the deeper problems remain. In spite of these problems, the question of whether the new paradigm exists in architecture is worth asking. What we’re seeing may be a false start; the old paradigm of Modernism can easily reassert its hegemony, as it is lurking behind every Blair and Bush. But a wind is stirring architecture; at least it is the beginning of a shift in theory and practice."

Read the full interview here.

Ketchup and Root Structures

Ketchup: organizational idea based on the most ordinary condiment that embodies all of the taste buds, can be put on anything and spreads easily.

Moving Forward Backward

fractal (n.): "a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation."

[ORIGIN 1970s: from French, from Latin fract- ‘broken,’ from the verb frangere.]

Imagine a tree growing in reverse--the branches and roots appearing, as if from nowhere, growing towards each other to form a trunk. An entire network of individual nodes coming together to form a cohesive whole.

I think we have succeeded in choosing our branches, but we must now figure out how to seamlessly combine them to create a trunk with which to unite them. The picture (above left) is an example of fractal geometry occurring in Nature. Many root structures are self-similar and contain recurring patterns on an incredibly small level. Nature creates organic patterns that, while satisfying fractal geometry, are not confined to the stark precision that mathematical fractals require. While in mathematical constructs the patterns are precisely the same on an infinitely small scale, organic examples of fractal geometry possess complex systems that are made of similar yet unique patterns that repeat on an incredibly (not quite infinitely) small scale, as seen above.

However, whereas in Nature an "initiator" and "generator" are used to determine the rules that will define the outcome of a system, we have compiled a large list of otherwise disparate topics that have the potential to come together in harmony. In our situation, there is no defining rule--there is nothing explicit governing which topics are chosen or how they come together. Instead, what we possess are the branches, and we've only to discern what we see arising from their connections. We are essentially moving forward backward, trying to discern what concept could possibly produce the results we have compiled.

Suppose for instance you are given the task of making a "found-art" sculpture composed of a number of random objects found in a junkyard...perhaps a carburetor, a refrigerator door, a car fender, a bathroom sink, a small step-ladder, a wooden door, and an old sofa.

You create a sculpture that is interesting, compelling, even seductive, and yet you did so without any intention or rule of composition. Instead, you started with a set of relatively unrelated pieces and put them together using only what you felt to be the desire of the piece themselves--what seemed to be "right." If a recognizable pattern or relationship arises and yet it was not intended, does it still exist?

While one might argue that a "pattern" or "relationship" does not exist until it is called such, it can be clearly observed that the existence of repetition and similarity exist devoid of human categorization. That is to say, such words as "repetition" and "similarity" do not, upon their use, suddenly bring into creation repetition or similarity--they are merely words to describe pre-existing natural occurrences.

In this way, we possess a list of "pieces" that potentially contains pre-existing patterns and relationships--we've merely yet to determine what those relationships are predicated upon. And upon finding the inherent relationships within the topic list (there are many possibilities, some more cohesive than others) we can begin to push the publication in the direction it wants to go.