Friday, November 24, 2006

tonight

a couple of us are meeting at 6:30 tonight in our usual classroom...if you are available and interested please stop by for discussion...sorry again for the short notice

1 comment:

Dan Bucsescu said...

Alex:

Your proposal to map three distinct places/domains/territories is very promising.

I have a few methodological suggestions for you. To map and compare anything one has first to establish a set categories - each map must be internally homogeneous
as to the aspect of reality it proposes to map-capture, describe, locate etc……..
So the first question is : What aspects, attributes, properties of the three places you are capturing at any one time. You are in search for categories of experience that the thre places share or not, relationships, similarities and differences.
It might be useful to organize your work in the three Worlds of Popper:

Karl Popper’s 3 Worlds

World 1(the world of physical objects) (0) Hydrogen and Helium
(1) the Heavier elements: Liquids and Crystals
(2) Living Organisms

Mapping this world would mean to capture the material reality: density/quantity of people over time, temperature, humidity, smells, light levels, dimensions of 3D space, color, sound levels, or any other physical attributes, objective, quantitative descriptions of the three places you have chosen.

World 2 (the world of subjective experiences)
(1) Sentience (animal consciousness)
(3) Sentience (animal consciousness)
(4) Consciousness of Self and Death

Mapping this world would mean to capture your own impressions (as you have already
Have done in your memoirs) of the three places. But you also might want to collect impressions from others- recorded interviews etc. Your sketches from these places would also fit here as your drawn impressions. All these are anecdotal, qualitative mapping



World 3 (the recorded products of the human mind)

(5) Human Language. Theories of self and Death
(6) Works of Art and of Science(including technology)

Mapping this world would mean would mean a review of the literature, theories about the three places : home,subway and night clubs. This means anything written about them anywhere, architectural theory, sociology , psychology, geography etc.



Once you have lets say, the raw data, it will be helpful to try to select, extract, condense your data into a matrix of categories, dimensions that can be diagramed.
You are, in fact looking for a “meta-level semantic nodes” (more about that later). You are after all searching for a new way to understand the differences and similarities of these distinct realms and, as you said develop a new kind of architectural program….