Friday, April 23, 2010

About Procedural Architecture, Arakawa & Gins



ABOUT PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE

Do you want to live in an apartment or house that can help you determine the nature and extent of interactions between you and the universe? What lengths would you be willing to go to, or how much inconvenience would you be willing to put up with, in order to counteract the usual human destiny of having to die?

Procedural architecture is an architecture of precision and unending invention. Works of procedural architecture function as well-tooled works of equipment that help the body organize its thoughts and actions to a greater degree than had previously been thought possible. Set up to put fruitfully into question all that goes on within them, (works of procedural architecture) steer their residents to examine minutely the actions they take and to reconsider and, as it were, recalibrate their equanimity and self-possession, causing them to doubt themselves long enough to find a way to reinvent themselves.



THREE HYPOTHESIS

ARCHITECTURAL BODY HYPOTHESIS OR SITED AWARENESS HYPOTHESIS

What stems from the body, by way of awareness, should be held to be of it. Any site at which a person deems an X to exist should be considered a contributing segment of her awareness.

INSUFFICIENTLY PROCEDURAL BIOSCLEAVE HYPOTHESIS

It is because we are creatures of an insufficiently procedural bioscleave that the human lot remains untenable.

CLOSELY ARGUED BUILT-DISCOURSE

Adding carefully sequenced sets of architectural procedures (closely argued ones) to bioscleave will, by making it more procedurally sufficient, reconfigure supposed inevitability.



PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE - ARCHITECTURAL BODY

Architectural bodies have everything to do with what a person makes of the fact, the soft but sure-enough fact, that she perceptually subtends, and as-if palpates, architectural surrounds as wholes.

There is that which prompts (architectural surround/tactically posed surround/tutelary abode) and that which gets prompted (organism that persons). Features of architectural surrounds/tactically posed surrounds/tutelary abodes prompt the body to act. Actions and maneuvers secure a general taking shape for an organism that persons of the characteristic features of a(n) architectural surround/tactically posed surround/tutelary abode. In responding to the ubiquitous call that comes from nooks, crannies, and nonnooks and crannies of a(n) architectural surround/tactically posed surround/tutelary abode — most observers feel that they ought eventually to get around to noting everything around them — a person assembles and takes on an architectural body, half-knowingly piecing it together into a flowing whole. The harkening to any feature or element of the architectural surround/tactically posed surround/tutelary abode, bodily stirrings and promptings included: a further articulating of the architectural body.

The dispersing and juxtaposing and culling of landing sites in respect to an architectural surround; a super-convening of many convenings; messenger-like — in rapport with all there is; that which revs as momentum — revved and revving; an amassing of the provisional; a ubiquitous piecing together. All that emanates from a person as she projects and reads an architectural surround forms an architectural body that moves with her, changing form depending on the position she assumes.

A person's capacity to perform actions is keyed to layout and composition of her architectural body.

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

The architectural body consists of two tentative constructings towards a holding in place: body-proper and architectural surround.

An architectural body critically — ever examining and always assessing — holds possibilities in place.

Architectural Body Hypothesis or Sited Awareness Hypothesis
What stems from the body, by way of awareness, should be held to be of it. Any site at which a person deems an X to exist should be considered a contributing segment of her awareness.

An architectural body exists paradoxically enough as that which is most probably specifically dispersed and even so only roughly present.

Covering a large area indeterminately, an architectural body, exists, when you come right down to it, as a statistical entity, with now these proportions, now those. An architectural body has theoretical and actual existence, but as an entity of this kind, it has such a remarkable degree of instability that it is fair to say it is as elusive as anything can be. This huge and difficult-to-track entity of sorts does have a highly visible generating source, and that is the human body, which itself has a statistical existence as a composite of actions and events in addition to its every man, woman, and child appearance as articulated corporeality.

A perfectly proportionate something or other that cannot even be determined as present and accounted for apart from what its definition specifies for it.

Take it as the near-animate group of loci its definition demands for it and accept that out it extends into an architectural surround, enormously expanding the body-proper; do not trouble yourself as to where in relation to a surround it begins or ends or fret over what its full extent might be.

The gist of biotopological thinking: No less attention should be paid to the atmospheric component of the architectural body (the bioscleavic atmospheric surround) than to the body proper.

An architectural body only more or less takes shape and only more or less presses forward and manifests as that which it is purported to be.



PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE - ARCHITECTURAL PROCEDURES

A juxtaposition of architectural elements and features for a particular purpose is referred to as an architectural procedure. An architectural procedure needs to be and has wound up being doubly defined, once, as a carefully juxtaposed area of the built world, constructed to be purposive to the nth degree; and then, too, as that sequence of actions that such an arrangement of elements and features invites. What results from the built world’s having been addressed procedurally can also be characterized as procedural.

Architectural procedures can be assembled into place (as juxtaposed elements and features) and invited to occur (as sequences of actions) across and between modules as well as within a particular puzzle-piece or module-type. 
 
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An architectural procedure is a complex something or other. Perhaps no concept is clumsier. We urge you not to let its overarching clumsiness scare you off. It works as both a this and a that. Tactically posed surrounds remain what they are, but architectural procedures have two distinct stages of existence or levels of implementation. An architectural procedure definitionally unfurls as one segment or many or as one set-up or many of a tactically posed surround - level one of its first implementation. The level two implementation of an architectural procedure is the sequence of actions that a level on implementation constrains.

Movements and the sited awareness they modulate and that enfolds them mediate architecture; responding to tactically posed surrounds, joining forces with them, actions complete the architectural procedures that put (the) procedural into procedural architecture.

Architectural procedures used only for studying interactions between body and bioscleave have an observational-heuristic purpose, while those devised for transforming body and bioscleave have a reconfigurative one.

A person moving through a tactically posed surround will be led to perform procedures that may or may not be recognizable to her as architectural procedures.

All of a sudden, what seemed a group of disparate actions, the doing of this and that, may strike her as the steps of a procedure. If these procedures, which have a lot in common with medical procedures, elude their performers, they do so openly, or are constitutionally elusive. Always invented/reinvented on the spot, they exist in the tense of the supremely iffy. Not a fixed set of called-for actions, an architectural procedure is a spatiotemporal collaboration between a moving body and a tactically posed surround.

An architectural procedure resembles its predecessor, a word, in two respects for a start: first, it is a repeatable item that readily lends itself to discursive use; second, charged with conveying a specific experience or range of experiences, it can be evaluated as to how well it serves its purpose or how effectively it has been put to use.



PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE - BIOSCLEAVE

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Without exception, all that can be and does get detailed as bioscleave consists, by definition, of cleaving. We have an entire field alive with cleaving: bioscleave. From cleaving, by means and in terms of it, bioscleave, an event-fabric capable of giving and holding and functioning as life, forms. Although it can be put to a purpose, cleaving on its own happens aimlessly, in both its modes, in its coming together mode and in its pulling apart one.

Bioscleave denotes life in all its multiplicity as communally lived and all regions that can or could encompass the whole of this vivid crew in the fullness of their interaction on all possible scales of action at once.



PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE - CLOSELY ARGUED BUILT DISCOURSE

A prescriptive supposition, the Closely Argued Built-Discourse Hypothesis presents architecture as the supreme context for the examined life, a stage set for body-wide thought experiments. With architectural procedures prodding the body to know all that it is capable of, this becomes an intrusive and active stage set. The body must either escape or "reenter" habitual patterns of action--habitual actions that have customized life into only a few standard patterns. Upon the body's mastering new patterns of action, bioscleave emerges reconfigured.

Adding carefully sequenced sets of architectural procedures (closely argued ones) to bioscleave will, by making it more procedurally sufficient, reconfigure supposed inevitability.

Closely Argued Built-Discourse Hypothesis.



above copied from: http://www.reversibledestiny.org/Reversible_Destiny_-_Arakawa_and_Gins_-_We_Have_Decidede_Not_to_Die/About_Procedural_Architecture.html

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