is that a baking utensil?

some thoughts on principle four:

not necessarily synaesthesia, more like covering the sensory bases, belt and suspenders: tactile, visual, and auditory. colours, textures, and auditory is interactive and fluctuating, footfalls on various surfaces, voices, echoes, or ambient sounds from the river, or the tram. tuned spaces.

develop coordinated suites, poems, synaesthetic garments, the occupant dons the space, it is pulled with them and drawn on to the next, barragan, whispers cascade to crescendi, participates in the orientation of the building, the meter of ones progress through it, communication of materials and spatial tuning grows more complex at a sensory nexus, retrieval point, the occupant retrieves bearing in the space, in these concentrations they gain control by assimilating all possible combinations of the senses through prolonged, less transitory consumption, a complex stasis.

in terms of the sensorially challenged, suites of communicative materials and spatial configurations cover the sensory spectrum, all adding to or mainaining the matter to be retrieved, however, each can carry the sensory melody alone, as a sense stimulus drops away the integrity of the communication is not lost, cmyk, orchestration, synonymic catalogue.

all arts are parallel translations of one fundamental mystery. senses correspond to each other; a sound can be translated through a perfume and a perfume through a vision… haunted by these horizontal correspondences.

the one hidden in nature behind the many.

-diane ackerman, on the symbolists

some thoughts on principle three:

for the stranger progresses up a reasonable predictable route from his point of arrival to his final destination, then of course, he is likely to retrace his steps. call it a path, in the sense that it is a way not deliberately constructed or planned for that purpose. actually the stranger’s path is, in most cities, easily recognizable, once a few of its landmarks are known. _jb jackson

although axial, it is not an hausmannian subtractive or planometric axis. it is pedestriam and narrative. it is an axis of attraction. points along the progression are tied together along a clear yet possibly rambling trajectory. the path is more a linkage of contiguous zones (skid row, financial, great white way). in reality the path is a bundling of paths that tie these zones together, perhaps engaging alleys, hinterlands, and internalized throughways.

investigate the stranger’s path for the whole island, starting at the tramstop or access point.

the stranger’s path becomes more respectable the further it gets from its point of origin. _jb jackson

there is a clear termination on the island, it is in fact a single spot, the tip of land, the memorial, the theatre?

also the path may be seen as a stream that does not empty or end, it merely evaporates into the city.

some thoughts on principle two:

their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. they are myriad, but do not compose a series. they cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. they weave places together. in the respect, pedestrian movements form one of these “real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.” they are not localized; it is rather that they spatialize. _de certeau

what form of representation can approach most completely that act, the enunciation of the footfall? the walk is a qualitative geographic drawing, drawing in a nonrepresentational acommunicative fashion, a mere recording, the data of which is relegated to the desires and memories of the walker. these things are absent from the geometric contributions of space. those lines are but one fragment of the act, these are abstract, atemporal, hard data that submit to the concept of ‘the city’ as an ordered environment, that omniscient view romanticized by perspective and subsequently killed by technology. walking is primitive in the face of the urban machine.

a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilites. in that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. but he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. _de certeau

the latent cloaks of spatial appropriation which we slip into behind impersonal and abstract space, akin to reading aloud the written word, giving it our personality, taking its latent cues and providing our intonations and meter.

walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks.” all modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. _de certeau

• are there thematic ‘conducting bodies’ that stand in the midst of this geometric cloud of possibilities?
• are the possibilities so concrete (wall, alley, gate)?
• the qualities of spaces/routes chosen by the walker also speak, they approach a tone or mood.

some thoughts on principle three:

synecdoche replaces totalities by fragments… makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. _de certeau

conducting bodies, portions of articulation that speak back about zones in space, one needn’t occupy the space to add it to one’s narrative, also a form of spatial forshadowing that could instigate the inhabitation of a space before it is entered (the westwork of notre dame) or instigate inhabitation upon entry but before use (locker room).

synecdochic plan: fragments, loci, precursors, harbingers, anterooms, steeples

some thoughts on principle six:

asyndeton by elision, creates a “less,” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics… nothing in place of something… cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. _de certeau

shortcuts linking phrases of space, an open endedness that could have any number of linked destinations or transitions, universal design? redundancy v. consistency/openness. ruins as programmatic asyndeton.

asyndetic plan: disruptions, retained moments are made fragmentary, silhouettes, half-lit edges.

hail!

some thoughts on principle one:

• architecture/urbanism of ethnic neighbourhoods

• gives both the air and the capacity to be claimed by the diverse public, how can these people imprint their preferences, cultural backgrounds, and ability levels into the complex?

• this smoothing of which i speak is not necessarily a minimalization, it is quite probably not a form dependent characteristic, certainly not ‘smoothing’ as someone like israel kandarian is wont to receive kudos for as he fires up rhino (maya)? i have in mind the potential of a continuous fabric such as manhattan, although formally rolling and roiling with difference, to receive the identity of communities through a gaseous form of population that fills spaces, leaves residue on its surfaces, yet is transitory. the continuity of the urban terrain coupled with the drive for social identification amidst hostile anonymity makes such efflorescences possible. how can a building provoke that urge and make itself a healthy receptacle for such tendencies. there would need to be a policy or principle based trigger that encourages groups and individuals in search of groups to lay claim to aspects of surface and space, yet that space and those surfaces would need to be prone to reception and also capable of witnessing change, for, as the migration or scaling of ethnic neighbourhoods uses the essential building blocks of the city, it also leaves them in a state that they may receive their next phase of life.

some thoughts on principle three:

structure of cognitive mapping in increasing complexity (after kitchen/blades):
• individual occurrences (named points, landmarks)
• links (paths or roads, potential for personal construction/inscription)
• distribution (groupings of points (function, magnitude, temporal characteristics), potential for personal construction/inscription)
• connectivity (groupings of paths (as overall networks) in varying complexity/density)
• contiguity (sequence and proximity, can have personal bias/exaggeration)
• classification (hierarchically ordered strata)

newcomers to a complex building preferred using ordered signs rather than interpreting you-are-here maps, because the latter involved encoding distance and direction… wayfinding is based mainly on ordered productions, with people navigating by making choices based on recognizing familiar vistas and places along a route. –kitchen/blades

• forground (path integration): material, texture, sound, light
• midground (piloting)(egocentric fixed frame of reference): interior landmarks, extents/envelope, path comparison
• background (egocentric global frame of reference): distant framed landmarks, axial connectivity, celestial/perspectival gauging

according to the theoretical perspective discussed above, cognitive maps will only become euclidean in nature once they have been synthesized into an advanced spatial system that is dependent upon time and experience. with only partial experience the rips, tears, and inconsistencies within people’s knowledge inevitably lead to an imperfect metric, or non-euclidean framework, and many researchers have pointed out that a euclidean metric may be an inappropriate standard for assessing spatial knowledge. –kitchen/blades

this seems to say something about the type of information that is synthesized into the cognitive map, it is more qualitative, egocentric, and conditional, even the same person might assess equal distances differently when biased by certain environmental conditions (heat, perceived safety, visual interest). how can this information be used to create paths or routes in buildings and complexes that are more memorable and potentially more intuitive (collective memory?). one such vehicle might be a perceptible spatial and formal hierarchy.

… it is difficult to imagine a whole map in detail, and the way we cope is to create a ‘window’ on the area in which we are interested… the cognitive map contains embedded systems, and [that] processing involves moving up or down through this hierarchical system depending on situational demands. –kitchen/blades

is there a series of descending or processional keys that ground each recentering of the inner window? as one constructs the cognitive map at its various levels, what are the mnemonic cues that link the strata of inquiry?

to do? create textual collagic mnemonics and ‘trip planners,’ they posit internal spatial relationships against external and global organizing constructs (landmarks, registrations) and hierarchical levels of engagement (spatial, formal, tactile (olfactory, auditory)), related and ‘linked’ by bearing and distance through egocentric spatial prepositions.