what is standing now are ruins because the sun has set so many nights on their unfinished fragments, i write backwards from the zenith, where fragments tossed out from a single point arc at their most scattered, having only to wait for the pull of gravity to bind them together again, toward and onto the earth and water, i write back toward that singularity in the project, the only point thus far where there has been a project, i seek to write backward through archival time, while necessarily moving forward through real time to a point, to a mirrored conclusion, an inversion of the understanding and naivety that was the decision to begin this work, a reflected resolution that completes the arc and anchors the fragments again into the singularity from whence they came, only 17 weeks later where it can be nothing other than a resolution, albeit provisional, in the face of this arbitrary deadline, for it will all fall apart again, as all things seek ruin, either by my hand, once again, or by yours.

our lunch meeting on december 23 in atlanta, at our usual spot, ‘eats,’ with the usual meals, black beans, cous cous, and collards did not come together as the working lunch we had planned, perhaps we were both afraid of having to discuss our frustrations about the work in person, we resorted to scapegoating our mercurial third partner in the venture and discussing how annoying children were as a presence in coffeeshops, and how we needed to do more writing on our anecdotal coffeeshop review website, in person it was clear things had fallen apart, not only was there no underlying binding agent to the project, the understanding had always been that the shared personal passions of each member of the creative community would imbue any ad hoc mess of work with a diffused urgency and a mindnumbing weight of the hours lost and complexities woven back through all of those disparate tendrils, even if they were misguided and selfish, they fell into the project to create another barb to snag onto, in the past i think we have held off of direct work discussions in person in order to maintain the purity of the electonic database that was the project, any face to face contribution to the project would be lost, relegated to the tenuous world of experience, would be selfish on our part as the work must be conveyable, translatable, but it was not self-restraint for the purity of the work that guided our subject matter off course, it was the embarassment of not being able to gel even our own discrete interests, not being able to contribute a body for the world to operate on, we remained with aggregate, with no cement to bind it, and in the end no cobbled mass to be given a fresh future by the wind and water, when i was leaning over to shut the passenger side door ‘i guess we didnt talk about the project,’ ‘you know what i said about the great fire of london, about cobbling together failures into the opposite of what they strove for, our failed work combined with the introspection of that failure, the ruins of a city built of shadows and intimations that can be ruined no further.

has the idea of the conducting bodies become too partitioned, at what point have you developed a database of knowledge about a component of the project that is sufficient to characterize its performance personality to the point that it will pseak out with its own voice enough to provide a hinge point within the system, a punctuation, that coupled with the rest of the fragmentary corpus both says its piece, anchors its agenda, and does not bind itself into a predetermined routine, the community does not sense ownership over a project by having its combinatory potential predetermined, yet, when we arrived at the fragmentary sectional drawings, by way of the sequence, by way of the asyndeton, by way of the synecdochic icon, by way of our own hands at last, these languishing spaces, waiting for someone who themselves were waiting to be empowered, just felt listless and scared, the strength of the section has always seemed to be its narrative potential, it gives scale and volume to things that we plan to inhabit standing up, but also in continuity, and what do you use to choreograph that continuity, the plan, and we have fragments of plans, spaces for isolated flattened people, perhaps the only things we should design in plan, in fragments, are hospitals.

those vignettes in conducting bodies are synecdochic components of greater programmatic spaces. they are icons, spatial punctuation that guides and shifts movement through and past spaces but also gives individual frames from which to perceive other objects and the spaces they compose. what then, drives the organization of the icons? what sort of grammatic narrative? and how is it composed. i am composing some sequences to weave together, or leave as potential sequences (stranger’s paths) in text space or on the island. these prepositional sequences begin from each conducting body, but contain others. they in turn, could be woven into a fabric of relationships by overlaying and sprawling out from singularities (theater, box office, event hall) in each sequence, with chance and redundancy (perhaps installing more ruins on the island, or painting studios in the middle of the theater, we shall see).

what do terms like ‘asyndeton,’ ’synecdoche,’ and ’schematic prepositional threads’ bring, was there something more than their ability to obfuscate the eventual return to the conventions of architectural design, the plan, the section, perhaps this working backwards, from the lofty critical musings, to the perspectival juxtaposition, to the envisioned sequence, to the section, to the plan would somehow imbue that plan with a core of openness that comes from its spawning within the lines of the text and a drive toward the experiential, the combinative, found in its perspectival construction, yet perhaps each of these phases we label as ‘process’ are no more than complex analogues for the corporate bubble diagram, itself only a foil for the fear we have of touching our lead holder to the mylar, but perhaps, this project, destined to be stalled and pissed away by developers, never to be built, is the perfect site for such inversions, where the plan, the architect’s secretly coveted false leg, belongs at the middle, as the picture plane, where it is neither the project or the audience, it is an ephemeral construction that requires translations in both directions, and requires the contributed sequencing and positioning of a myriad of viewers to be given life, perhaps that plurality, on this side of the picture plane, far from the project, that first text, lies out here, within this text, which can itself never be built.

one theory on the way individuals remember and order space in their minds proposes a cognitive map that is not cartesian, not physical, a collection of images, icons, frames, and passages tethered together by the experiences undergone to apprehend them, to etch them, there are not right turns or left turns or paces or elapsed times, there is a fluid catalogue in the mind that is spatial in a way that space can never occur for the individual because it is instantaneous, it is the teleportation of matter around the viewer, the nights strung together over six weeks facing the desk, as fragments of the drawing accreted on the mylar, are to me, now, the experience of the spatial hops multifold, both in the temporal space of the halted drawing, with its apparent history of smears and erasures, and in my nocturnal continuity, even now, beneath a different kind of pencil writing words by lamplight, here is the elision of space and difference through immediacy, it is all flat, bleeding, icon based, like each of these nights made concrete and interchangeable, recombinatory, because they were all the same darkness, the same fit, yet completely different, the raw materials of the stories the roosevelt islanders want to tell themselves silently, quietly, are indescribable, but they find basis in some transient given that i am being looked toward for, these architectural drawings do not provide the haptic or geographic grounds of the plan or section so they are at once useful, to the shy generation of the given, the people’s power, the reluctant presentation of a nighttime project that is more emptiness than direction, and useless, to the construction of a singularity, a finale, a solution, which we had chosen, through our own supercilious ineptitude, not to provide.

the great fire of london is a text in place of a text, a text in place of a project, a text in place of the life it consumed, it also makes possible the things that it replaces, the text that it replaces, that failed aspiration, is in fact contained within the text that laments it, it is nominally invoked, a luminous plasma that birthed the failure and also maintained the failure long enough for it to expire and leave a ruin, which is what we find in it, the project and the life that sought it are made palpable only through the humanity of an obscure ethos, we are assured by the failure of the author because it ensures that he was indeed there, a spectre, why trumpet success, success is an end, yet through his abandonment of the text it becomes ours, and happening across its ruins in mid-october i spun together greater yarns than could be supported knowing the fecundity of reflective failure.

i blame it all on teddy cruz, he was the one that told me that the solution was not always a building, and i guess i really took that to heart, and i would say that everything i have done since then, and presumably everything you and i have done together, has fallen victim to this reluctance to allow the work to progress to some sort of recognizable conclusion, that being a building, we put ourselves in an unnatural position propped by tiny pillars upon this world of architecture while at the same time loathing it and making light of it, and i think as much as we shirk our role in the built world we know we have a responsibility to it, i think this happens for a number of reasons, i think you and i both see ‘buildings’ as pragmatic, capitaliste, ‘finished’ dilutions of our ideals, yet when i think of the supreme building, the city, i see my desires, the core principles of self empowerment, freedom of use and route, blankness, and i think the reason it is all of those things to me is because i didnt design it, i didnt create it, and my hand (or any hand for that matter) is invisible in it, but here we are on the other end, and we dont want to be in the position to make that ground for other people to experience, perhaps because we would feel like part of that invisible construct that we both rely on and execrate? i think there has been a fear that taking these core principles forward into the realm of the building will negate them (this will kill that), i think we like the idea that people will have to assemble these fragments of things we produce into their own picture or reality, but, as you and i both know, (although i often refuse to recognize it) people who are willing will reconstitute and inhabit any built condition in ways that others cannot predict, ways that its designers could not predict, even things as banal as corporate lobbies or turkish toilets in cafe courtyards will be threaded together in the memories and desires of everyone who encounters them, we are fighting a paradox i believe, i dont think it serves us to hold ‘resolution’ at arms length, the ideas we are dealing with here are very architectural and they are embedded with the principles we would want a ‘complete’ building to further, those being empowerment of the individual, understanding of the transience of built environments, and openness of experience, i also dont see our work as culminating in ‘an image’ or ‘a plan’, i think it will always be the entire body as contained in ‘roosevelt’, even the plans will contain strains of those experiments and tendrils of our various interests, i think i want to see it all come together into something that is deceptively resolved while being collaged from an impenetrable layering of the deferrals of process, i think we have to bring these along with us toward some kind of experimental conclusion, one that can test these hypotheses, and most likely fail like the others have, but at least then we can allow it to fall into ruins, rather than leaving it unrealized.

attempts to round together an out of control herd by merely calling out their names, their characteristics, and their pasts are vain and desperate uses of dwindling awake night, such is the recap within the body of the project, the night before thanksgiving, after trying to organize the tentacles of the work under those original principles, that rapid fire fertilization of the brief, and cramming dangling questions in front of old answers, it became clear that each fragment had a range to run, one that embodied all of those original principles, how could it not, where else would it have come from, and if i felt the need, before it ran out of steam, to yoke it down, then i would have to ride it weakened into the badlands to die.

the idea of sequence and happenstance or adhoc movement could be viewed as antithetical, but what is cultivated in the prepositional tapestry is a network of relationships between the program spaces built from variegated sequences in which a programmatic element is in one relationship to another and then the whole thing flipped recto verso based on its asyndetic relationship, which is in turn based on either programmatic necessity or devious whimsy, i believe that as a base, these narrative threads serve to provide a woven condition of ‘paths’ that can be tailored to the needs of the estranged pilot through ideas of triangulation, assumption (frames of reference), and form. these ‘primary’ or embedded paths i perceive as loose, ones that, as with the “stranger’s path”, are lost within a fabric, yet stand out through their recognizable trajectories, i see the idea of complete chance as anathema to the principles of universal design, yet the disneyfication of the path is insulting to the people who seek to lay claim to the project.

character; home; visit:

single mother, 38, and three (3) children; upper upper east side; annual fighting-kite event.

male, 51, and female, 45; upper west side; one (1) gallery opening of sonic installations.

nuclear family, queens; two (2) trips each summer for outdoor activities.

single male, 20; brooklyn; visits daily for internship in gallery offices.

single female, 25; southpoint; syrian page in united nations.

married female, 36; upper roosevelt island; weekly domestic shopping.

single male, 32, and single male, 32; queens; fish from eastern shore weekly.

single male, 48; connecticut; takes hour lunch from coler.goldwater.

student, 23; lower east side; maintains printmaking studio.

im sitting in the cavernous lobby of the marriott marquis again because it has grown so familiar to me, and although i have finalized a preferred route into and through its bowels, it still perplexes me, at the inception of the project i sat outdoors at lunch against that low brick coping in front of the equitable building, the timing was ideal as the leaves had flourished all spring and summer on the scrawny trees but had not yet been shed by autumn, the temperature had settled to the point where i could bring my sweater but usually used it as a pillow to keep my lower back from getting gouged by the leading edge of the brick, the university was in session providing an interesting cross section of people to observe as they made their way around me, i spent equal time drawing and developing insights about the folks that strolled into starbucks, dug through the trash, ogled each other, cut through the park, jaywalked, strained and craned upward at the tall buildings, and hollered into their cellphones, my efficiency ratio was low but the material was grounded in a buzz of life, in shared experience, at night i blazed through fragments of material alone that remained fragments reaching back into the day, but idly, and only in my head, alone they were echoes, i finished the prepositional threads in the lobby of the marquis as people above, around, below, across, behind, between, and before made aimless routes up, through, over, down, against, and from the punctuated cavern’s strata, at my desk the sequences became scientific, they insisted on the solitude of the dark window within which i could see my reflection under the cone of light from the lamp, in my own little controlled room, in the vast alienation of the marquis i created a suite of comforting familiar routines and an affinity for emptiness, chance, bewilderment, and discomfort beneath the guise of control, archetypal orienteering, and the freedom of open space, i felt comfortable that the stricture of my power would not snuff out potential, like the monotony of the city grid gives rise to ethnic communities of imported colour and vibrancy, the swell of voices in the early autumn convention spurt that cascade through the atrium that, both transitory, leave the spaces hollow again for me to walk in a straight line in silence.

because these plates do not even pretend to offer closely measured descriptions of archaeological value, they begin to appeal to us aesthetically in a way the many archaeologically accurate illustrations cannot acheive.

the ruin is not in the truth of decay, or the false longing of the anachronous soul, but is dependent upon loss, for it is only in the evacuation of the face, the touch, the personality, the culture, and the context that we truly invest our whole being into the project, certainly the pathos, the suffering, the undertaking through which our fellows sacrificed their warm nights to tickle our senses in person or by proxy move us profoundly, we may even speak of inspiration, an appropriation of momentum, of preprocessed experience, but the fruits of a humanized creativity are consumed with guilt, and even in our inspired improvisations through which we seem to depart those germs we are burdened by our dependence, the ruin is the freedom from this, it need not be the decayed structure, sunlight on a broken column, or even possessed of decay in any capacity, it must merely be emptied, the faceless city, the mathematical grid, the cardinal points, the absence of a skyline in the high plains, the hollow wooden desk i now write upon under the cone of light from my lamp, the text, they are all mine to use as i wish, ‘might we perhaps ignore the ruins? maybe only for awhile?’ but i have not been to roosevelt island, the entirety of it is my ruin, it is real no doubt, but it is mine, and only in my disappearance can it be your own.

i posit that it would be appropriate for us to see a phased (not phased construction, but an active form of occupation), a project composed of flowing and migrating communities, one that does not take any of the authorized maps as a given condition, rather, the constructs on the island, or at least the locations of particular aspects of the project are in states of flux, even, or especially, as they leave our hands, they get flooded, are buried, are forgotten, or enisle’d. how does a static construct mitigate such effects, does it become a picturesque ruin, does it compensate through redundancy, does it exploit its new potential (mont s. michel (although one would imagine that its tidal insulation was noticed before construction was completed), does it subsidize its own obsolescence, is it up to us, or even them?

considering the notion of ruins and casual mention of traces, both by an audience and the river, we construct maps displaying an interest in affecting the landscape of the island over time, taking advantage of the tidal motion of the ‘river’, alluvium is accreted around groynes, cables, nets, rip rap, terraforming new features into the project over time gradually, snagging on fragments, submerged in the limp tidal current of the days lost into night, i don’t foresee attemping to scuplt the island to such a degree that navigation on the river is blocked by the project, the scale would be such that an audience would notice changes over time, and may take part in its sculpting, folks can place phrases, stones, bouys, whims which will be drawn by the movement of water and time, the traces made by and upon these artifacts would reflect the marks of time on the ruins, as new areas appear and sink, folks will discover moments in which their insertion is required and places to cup some east river water to their lips.

there is a theory of cognitive mapping and spatial piloting that takes into account our shared expecations and prior engagements with situations and spaces throughout our lives in order to explain how we frame the spaces we encounter in a particular setting around those in the same setting that we did not encounter, whether forbidden, redundant, or inconsequential, our cognitive map of a cafe is constructed around the fragment we engage, the dining area, the storefront, vis-a-vis the space we did not engage, the kitchen, even though we know it is behind the blank wall opposite the storefront, and like the blank page upon which the murder is committed in le voyeur or the reflection of television glow on the ceiling in an upper room of an urban convalescent home, we construct our environment from fragments, we live in an incomplete, individually perceived, unfinished environment, halfway through the drawing that sought to compose the synecdochic conducting bodies into a non-cartesian underlay for latent cognitive maps i assessed its trajectory, it was, and was destined to remain, a skeleton, or perhaps more accurately, skeletal remains, scattered onto my hollow wooden desk, within the chance array could be picked out recognizable fragments, but the space between had to be constructed instantaneously, and continuously, with every viewing of the project, its ‘complete’ form was always changing, every day as i walked to the marriott marquis i took macro-lens photos of worn materials, erupted rebar, dust covered intake vents, piles of leaves, archaic brickwork, as a parallel to the growing incomprehensibility of the skeleton, the material palette served as an investment for the future, skinning the bodies found within the skeleton was the reaching out to the senses, the crushing of the analytical detachment that comes with abstraction and flatness, these photos, still divorced from their bodies, are the notes in a sensory suite that sought to construct a complete environment, one of sound, memory, the odor of natural materials, and their tactile genuineness, they did not seek to construct relationships, but to provide hot spots between which relationships could be drawn, at the halfway point of the drawing i could compose the whole skeleton, even though much was missing, yet, as i continued to draw, to mark the space into existence, it was as if the missing bones were being removed, or that when they appeared the spaces they filled changed that phantasmagoric skeleton, it was no longer of the body i imagined it to be.

i see a few ways to proceed from here. one involves terraforming and the other investigating previous thoughts about trajectories, frames of reference, and piloting. this would be a planning exercise that looks at how the vignettes of the conducting bodies might be related to one another through a fabric of sequences. i like the idea of it being still non-analytical (as opposed to what an architectural plan or other projective drawing might be) and conveying some aspects of the space and its character to bolster the vignettes, but also that it does so in a context, even if it is one that we construct (terraform). the other, which i am continuing to do now, is to weave the vignettes together in a manner similar to what i am proposing for the plan, my goal for this would be to scan this in and collage textures, surfaces, and further poached vignettes into the drawing to create a potential narrative tapestry, that, though unrelated to coordinate space, could inform, or posteriorly correspond to a coordinate based potential narrative.

i have no doubt that i could prepare a plan, and i would have no objection to doing so, provided it was in the spirit of the work done so far, i dont think it would hurt, one could see it less as a spatial organization, or something that kills the moments enumerated above, and more as an amplification of the potential of the moments, by creating even more threads fanning out from them to each other, and to the city, it could utilise the textual prompts above and the physiognomy of the spaces, in a schematic or primary form, to situate the moments on the island, where they might gain more power, similar to the function of the wall layout in marquis, that being said, i dont think there are any presentation requirements other than a 30×40 board.

situations and vignettes best punctuate our insights, that is why i gave up writing novels, im a poet now, i deal in flavours, in fluid grammar, in the texture of the building blocks of my trade, when i settle on one, what is it you say, in the present in which the edges of these designations are nearly congruent, and coincident, arbitrary, that places me here above the poet’s pencil, it is the investment in the tableaux, the static, the unsaid, the way the static becomes the animate through the voice, poetry is spoken, the project is experienced, actively parsed, traveled, it is an act, poetry, this is a series of static vignettes, untethered, you shuffle them, you approach the moment of enunciation and we are both transformed into poets.

i have some ideas about how these little ‘vignettes’ can be used to inform the plans, spatial prepositions, above, next to, inside, but also maybe as base drawings for material collages that could take the place of a computer model, which i do not want to build, i may take a stab at something like this soon, i find the prearticulated surfaces worn sidewalk abutting walls and alcoves rife with potential cladding for the rearticulation of perspective skeletons, i guess i am not seeing this thing as a coherent building at this stage, i definitely see things threaded together spatially, but not with any identifiable singular identity or form, almost a mess within which you can pick out these bodies, as beacons that enable the recognition of zones or as fragments that are strewn across zones.

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 an euclidean metric may be an inappropriate standard for assessing spatial knowledge. euclidean, ordnance survey or rand-mcnally maps are only one standardized model of the world. they are sophisticated tools for aiding navigation, but may have little correspondence to how we actually view or understand the world, therefore using them as standards to measure the accuracy of spatial knowledge may be inappropriate.

it is only now, temporally opposite from the beginning of the conducting body studies, in the officially decreed closing week of the project, that the plan is gaining traction on the island, you will likely never see this particular plan, points are being given significance, relationships cemented, still often by chance, but by an informed chance, one that has come not through dictation, but from inhabiting the spaces for so long, long enough to give to them the order that they have allowed to us.

when i walk into the marquis, in these more recent days of distraction, i am guided by habit, the key moments at which i know i have to turn, to ascend, to choose, are triangulated by visual cues, which tend to be the only things i see, i hardly look up anymore into the enormous hollow volume, i rarely notice the elevators with their carnivalesque rows of lights, a trademark of early john portman, i merely fix on what is necessary to pilot my route, without wonder or scrutiny, we do many things this way as humans, we often read this way because the words fall apart to us, they are so familiar, the grammar so rote that we read every few words glossing over the connective tissue whose character we either extrapolate or ignore because it is useless, it is a vehicle for travel between points, we scan for conducting bodies in spaces and texts that promote that travel, they recenter and provide keys necessary to determine the locations and compositions of other bodies, they may be connected by a relationship to a central theme or built in a narrative layering, they may be hierarchical or their ordering may be interactive, their strength then is determined by just that connective tissue that we allow to recede, a grey smear of construction lines, the blue lines on this card, but, if the nature of space is such that we colour the intermediate tissue ourselves, why should we not begin without that tissue, with fresh wonder for every interaction, with a free catalogue of conducting bodies, themselves expressed by fragments of their own physiognomy, expressed in ever smaller stock fragments until we have unwritten our expectations before we can even begin to construct a situation, or what if that base element were imbued with such a strangeness and density that it not only occluded the identity of the structure its replication and assembly would produce (the private box to the theater, cracks of otherworldy red light to the darkroom) requiring the totality of the space to be either imagined or intimately experienced, but it also incited a frenetic impulse to link the fragments, shaking us from our glazed stupor, tying together sensory correlations from the indulgent suites of the bodies to extrapolate a story that you know is embedded within them, how can it be new each time.

i do not care much for snapshots taken by other people, they never train on what i am interested in seeing, they have no significance to me, rarely are architectural site snapshots composed with an eye for alignments, symmetries, spatial themes, or cryptic generative conditions, although casual, they communicate to me a sterile, static, closed environment that i cannot penetrate with the analytical persistence of a crime scene document, i do not care for their flatness, their disregard of architectural perspective techniques, of framing, in short, all that is communicated is the technique, and from technique i cannot cull the agenda of the photographer, i want to be communicated to, i want mystery of form and context, i want to see something that could not be seen on the site with much greater effectiveness, i want the space of the frame chewed and broken, and i want to do it myself.

PRINCIPLE ONE: Equitable Use
The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
cultural / historical smoothing: this smoothing of which i speak is not necessarily a minimalization, it is quite probably not a form dependent characteristic, 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.

PRINCIPLE TWO: Flexibility in Use
The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
democratic delimitation: 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. are there thematic ‘conducting bodies’ that stand in the midst of this geometric cloud of possibilities?

PRINCIPLE THREE: Simple and Intuitive Use
Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
archetypal wayfinding (stranger’s path, jb jackson): “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.

PRINCIPLE FOUR: Perceptible Information
The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
sensory suites: 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.

• john ruskin, albert speer, critical plagiarism
• occupying ruins, ruins occupying
• disenfranchised/discriminated: ghosts, wampyrs, small pox, louis kahn
• “culturally pluristic representation of society”: phes, minorities, mobile elderly, people who read whilst walking
• ahistorical, speaks through character and type over form
• friendly residential face? art is explication of lore, not moderation of tradition
• “water related transportation infrastructure”, dangerous supplement?
• castelvecchio v. interior/museumized digs
• “bldg constrct’d materials from island quarry by inmates”: sustainable and eerie
• a.w.n. pugin, renwick, adaptive revival
• include kahn’s memorial
• this is for the people, cannot take a park away from the people
• “quarantine”, burial at sea
• “19th c gothic romance”, wuthering heights, castle of otranto
• “charity cases in wards on lower flrs and a series of prvt rooms upper stories for paying patients”: not universal design, counter the classist history
• grey gneiss, pointed arches, crenellated cupola
• “garden fabrics”, not a folly, somewhere between useful and curiousity
• 13th century tintern abbey in monmouthshire, palazzo braschi in frascati (setting for la notti del terrore)
• sleeve’d crumbling walls, decay is a form of articulation
• no dogs are allowed on the island, read: only cats
• “1/100 people who died in nyc in 1854 died at renwick”
• 1839: octagon tower at lunatic asylum, designed by ajackson 1982: octagon tower is torched 1999: labor day fire ravages octagon pavilion
• fireworks viewing platform, large theater walls disappear, ruins roof has disappeared

in a survey, residents complained that the memorial would cost too much, that the trees in the kahn proposal would block their front-row view of fourth of july fireworks and that the granite structure was too severe. -source withheld

anyone who ‘needs’ an arts center is an ignoramus, the ruins are the only thing that could save this project! -source withheld

the memorial in shanksville, pa., will also include pedestrian trails and a roadway leading to a visitor center and the actual crash site, which will be surrounded by a crescent of maple trees. the victims’ names will be inscribed on a white marble wall.

state park meets graveyard? ill bet the lobby is so strong that even if you won without a marble headstone the families would push to get one, i personally would not want to go and see the name of my loved one listed there, i would know they died there, and i wouldnt feel it was so important to get some second hand sympathy from people who did not even know them, i guess most americans are more interested in grief fed to them, and have texts like ‘lets roll’ ghostwritten for them to deal with their loss.

lets roll on to “a theory of roosevelt value.”

spellcheck’d text in one file [doc]