Chandelier over the Main Lobby

Chandelier over the Main Lobby, originally uploaded by Hairbrained Blogger.

This Chandelier is in the main lobby of the Hotel del Coronado. It was designed by Lyman Frank Baum, the writer of the Wizard of Oz.
Frank Baum was also among the first professional retail art directors. Baum, who in the 1890's began by testing blends of color, light, glass and mirrors, to find how to stimulate positive responses to certain products. Baum perfected an architectural atmosphere of affluence and opulence, with the building’s spaces and finishing deliberately engineered to elicit feelings of class inferiority. Baum’s idea was that the only way rectify this perceived inadequacy was to spend money on the products sold therein and prove one’s worth accordingly.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

MANO OCULATA A thought about touch and vision by Marco Frascari

But phenomenology is also a philosophy, which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their 'facticity'.
( Merlau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , p. vii)

In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves
thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body
which is better informed than we are about the world... (Merlau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, p. 23)

An amazing photomontage by the Russian architect El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich Lissitzky) entitled The Constructor (1924) shows a self-portrait on which has been printed the image of a hand holding a compass. The overlapping of the two images is done in such a way that the right eye of El Lissitzky’s is emerging within the palm of the hand. This flying image of hand holding a compass first appeared as an illustration of the hand of God in 1919 book designed by El Lissitzky. The hand and compass, as a drawing, turned up in an advertisement designed for Pelikan ink, and, as photo, on a cover for the magazine Arkhitektura. VKhUTEMAS.
Several times in his photomontages, El Lissitzky revives in modern configuration classical allegorical topos. In the case of the Constructor the reference is to the Renaissance emblem of the mano oculata as presented in a vignette used in Mario Bettini in Apiaria universae philosophiae mathematicae published in 1642. El Lissitzky reinterpretation of the emblem tells us that insight is revealed through a tactile activity. Between the action of the hand, and the hand’s relationship to the rest of the body, another form of architectural vision is available
Seeing is a remote sense. It tells us about distant parts of our environment by receiving rays and waves. Seeing is also touching at distance, for example, the haptic vision is a form of tactile vision; here the eye is used as an organ of touch. Haptic images are invitations to come as close as possible to the image. The word haptic is derived from the Greek term hapthai, meaning touch, an emotionally loaded sense, about the communicability and possibility for shared cultural experiences
In Traité des sensations (1754), Condillac illustrates his post-Lockean theory of the senses with the image of a marble statue, which gains knowledge about the exterior world by way of gradual revelation of sensory input. While the sensations of smell, taste, sound and colors, endow the statue with a sense of being, it is only through touching that the statue becomes certain of external objects. There is, however, an essential idea that neither smell, nor taste, nor hearing, nor even sight, can yield, nor that is the idea of an object, the idea of an external world. Colors, sounds, odors, and tastes are mere sensations or states, not, as yet, referred to external objects. Before external causes can be substituted for its sensations, the statue must be endowed with the most important of all senses: the sense of touch. Touch alone can reveal to us the objective world, by giving us the ideas of extension, form, solidity, and body. Even sight cannot
suggest them. Persons born blind cannot, upon receiving their sight, distinguish between a ball and ablock, a cube and a sphere, until they touch these objects. Only after having touched things do we refer the impressions received by our other senses, such as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells, to objectsexisting outside of us, Hence, touch is the highest sense, and the guide of the other senses; it is touch which teaches the eye to distribute colors in nature.
Our need to touch is passionate. Touch gives an immediate communication with internal, or external bodies. Our skin is what stands between us and the world. Skin is a language; skin records the passage of reality.
Drafting and measuring tools are extensions of the architect’s bodies. Indeed, architects used to sense the world through pencils, squares and many other drafting tools and (when this capability was developed properly), they would not be even conscious of the tools as such, but directly of what the tools touched and of how their different graphic support moved in the conjured places bounded by lines. Through the grasping and manipulating of these instruments, architects of the past developed enlightening manifestation of architectural conceptions. Through valid haptic interactions with physical tools and instruments, architects have developed rich representations and have directed constructions of amazing architectural possibilities.

Architectural thinking is quite comparable to the drawing of architecture

The lines describing a plan on a site and on a drawing are one of architecture's most fascinating and puzzling enigmas since they make visible what is invisible in the constructed building. Lines present an entire building by simplifying its reality, but at the same time, they manifest a more complete view of the building's interacting parts by showing more of what is visible. The play of lines presents the invisible aspects of architecture, representing in a unique a way what can never be seen when the walls are erected; this play is spatial and temporal phenomenon, not some non-spatial and non-temporal phantasm. In the lines, the building's dynamic nature is manifested in a demonstrative interpretation of the tectonic of the building; its three-dimensional extensions are represented in the material and form of the line which we don't interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand without interpreting it.
In an architectural drawings the drafted lines in their interfacing between support and their material making reveal in cosmospoietic event that which is present in the visible building, but is itself invisible. Metaphorically speaking the drawing of lines represents the coalescence of architectural imagining. If we assume that this architectural imagining results from an intangible super-faculty that arises from the possession of a metaphysical eye able to envision a future building, the enigma of the architectural drawing is a false problem. However, if we consider the extraordinary capacity of architects to imagine a building by tracing lines, the enigma becomes real. Architects can draw the lines of a building in direct sight, reconstruct the lines of a demolished structure, or devise the lines for a future building. The common denominator in all these procedures is the making visible of that, which is invisible. Through a peculiar and curious procedure of de-composition, selection and re-composition, through a polysemic use of lines architects can trace rooms, structures and building details whose functions become self-evident in the composition of the lines that will never actually be seen in the constructed building but it is essential for presenting the inner and outer spaces simultaneously and revealing the many temporal sequences of architectural perception. The building is represented in its entirety but there is no likeness between the lines and the original.
The lines of building are neither facsimiles nor symbols. The lines produce it poetically. It is in this poetic dimension that the enigmatic beauty of the lines lays.
Lines direct the enigmatic demonstrations of architecture. To fully understand the importance of their role in architectural imagining it is necessary to remove any preconceived idea about the lines of an architectural drawing are merely a functional result of descriptive geometry, or as a graphic description that leads to verbal and graphic prescription of usage and construction. To achieve a better understanding of the play of lines as –demonstrations of architecture it is perhaps necessary to reflect on the obsolete Vitruvian term, ichnography (ichnographia) generally used to indicate the drawing of a plan. Ichnography, a compound Greek word, ichnos = foot-sole and graphos =writing/drawing, is a topical procedure by which a representation that opposes perceptions and experiences depicts something which does not exist in the visible realm. The graphic procedure involved in translating the invisible into the visible requires a reflexive dislocation. As a topical procedure ichnography contains in itself the solution to the problem that is posed. Architects can project the characteristics of a construction from the footprint of a building, as hunters, using conjectural knowledge, can envision the specific characteristics of the animal they are hunting from the footprints left on the ground.
Humans have been hunters for thousands of years. During countless pursuit of their preys they have learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of invisible animals from venatic clues. They learned to sense, record, interpret, and classify such minimal traces and to execute complex rational maneuvers on their hunting path. Hunters have passed down this rich storehouse of knowledge over the generations through storytelling. Hunters would have been the firsts “to tell a story” because they were able to reading the tracks left by their prey, a coherent sequence of events. This knowledge is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence. The reading of animal tracks is the mirror of divination: divination looked to the future and the interpretation of venatic clues to the past. There were great correspondences between the two; the intellectual operations involved—analyses, comparisons, and classifications—were formally identical and storytelling was the common process of communication in hunting as in divination the process was the designation of one thing through another. The lines of an architectural drawing the designation of one thing through another can tell the past the present and the future of buildings.
By using a play of lines the architect makes visible that which is in-visible. This practice is based on processes of demonstration. Demonstrations occur both in the constructing of theoretical drawings and in the constructing of building drawing; since both are forms of realization, every architectural demonstration becomes ontological. Architects demonstrate through tangible signs the intangible that operates in the tangible. This demonstration is the setting of the enigma of the labor involved in architecture. The drawing of lines, a projection using the compass of the human body, reveals a continuous search tor the human measure bridging the past and future of the constructed world An architectural play of lines is not the designing of a specific building, but rather, a projection of a future constructed world based on the transformation of the past world of construction through a specific drawings, the ichnography.

The cover of a future book

A new geomatrician drawing the tower of babel

fun

The Angels of Architecture

The Three New Necessary Angels of Architecture

By Marco Frascari

An angelic prolegomena

Three angels up above the street,
Each one playing a horn,
Dressed in green robes with wings that stick out,
They've been there since Christmas morn.
Bob Dylan, New Morning,

released: Oct 21, 1970

Architecture needs angels and to be more precise it needs three groups of angels. The three necessary Angels of Architecture belong to the First Sphere of the Hierarchy of angels and they are:

1. The Seraph of Storytelling and Pathos (Aby Warburg /Walter Benjamin/Carlo Ginzburg)
2. The Cherub of Habitus and Architectural Conceiving (Bourdieu/Panofsky/Paul Frankl)
3. The Ophan of Ethos and Sense(s)-Making ( Italo Calvino/George Perec/Carlo Gadda)

Aby Warburg’s “science without a name” is the discipline that can help us to uncover the cosmopoietic dimensions of architectural storytelling that had been hidden deep in the closets of architectural culture. Architectural discernment has become a unconstructive attitude that has made an idol of absence itself. Congested by the perspectives of the physical sciences, by pseudo-searches of inter-disciplinarity and by being uncritically open to memory-less scientific or artistic fashions, thinking about architecture has turned itself into an ostrich attitude to the realities of judgment generating self-contained and tautological practices and pedagogies. At present, most architectural judgment works by a refusal of the power linking the arts of building, living and thinking well.
The science without a name developed by Aby Warburg tends to spurt through the precincts of diverse epochs and cultures, from one to another in an anagogic manner. An a-temporal perception generated by supratemporal corporeal themes nonetheless allows for the recognition of forms “temporally” disintegrated by technologies of historical depictions.
In architectural criticism, this approach can assist in recovering a recognition of a cosmospoietic dimension, through the reactivation of an original pathos of architecture, liberating it from its paralyzing aesthetic and professional conventions. The cognitive imagination of architecture is an expression of the power of human beings to act and think in a pure mediality. To think imagination as mediality is a challenge to which Warburg had already risen, and one which architects should begin to grasp again. The effective presence of tectonic condensation and the poignancy of building details and constructs result from what Warburg has identified as the “pathos formula” (Pathosformel). Through tectonic pathos, the energy embodied in artifacts can be reactivated beyond the threshold of rational understanding.

Architectural Storytelling

Now, aqua in buccat. I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexen-gown.
James Joyce, Finnegan Wake

How and why it is essential to teach “architectural history (histories)” and not “history of architecture” to future architects?
The answer is straightforward: to foster a proper architectural thinking and above all a proper architectural imagination.
The teaching of history of architecture and architectural design are both based on “briefing.” From the history point of view has as its primary aim the recall of a “factual knowledge of the past;” student must recognize monuments, documents and events, meanwhile from the design the present trend is for a factual projection in the built world of the design drawings, i.e. the building must precisely look as in the drawings. “Briefing” in design becomes “executive summary.”
However is this necessary for fostering architectural imagination?
The teaching of architectural history is based on storytelling. Experience, passing from mouth to mouth, is the source from which all architectural storytellers have created. This is illustrated by the folk-notion of a storyteller as an individual that is either someone who has traveled far, or someone who has learned the laudable stories of the region, the epics of different trades or the heroic materiality of objects. In both cases, experience not readily available to all is passed on by means of the storyteller.
Within the framework of storytelling as teaching of architectural history and conceiving proper architecture, my examination tries illustrate its primeval role in setting the concepts of architectural sense-making, identity construction, and conceiving habitus.
Storytelling is no simple form of entrainment. It is a mirror for processing and reconstituting experience since the telling of a story is the root of all human communication. We tell stories "to give order to human experience and to induce others to dwell in them in order to establish ways of living in common, in intellectual and spiritual communities in which there is confirmation for the story that constitutes one's life.” Stories not only help us make sense of the actions of others, they serve to shape our own identities. The fundamental implication is that identity is a narrative construction.
Storytellers dig what they tell from their experience, or from the experience of others, and make it the experience of those listening to the tale. Storytelling is a crucial condition for making sense of both individual experience and social interaction. However, as Walter Benjamin had pointed out, the art of story-telling is dying out and with it also dies the human capability that is the essence of story-telling: trading experiences (Erfahrungen). Storytelling is dying out because wisdom, the epic side of truth, is dying out. The storyteller takes his stories from lived experience, either his or that of others, to change it into experience for the listeners.
The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his hometown or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.
Information is antithetical to storytelling, which is deformation. Information convey dry, distant facts and figures. Information explicates impersonal objects and events, a storytelling explains nothing and implicates this is the reason why does not matter how many times is told the story is still food for thought.
Walter Benjamin points out that storytelling is entranced in the rhythm of labor - such as weaving or spinning - who most naturally assimilates the story. As craftsmanship dies out, so does the story.

A New Vitruvian Figure

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values, the
Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost
beyond number.
‐‐ Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi

HERMANN HESSE. MAGISTER LUDI (THE GLASS BEAD GAME) FOUR GREAT NOVELS, NEW YORK: BANTAM BOOKS, 1966‐1970 [V.1, 1970].

GRASPABLE PHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND GAZEABLE DOCUMENTS

Many centuries before the invention of computers, our drafting precursors manufactured a variety of specialized physical artifacts to draw geometric shapes, to compute and measure distances and the passage of time, and to predict the movement and influence of Planets and weather.
These beautiful artifacts are untouchable and placed behind security glass in exhibition cases of many museums. These amazing artifacts were made of different metals, as brass, silver and steel, and also of precious organic materials known for their stability, hardness and durability, as ivory, boxwood, bamboo and ebony. The aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical instruments inspired much architectural achievement. Most of these tools, even in their modern versions, have now disappeared from schools, laboratories, and design studios and have being replaced with the most general of appliances: personal computers and other related electronic gadgets. (The only exception concerns time pieces, whose inner workings now reflect cutting edge technology but whose casings are still sometime made of precious materials in order to satisfy a desire for luxury and status). Architect to draw and conjure up their buildings used to work with several of these tools as media of architectural perception, sensory prostheses proffering architectural projections.

Drafting and measuring tools are extensions of the architect’s bodies. Indeed, architects used to sense the world through pencils, squares and many other drafting tools and (when this capability was developed properly), they would not be even conscious of the tools as such, but directly of what the tools touched and of how their different graphic support moved in the conjured places bounded by lines. Through the grasping and manipulating of these instruments, architects of the past developed enlightening manifestation of architectural conceptions. Through valid haptic interactions with physical tools and instruments, architects have developed rich representations and have directed constructions of amazing architectural possibilities. Unfortunately, much of this wealth of skills has been recently lost to the overwhelming flood of digital technologies. Valuable conceiving and conjuring procedures and skills have been lost within the mare insanum of the indiscriminate use of computers in the design process. Easy and fast computer programs have deluded architects into believing the knowledge and the skills accumulated in centuries of practice could be dispensed of altogether.

To compensate for what we have lost with the advent of computers the possibility of experiencing the richness of the physical world of architecture by literally grasping the tools of both the distant and recent past must be given to architectural students. This physical grasping will trigger the development of various skills and work practices for the processing of information through haptic interaction with physical objects (e.g., scribbling and drafting notes by spatially manipulating the marks through tools) as well as peripheral senses (e.g., being aware of the rules embodied in the movement of the tools). Most of these practices are neglected in current pedagogical tendency because of the lack of diversity of input/output media, and excessive bias towards graphical output at the expense of input from the experience of the world of facture.

Architects belong to the two realms of the physical and the virtual environment but in spite of this dual citizenship, the absence of seamless couplings between these parallel existences leaves a great divide between the world of electronic bites and the physical atoms. At the present, we are torn between these parallel conditions of being and restrained by greatly disjointed provisions of photo-renderings and the absurd precision of digital drafting nurturing of a new phenomenological approach to architecture. Only a proper playing with the tools of illo tempore, architects can prepare themselves to a proper architecture.