Reality vs. Reality

Decay is alive and finality has sunken in. Chaos has a new meaning and students are working again.

Another year end is within easy sight. No more distorted visions! Hip-hip! At a glance my study looks like Santa’s workshop (not far from the capitalist china factories) as the last finishing touches are being steadily applied in order to achieve the best results possible. Well trained hands draw the final lines under the night sky and the smell of burned wood from laser cutting models and glue hangs thickly in the air as the eyes of students tighten from working late night shifts. All is perfect...for now. Next Stop = Who knows?

This crescendo of year end shows would normally be classed as “brilliant” and I’m sure if the Daily Mail had their say like they do on movie posters and books, we would get a better twist on this classification. The array of concepts, processes, drawings, models and free thinking on display are pure and remains true to the future architect’s aspirations. However there is a twist to all of this...as always.

Would the proud owners of their work still be happy and smiling when they move into a paid job, should they be so lucky. Now in the real world, meaning those who are already working within the profession, I would think that most of you look forward to the majority of year end shows, possibly as an escape from your own reality.

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination…”~ John Lennon

I've found university as a breath of fresh air but I have also found myself caught up between the

boundaries of the professional environment and that of the make believe world...namely university. I have also seen many newly qualified architects coming and going. More than a few struggled to design anything of merit that actually works. Those that have heroically tried to form a design didn’t know where to start and ended up with a “Willy Wonka” booklet made up of “googled” architectural details and photos found on architectural websites. There was no concept, no real beginning and therefore no real end, but there was something. The final something was read by professionals as a miss-mash or should I say “miss match” of other architects work stuck onto facades...is this really happening to architecture? This is not what architecture is about and surely this is not what universities have been teaching their students.

I suppose the reality are that those midnight shifts and the polished end products that we all put so much hard work and effort into...as if it was for a sacred or religious purpose, just isn’t working as a transferring platform from one reality to the next.

Robert Brault once said that one should: “Question reality, especially if it contradicts the evidence of your hopes and dreams”…and this is exactly where I am with this article when I say that reality indicates that... If I was to present work in my portfolio to the equivalent of the real world, I most probably won’t pass or just scrape through and the flip side of this foundation is that, if I did approach my professional career, concepts and designs as expected at university level...I’ll most probably won’t last long.

As the profession remains in a state of recovery (aiming not to sound like a broken record here) and the new architects to be, dare I say...is about to go out looking for work soon... what are we missing whilst being caught between two realities? Then again what you see as real is only defined by your perception of it.

“We see the world, not as it is, but as we are...” ~ Talmud

Chaos has a new meaning and reality is now leaving...but where does it leave you?

(Im)possibility of the Zaha Connection

Architects tend to bring out a more nuanced translation, allowing us to murmur before the first word. This is linked to a sense of what remains always with and yet always outside of language.  

Architectural Speech is always accompanied, necessarily, with the unsaid: an unsaid that is not simply nothing of silence but is rather a persistent murmur of the masses that sees it of yet no meaning or understanding. 

Against the popular trend in architectural theory, fuelled by readings like Jonathan Meades, From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008 on Zaha Hadid. The questions are indirect and the ethics might be understood as an alien encounter, a more stringent alterity and this, in turn, raises crucial questions of how it is Zaha approach the other ethically.

These questions are, in indirect ways, picked up through the article and is concerned with questions of relation and, specifically questions of how to conceptualise the Zaha boundary between the self and the social.

In short I suggest our constriction by the dominant concepts in modern architecture and urban form has forced us into a position where it has become all but impossible to think the relation of self and other without being trapped by seemingly common-sense notions of individuality and the naturalization of separateness that it could be suggesting. There’s a preconceived notion of architecture already formed  and an armory of border concepts. 

Just imagine our current timeline to be the equivalent of the mud hut era where change was needed and you might understand Zaha’s thinking for the future….and the rest, waiting for something to happen whilst sitting on the fence.

“Zaha doesn’t explain her work”….errrm…and? Zaha Hadid states : "We create transformative cultural, corporate, residential and other spaces that work in synhroncity with their surroundings"….is Jonatahn Meades completely just picking for a reaction?

Although the beginning of Zaha’s career could be described as a paper performance. It’s exactly those paper concern experiences and sessions that made lines slip from paper to reality as a sensation of dedication and nakedness to one self. The world wonders why Zaha don’t explain her work…why would she, she’s already naked. Fragments of her soul is already laying bare in many cities across the world. 

I call it nakedness as I’m again referring to the Jonathan Meades article stating “Architecture is the most public of endeavors, yet it is a smugly hermetic world.” Zaha is naked. Why does everybody need her to explain the practice to her performance? Step out of the mud hut timeline, stop being part of the audience. Allow yourself to walk into the fluorescent light, wander in its space, get absorbed by its colours and inevitably encountering a new world different from the usual.

Should Zaha been seen as a commodity. No. She’s like us, wandering through Georgian Streets, grim Noddy town cottages set in a maze of alleys…what you’re not seeing is the neon reflection on the rippling puddles. 

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/zaha-hadid

Love among the ruins

Architecture is our love among the ruins of beauty…but what is beauty? What gives a building that quality within an ocean of lights? If you knew the answer would it be the same for everyone? Beauty and beauty has never been the same and when separated or formulated they have nothing to do with being beautiful. A child growing up might think that the glass towers of London or New York are beauty, where a person of wealth could be thinking that the old corrugated roof sheets on a shack is beautiful.

A building might posses a certain beauty, but why? Our minds always analyse. We analyse information by means of our senses. By hearing, seeing tasting, smelling and touch we learn to control the dimensions we are within at any moment in time. We learn what’s good and bad about life, maths, work and death. Everything becomes a calculated risk, when will I die? How much does that weigh? Would it cost less? Even shopping centres now tell me how much I’d be paying for a millilitre of milk in comparison with its equally “cow-ish” friend next to it on the shelf. “Calculated Risk”, yes replay it in your mind…it’s also beauty.

If this is exactly how the human mind functions then I’m asking the question whether everything we agree or disagree with remains a weighing up exercise of positives and negatives. If calculated risk remains the essence of how we open up our minds to processing and answering life important decisions, where does beauty fall? Beauty doesn’t fall under the previous mentioned state unless a paradigms shift occurs and shift towards personal style.

No, beauty won’t let you starve, die, love or hate someone. Beauty won’t influence your life’s direction and final choices.  However beauty still needs to be defined. Even though we might agree with the dictionary description of beauty, the reality remains that none of you would actually be in any agreement with what you’ve read. That because you all will have a different perception and influence to what beauty really is.

Beauty becomes…

Beauty is not a constant and in some cases non existent. It gets formed by your senses. You only believe it because right now, you are here and it’s only because you’re here that there’s beauty. Beauty is a pattern formed, sanded and smoothed into a unique shape within your mind for only a limitless period of time. Historically the cave paintings to our primitive homosapiens species were defined as “Ooo-oo” meaning beauty. Then one day baroque was beauty, then the Renaissance then came modernism, post modernism and today…it’s different again. It’s a new generation. A different perception. A new sense of beauty. But even back in the renaissance period all the renaissanceians would have had a different idea and perception of beauty perceived within their fellow masses. In the same way beauty are unique to an individual it’s also true to a culture.

Really I’m saying that beauty are never the same, have never been and yet it’s defined as one and the same in all dictionaries around the world as being the same thing. As this is true what could the one be that makes beauty equal, realistic and true? Well it’s the above…thus beauty is equal to what is true and untrue at the same time.

Our minds calculate our way of life. But it also calculates the invisible of what it can’t see. As the human form, nature and all other natural non man made things are to a certain nation also discovered or undiscovered to us. All calculations are an endless sea of dots. Dots on the one side versus dots on the other side. If you were to spread these invisible dots into equal parts and distances across to each other to the golden ratio, you will define it as beauty as that would be the natural order of you, me and nature…as an object within an object. The very parts we can not control but makes up our very essence. We naturally believe in the natural order of dots. It doesn’t matter how you spread it. As long as it remains within the order of “your” perceived ratio within “your” order of acceptance, only then you’ll have beauty associated to yourself, culture, timeline or future building. It’s within the natural order then that we define beauty across ourselves, our neighbours, cultures and history.

Beauty is now…it’s you. NOW…BREATH…and it’s changed itself again, just like the ruins we love for eternity. 

po10c : potency

I've been hosting my blogs on my own website www.heinivanniekerk.com since the beginning of time but have now decided to do all my future blogs under the new title po10c.

Why po10c you may ask? In this case Potency  (pharmacology), should now be seen as my measure of the activity...of a drug namely architecture within my biological system and as an offset to measure of how I could dilute the substance/subject. For the purposes of my po10c blogging experience this will be used to describe my approach to architecture and how I see new things.