Prezoject

Project on Prezi

Advance Praise

“I don’t speak Greek” – Epimenides, paradoxician [translated from the original Greek]

“…the least factual, most accurate account.” – Frank Mankiewicz, journalist

“…soft and spongey—like a Twinkie.  Like a Twinkie.” – Morgan Freeman, narrator

“Your film…one thing in two words: fucked up…very fucked up.  Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares…very very fucked up.  What I’d call a bad trip…I was so upset I even threw my friend’s fishtank at their china cabinet.  Ugly, very ugly.  Salt water, dead fish everywhere, me screaming ‘so very very fucked up.’  Five words.”

- Hunter S. Thompson, doctor of divinity [interview with Karen Green, qtd. in Danielewski]

“It’s like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain.” – Hazel Murphy, captain

“surprisingly adequate” – Harold Bloom, logorrhetic sesquipod

“That’s Numberwang.” – Bertrand Russell, human

CATTt+astrophe

[strophe - a turn or division]

It finally happened.  There I was, minding my own business (well, my own beer), when I finally had an epiphany of my very own.  It was bound to happen—it’s fatality, after all.

I’ve been agonizing for days over my Prezi.  (Todd can attest—he’s seen me sulking around top floor of Rolfs like the ghost of Hamlet Sr.)  I just couldn’t make the damn thing come together, find the logic of the immanent trope.  So there I was, hunched in agony (competition with the object—who will prove more resourceful?) over my computer, when I finally found a tropic tangent.

In the later days of Pruitt-Igoe, broken glass was a conspicuous feature: cascades of shattered beer bottles filled the ground that originally promised ‘a river of trees’; more significantly, one of the buildings’ most prominent features was its busted-out windows.  Broken windows—a sign of fatality.  We’re all intimately familiar with this phenomenon.  It’s the scourge of the personal computer—the fatal error—a sign that Microsoft Windows has tripped over its own formality.  Pruitt-Igoe as a signifying accident is the very same as the blue screen of death.  This, of course, leads marvelously into Lev Manovich’s theorization of the new media screen, providing a convenient inroad into digital technology, a persistent parallel to modern architecture in my blog.

I hypothesized, early on, that the disaster was the organization of space.  The notion that suspicion and defection were emergent properties of the layout seem to corroborate this.  Pruitt-Igoe promised the American Dream of the mid-century.  The project arose as a result of flight to the suburbs, to the white picket fences of middle-class America.  Pruitt-Igoe was an urbanized version of the white picket fence neighborhood—‘vertical neighborhoods for poor people’, to quote Architectural Forum (and the scary thing is, these were words of praise).  The social disintegration seems to me a form of mass brinksmanship; if this barren, inhospitable space masquerading under a human metric was the best that the American Dream was going to offer up, the only option was to call its bluff.

Going Modulor

The search for science has led me back to Le Corbusier's Le Modulor.  The standard scale of modern architecture, this is the metric of Pruitt-Igoe, the science behind the space.  In the pursuit of a "living-machine" that takes the human as its measure, Yamasaki created an unlivable-machine.

We get a break on this one; the science already shows its fabrication.  The standard for modulor was changed ex post facto, from 1.75 metres to 6 feet, from the height of the average Frenchman to the height of good-looking policemen in English detective novels.

As previously noted, modulor is homophonous with modular, synonymous with infinitely repeatable design, like the homogenous blocks of Pruitt-Igoe.  Modular housing itself is prefabricated structures that can be moved; in the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the buildings weren't modular, but the design (based on the Modulor) assumed that its residents were--that humans can be picked up and deposited into prefabricated spaces and philosophies.

'As if' al Azif

One thing that play and ‘pataphysics have in common is the ‘as if’; in play, this is the creative paithia, play without formal rules but organized by the principles of an imaginary world.  ‘Pataphysics is founded on this principle, creating an imaginary science of the world constituted by ‘as if’.  Both paithia and ‘pataphysics willfully forget history and experience in favor of constructing their own reality.  ‘pataphysics has certain rules, making it more ludic in nature, but ‘pataphysics maintains its playful character by developing the rules of its own methodology, granting greater freedom and creative latitude than in normal science.

I return to Danielewski’s House of Leaves as a point of intersection for a variety of themes I’ve been following.  The book, as noted before, uses the trope of recursion, and it does so in two ways.  First, the book represents itself as a diegetic object, as a book that the protagonist finds and reads.  Moreover, the impossible architecture of the house (unbound by space and time—an impossible physics, an imaginary physics, a ‘pataphysics—see also Turlington Hall) is reflected in the impossible architecture of the book itself (the house of leaves).  The book is the house that is the book.

Moreover, House of Leaves presents itself as a found manuscript, like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. (The book also contains various other found manuscripts en abyme.)  This seems significant in light of Todd’s enlightening lecture, wherein he suggested the possibility of the hoax, pure simulation, as a route for our projects.  We want the realer than real to expose its own constructed-ness as well as that of the cultural doctrines we take for granted.

One example is The Blair Witch Project, another ‘found manuscript’, that needs no introduction.  An important, but little-known, paratext is the Sci-Fi Channel special “Curse of the Blair Witch”, presented as a documentary about the making of, and events surrounding, the found documentary (and aired in advance of the release of the film itself).  This was in the days before Sci-Fi switched to all-camp-all-the-time and still ran shows like “Sightings” which took a very serious approach to parascience.  A documentary about the weird circumstances surrounding a group of missing students, complete with dated news segments and interviews with Burkittsville locals, was indistinguishable from an actual documentary report.

Another example of the found manuscript is the Canadian “pataphysicians’ approach to reading the natural features of the landscape as interpretable signs—similar to reading accidents as signs, reading natural history as an accidental text—or perhaps accidentally reading it as a text.

Which brings me to the point that started me thinking about found manuscripts.  HP Lovecraft is famous for his universe of impossible physics (like non-Euclidean architecture and forms), and a key component of this world is the Necronomicon, adapted from the original title al Azif.  A popular prank amongst Lovecraft aficionado, back in the days of analog libraries, was to sneak cards for the book into official catalogues.  Several versions of the Necronomincon have actually been printed, among them a version edited by a man called Simon, which also presents itself as a found manuscript.  Despite the fact that Lovecraft himself averred that the book was pure invention, there are readers who legitimately practice magik with the book’s symbols and spells.

‘As if’, a la al Azif.

Pruitt-Ilinx

Moving through Caillois and away from a rational understanding of games and play, we can get a better understanding of the social instability that the Pruitt-Igoe projects exhibited.

The social vertigo is a major point in most discussions of PI; in areas of 20 or more families, residents had difficulty distinguishing fellow residents from intruders--cooperators from potential defectors.

Such space itself is disorienting, but in a specific way.  Turlington Hall, with its multiple entrances, twists, turns, double-backs, and no windows, is a complex and disorienting space because of its lack of repetition; PI is disorienting precisely because of its total repetition.

The quantification that invariably accompanies grids, and the process of gridding, rationally compensates for this--we know that number 312 will be on the third floor, and between 311 and 313.

Now, lets imagine a grid without numbers--a grid without the very thing that makes it rationally comprehensible.  The space would have to take on qualitative features as a means of facilitating navigation.

A Turlington without numbers: navigation would involve spatial direction and identifiable landmarks.  "Go in through the north stairwell to the top floor, turn right through the double doors, look for the door with William Blake and Donald Duck posters."  Relatively simple in a space that is qualitatively heterogenous.  But how would one navigate extremely homogenized space like PI without recourse to simply counting off floors, doors, and corridors?

Corbusier & Corbusier

"Le Corbusier 

adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, Lecorbésier. But in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being. It brings to mind the verb courber, to bend, and, of course, Le Corbusier was a great bender of townscapes to his own will. It also brings to mind le corbeau, the crow or raven, not a conventionally beautiful bird in plumage or song, but one that is simple and unornamental in both and therefore, metaphorically speaking, honest and undeceiving, as Le Corbusier claimed his architecture to be. In French, le corbeau has a further meaning: that of a bird of ill omen—and perhaps that is the architect’s little joke upon the world."

-Theodore Dalrymple

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man

Le Corbusier's design was informed by his Modulor, a scale of proportions based on the ratios of the human body, a continuation of Da Vinci's project in the Vitruvian Man.  It relies on the golden ratio, another irrational mathematical constant like pi, and the Fibonacci sequence, an exercise in vertigo which produces the golden spiral whose growth is related to the golden ratio.  Da Vinci and found this ratio inherent to the human form, and it can be seen in other natural phenomena.  Le Corbusier's ambition was to use this ratio to create architecture and design suited precisely to human proportions, possible through the mathematical order of the universe.

Le Corbusier's Modular Man

The first Modulor Man was based on the height of the average Frenchman, but was later revised to accord with the standard height of attractive men in English detective novels.  At least in the second case the base was a professedly fictional standard.  The very name, "Modular", evokes "modular", or interchangeable, the very image of Pruitt-Igoe, the design of which was inspired by Le Corbusier's architectural principles.  He considered the Modulor scale to be one capable of uniting the Metric and Imperial scales, creating universal equivalency.


One of Le Corbusier's early projects was the Domino House.  It is a very simple, practical design, but also one in which interior layout is customizable within the overall form.  The name evokes the image of dominoes stacked and arranged to build a small structure, but also recalls the variety of ways dominoes can be combined and recombined within the overall structure or rules of the game--the very essence of modularity.

Perhaps we've found the fetish-object?

A Walk through Pruitt-Igoe

St. Louis was under siege from itself.  Decentralization, the flight of city dwellers to the suburbs, caused an expansion of the city’s slums that officials feared would engulf the entire city.  The solution was urban renewal in the image of the major metropolis.

Le Corbusier’s highrise design synergized with federal housing guidelines that only allowed for high-rises to be built.  Yamasaki’s intention was to maximize the efficiency of the space.  But these innovations that were initially praised became the sources of Pruitt-Igoes problems.  Skip-stop elevators began to break down, and the deferred traffic led to the congestion and deterioration of the stairways.  Common recreational areas, called galleries, became known as gauntlets where residents dodged hoodlums and criminals.  The projects’ reputation was so bad that messengers and delivery workers refused to enter the buildings.

Storage rooms were burglarized.  Halls and stairwells were vandalized—but that’s all right, since paint in the common areas was one of the ‘luxuries’ that budgetary constraints eliminated.  Others included landscaping (outdoor common areas became wastelands of trash), insulation on exposed pipes (in common areas where children played), screens on windows (at least two girls fell from upper-level windows), and ground-floor public toilets (coupled with skip-stop elevators, an utter nightmare).

Pruitt-Igoe was an exercise in utility.  Modernist architectural principles eliminated, or at least minimized, secondary and superfluous features at the same time that it maximized occupant capacity.  The projects’ refusal of excess returns as its nemesis—the projects were a complete waste.  They never reached full capacity, and were completely demolished after an astronomical expenditure over a relatively brief period of time.

Space Policy

The International Style of architecture emerged in the formative decades of the Modern movement in architecture.  The International school believed that architecture is a matter of aesthetics rather than politics.

The failure here is to see the political dimension of aesthetics.  Modern architecture may not be socially political, but it still participates in a politics of knowledge.  We can see this in

Modern architecture's foundation in the derivation of form from the intended functionality and the inherent expressiveness of the constitutive materials.  Ornamentation is either drawn out of the essential form (constrained by function and material) or else eliminated from design, simplifying form and eliminating unnecessary (accidental) details.  As a result, Modern architecture embraces a machine aesthetic of functionality, laid out rationally according to horizontal and vertical lines.

Modern architecture wears its Platonic metaphysics on its sleeve: it seeks the essential and the functional.  It goes about it in a fashion exemplified by

Le Corbusier’s architectural theory, which is undergirded by the idea of the plan, a telos that guides an architecture’s entelechy according to the intended function and the medial constraints imposed by construction materials.  The architect must become engineer, embrace simplicity and functionality.  This new aesthetic is founded on mathematical calculation of pleasing geometric form, and the use of regulating lines to rationally delimit and indicate the features of a building.

The architect becomes engineer; mathematics and science masquerade as art.

A lesson from Pruitt-Igoe: eliminate the accident in design, it will express itself in function.

P(ruitt-)I(goe): A Typographical Architecture

The sharp, hard, enclosing lines of Modernism; a reflection of metaphysics founded on distinction, stability, repeatability.

Bibliographic and digital textuality are both laid out according to grids.  Everything has its own apportioned space.

page layout

      

the digital page

       

page folds

type fount

radiant medium

Visual and material expression doesn’t fit into nicely delineated units.  Marinetti’s At Night, In Her Bed breaks free from the normalized typographical matrix, embodying tumultuous affect:

The poetic experimentation of Marinetti, Tzara, and others laid the path for typographical manipulation.  The  Helvetica font is a movement in a more rational direction; it is a face for the form; Helvetica and its derivatives (like Arial)  are uniform, clean-line typefaces intended for all uses and purposes (evidenced by its predominance in contemporary culture).  The drive to create an organic typeface backfires into infinite repeatability, the same flaw of Pruitt-Igoe.

Helvetica, est. 1957

Pruitt-Igoe, est. 1954

We can put pi into a clean, neat shape, but that doesn’t make it any less irrational; you can’t quantify the unbound; a squared circle isn’t a circle anymore.  “On the grid, there is no room to grow.”  Grid as anti-rhizome?