Architectonics

Cache, Spuijbroek en Mulder

 Cache in Buiten: Wat is geografie?

• Geografie is niet omgeving van een

gebouw maar de onmogelijkheid van
zijn afsluiting. Het is een lijn door
objecten; van de stad tot de theelepel.
• “This outside is not relative to a given
inside; it exceeds any attempt at
interiority”
 Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot: geometrie heeft nooit bestaan,

is een product van threshold of perception
(Massumi) een startpunt van de
waarneming.
Voorbeeld: “How Long Is the Coast of
Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and
Fractional Dimension”
 Cache
fractal logic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs&feature=related

“It is therefore not only the power of continuity that allows a virtual
infinity to emerge between two points, contiguous as they may be. It
is that between any points there is an interval, a zone of
indeterminacy or availability that can always give rise, in an aleatory
manner, to another fold. … If we draw surfaces with variable
curvatures within an architectural framework, we can say that we
are introducing an outside on the inside.”
 Stuctuur en Huid

Twee architectonische principes,

structuur en huid (skin):

• Gropius en Corbusier prefereren

structuur

• Loos en Semper gaan uit van huid

Architectuur als kleerhanger
Maar als we echt volgens Mandelbrot ruimte willen
ontwerpen (niet volgens representatie), moeten we niet
aan de buitenkant blijven, maar moeten we ook de
ruimte binnen ontdekken
 Evolution
• Soft architecture: is al lang aan de gang mbt life

• Michel Serres: Life has evolved from animal forms,

where what is soft lies on the inside and is covered by a
hard outside, to other forms, such as ours, where what is
hard becomes interior: bones, cartilage, skeleton, while
the soft is pressed out: flesh, mucous, skin…

• By the end of this evolution we might drop the bones

altogeter.
Cimabue (1240-1302)
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
BLUR BUILDING
Spuybroek/ NOX: Machining Architecture

The continuity of action and perception can happen only in a body

where “a perception is not followed by a movement, but where
both form a system which varies as a whole”
Maurice Merleau Ponty

McLuhan to the extreme: perception and action are inseperable.

Ons brein wordt gevormd door de boodschappen waarin wij leven,
en ons body schema wordt er voortdurend opnieuw door
vormgegeven (Oliver Sacks).

Spuybroek (als Cache): Moeten we architectuur ook niet eens

minder chronologisch denken maar fundamentally “plastic,
topological and continuous”?
 Plato and Kant failed to explain how there
can be real communication (p.7)
Design is about creating an architectural
morphology, a rethinking of the body plan that
mobilizes all the elements of the system

Transitive geometry is about 4 morphologies

a. Deep surfaces: planes and sufaces
b. Blisters: single flat surfaces locally
transformed
c. Filo: double or multilayered structures
d. Sponges: multioriented morphology

What else can architecture be than a

permanent interaction with the body scheme
and the group scheme?
A. Deep surfaces: Tommy
B. Blisters: D-tower
C. Filo: Son-O-house
D. Sponges: Oblique WTC
 Mulder: the Object of Interactivity (static
versus dynamic media)
• Modernist art represents nothing but
itself, it is interpassive:it requires a
silent reflection of art that gives back
nothing of itself. It creates an
audience. Interactive art creates itself
though the audience. How?
• Susanne K. Langer: art expands our
inner self (think McLuhan) and thus
creates the illusion called the Virtual
Object
• Virtual life is life that is actualized by
the beholder of art through the living
experiences he or she carries within
his or her own person (p.334)
 “The virtual is real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract”
Marcel Proust

Our brains and our bodies do not contain two separate

systems of experience, where the one can be activated
only by real experiences and the other only by media.
Medial experiences are as real as immediate ones and
the accompanying feelings are just as authentic (p.335)
– Architecture evokes a virtual ethnical domian: it turns any
arbitrary location in to a site for a people, a company or a family.
– Dance contains virtual powers: the powers to which dancers
seem to attract and repel eat other wile in reality being able to
move freely in any direction
– Music’s virtual object is the controlled, intensified passage of the
present, of time that seems to come alive in rhythm and melody.
D-tower consists of a visible
sculpture that includes a Again: D-tower
virtual kinetic volume: it
moves yet it is stationary.

“D-tower is therefore not so

much a sculpture that shows
the emotional state if the
residents of Doetinchem as it
is an installation that enables
them to understand, expand
and deepen their emotional
life”. (338)
(is this Aristotle?)
 Again: Tommy

Tommy’s functionality –that it is a vase for

flowers - is a mere excuse… it is an
animate object, a living thing, containing
something that directly touches and brings
to life the body of its owner.
Art contains virtual experiences, virtual emotions
But what is living about an object? This: the virtual feeling that is
actualized in humans and that comes to life within us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6v60imApC0&feature=related