Pedestrian Flows, Place d’Aligre from On Street by Stanford Anderson, 1978
The idea of the labyrinth is predicated on the notion of finding oneself through the process of losing oneself. The medieval city embodies the labyrinth by virtue of its bottom up methodology. Its resulting urbanism exhibits a level of complexity that contrasts greatly to the strategies employed by the industrialised minds of the 19th and 20th centuries who sought to restore ‘order’ and ‘rationality’ to the urban landscape. The grid, the radial plan, and the top down urban systems forever altered how one operated and navigated the urban environment, significantly impacting the urban ecology and its culture. Today we are seeing a similar transformation albeit by much more subversive and intangible means: through a digital medium.
We are living in an age composed of two worlds: one physical and the other digital. While the physical world is bound by space and time, the digital world transcends them. We experience the physical world through our perceptions and our senses, but we also do so through a superimposed digital urban landscape. This has profoundly transformed the urban experience and society as a whole, accelerating globalization by collapsing distances and altering the way we operate within the urban environment. The digital network shares the bottom up methodology with the medieval city, allowing one to lose oneself in its labyrinth of information.
In Paris, the labyrinth of the medieval quarters have been torn through by and adapted to centuries of development. The city was noted rather sardonically by Walter Benjamin as ‘the capital of the 19th century’ the city of Modern thought and transformation.
via: Labyrinthine Cities by Patrick Bourgeois
mdl4:
The Montreal Biosphere’s outer covering caught fire in 1976
A small collection of ancient rosettes as found on Roman monuments (1913)
Author: Antonini, Carlo, b. ca. 1750
Subject: Decoration and ornament, Ancient
Publisher: London, Published by J. Tiranti & co.
found: here
Perspecta 35: Building Codes
Architectural journal, edited by Elijah Huge, New Haven: Yale School of Architecture & Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
found: here
Perspecta 35: Building Codes
Architectural journal, edited by Elijah Huge, New Haven: Yale School of Architecture & Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004. Sewn paperback, 229 x 305 mm, 160 pp. The book consists of two kinds of writing: the full-length, academic ‘essays’, and the more personal and sketch-like ‘briefs’. The essays form the main body of the book, while the briefs, printed on smaller sheets of coloured paper, are placed at an interval of sixteen pages, regardless of the flow of the essays. The book in its standard format is quite big for extended reading: the text is set in an accordingly large size, forcing the reader to maintain a safe distance between his/her eyes and the book. It also adds a slightly unfamiliar, rather wild quality to the largely conventional and refined layout.
found: here
4D House from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One Buckminster Fuller, 1981 via artnet.com
Building Construction Dymaxion Deployment Unit from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One Buckminster Fuller, 1981 via artnet.com
