ramblings on week 3
Materiality in terms of what the building is constructed of, and ones knowledge of how these materials work, could be said to be the art of the architect. Materiality is also beyond what the substance is made of and its scientific properties (ie. concrete = grey solid matrix with compressive strength x etc.) I think perhaps it’s also about a sense of the substance beyond the visual. Kahn’s statement of ‘what a thing wants to be’ implies something beyond an artefact man can shape and mould to his pleasure. The Japanese Zen gardens and Emperial Chinese gardens place great emphasis on the nature of the rock, where the artisan garden creator is skilled at listening to the rock and positioning it in relationship to the ground and other rocks that is deemed harmonious. This example is interesting when placing this practice in the ANT context, where it is not the fact that it is a rock that is important, rather its ‘inherent’ relationship to other objects around that informs the developed aesthetic. Perhaps the desires of the natural materials have been overcome with the creation of the synthetic, where one machinates and programs the behaviour or will of the material.
Even the word building, being a verb, implies an action, so the building of a building implies an object in constant flux. One can think of the end point of construction as a transiently static object, but it then goes on to be inhabited, but is there a certain ‘deadness to this’? Is it because there are fewer actants involved? Could this explain the apparent ‘eery deadness’ that at least I feel from the suburbs. Maybe its just the density of the actants there, and the nuclear family’s diy boom is an attempt to increase the ‘construction’ and increase the network.
The way architecture was described as the construction phase as opposed to the completed static object was interesting. It made me think about how one could design a building that never becomes the static object, however using the Serres analogy, it is possible to view each building is the ‘I’ and the city is the ‘we’ so on a larger scale the city is infact the architecture, and the collective population are the architects. On a similar thought about construction versus the end product, i can only assume, but it seems like the drive for people to procreate is orientated to the idea of construction. One never set out to create a static human (which means depth), but to engage and have relationships to this new object like a building. Where the doctors, the teachers, the politicians, the grandparents etc are the equivalent to the concretor, glazier, drafter, and crane driver.
