I VW DECOZSTRUCTIZ9

Responding to msg by "carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> () on


Super-architecture, Brian.

To climb on your weather ballon-deep probe, I've been working
for two decades to design and advocate what I call for PR
effect "$100 Billion architectural projects".

And, the slogan, "architects (designers) think too small".

And, the need for "civil architecture" beyond property lines
and projects.

All this is to shake the rocks of my noggin (maybe others) off
small turfs a bit, and dauntlessly grapple with issues and
problems like the societal shakers:  "international" affairs,
military and civil planners, scientists, economic theorists,
and the bevy of Big Ticket Items that thrived in the Cold War
shenanigans, and, in that miserable course, shaped many of the
countries' institutions, especially education and finance.

Hold it, no megalomania or gigantisim charges, please.  This is
about brain to world connections.

Fred Quie, a former student of mine from the '70s, when faced
with a need to formulate a design problem for himself in NYC,
and having an interest only in rural ecology and trained as a
biological scientist (no design or history at all -- those were
the glory days of preservation), chose to investigate all the
utilities of this burg, all of which are underground (this
preceeded Macaulay's fine book).

He taught me more than I ever dreamed about architecture in the
process, and led me to first think outside the real estate
conceits of urbanism and architectural education as conceived
by the AIA and NCARB and the accrediting boards.

Under his tutelage, I began to study physical systems that make
surface architecture possible, those out of sight and site:
energy, water, sewerage, waste disposal, food, transportation,
immigration, money, light, air, atmosphere, and on and on to
inter-galactic architecture and engineering and black holish
pools of energy and life in the making.

What an eye- and brain-opening education about buildings:  the
earthly and worlds-beyond raw source of their materials, not
just Sweets for god's sake, but geology and vulcanology, and
earths in collision, and how to read the evidence of Grand
Nature in a metal stud, a luminaire, a hubless soil line
connection -- the grand panoply and experimental laboratory a
building makes for study and wonder, even if only a decrepit
Harlem bedroom, or dumpster filled with torn gyp board, or a
FAR-monster on Wall Street, or Fresh Kills Landfill, or the
landscape seen when flying -- all now exquisite data for
experimental architectural design and mud pies.

And, boy, do we use it in our crummy projects to make art no
client could ever program.  (Read Lebbeus Woods on this, who
came from a different dementia.)

Researching the design, planning, costs and construction of
large physical systems, the pork barrels of our fat nation, led
me to study large systems of all kinds:  economic, social,
political, cultural, media and PR, education, say, not as
abstract fields to play in by others' rules, but as extensions
of my own (now our) architecture and design:  we needed to know
them in ways not taught in schools, so we have continued to
re-educate ourselves and use our projects as contributions to
civil, perhaps cosmic, architecture of worlds without limits.

Hence, my fascination in your venture, and those of what a few
others are doing (Lebbeus, Michael Sorkin, et al), in finding
architectural knowledge beyond the linguistic metaphors of the
critics and theorists, but instead, in the practical, pragmatic
workings of our wee practice, which, as you will understand, is
merely a window on the large, stupendous spectacle Out There,
as scripted, no doubt, by the tiny brains In Here.

Good graphics, you got on the list, too.  I'll sketch a bit
with the keyboard and beam them up.