#THE SPATIALIZATION; NEIL!!!

[the-everqueen]

that one scene in the audio drama version of "Men of Good Fortune"

h*b: friendship. [smyECK] OI fink yoa lonely.

dream of the mcavoy: [heaugheughgughghgh] [hhhhhhhhh] [appallingly loud close-mic chair creak] y-you. da-are. you. daAare. imply that *i* might befriend a morTAL?? that one of MY kind might need comPAN-IONship?? YOUDAAAAARE to CALL ME LONELY???!??!?!!?!?!??! [frantic chair hits, furniture scrapes, door slams, screaming, crying, pissing, shitting, falling over and exploding,]

[stellerssong]

reminder to self to have some fucking couth. neel geighman is LITERALLY on this website and he DOES check his notifs. you cannot doxx yourself on behalf of a joke about horse murder.

[little2nerdy]

saw this post by @moonsnqil and had to write something, disclaimer:  i wrote this while sitting through a sexology lecture so take the quality with a grain of salt.

----

Neil was exhausted. 

He had been tired before. On the run with his mother, during his 16-hour days at Evermore, when he was recovering from his stint in Baltimore, after a game, during finals season. Being tired wasn’t new. But this was different.

The exhaustion. The heaviness in his limbs and the fog in his brain. For someone who had the requirement of constant awareness beat into him, he had been increasingly unable to keep himself tuned into what was going on, and the motivation to care about his surroundings was lacking. 

After months of throwing himself into practices, developing new drills with Kevin at night practices, co-captain responsibilities, runs every morning, and socializing with the upperclassmen, he was becoming keenly aware of how tired even the little things were making him. He was slowing down.

His usually easy homework took days instead of hours, he was bumping into people in hallways, leaving movie nights with the team to go to bed early, the walks from the math building to Fox Tower took ten minutes longer than they ever had.

At first he thought he was getting sick. He’d gone to Abby and told her she'd listened to him list his symptoms, her lips turning down in the corners, as she looked at him with not unfamiliar concern for his well-being. But she’d taken his temperature and asked him the standard questions and sent him to the student health center for a round of uncomfortable swabs to test for common campus plagues. But he was fine, medically, so he kept going. For a while, at least.

Except those little things turned into bigger things. He was missing drills and tripping over his own feet at practice, he was sleeping through his alarms, nodding off in crowded classrooms, not having the energy for runs in the morning, wishing they didn't have a game on a Friday night. Which turned into skipping his morning class. Skipping lift. Then skipping his afternoon classes. Skipping practice. And night practice.

The fatigue was consuming, eating him from the inside out, scooping out everything he’d ever known and filling it with concrete, weighing down his limbs, locking words and actions out of his reach. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t know how to get through to tomorrow. There was nothing to run from or run to, there was only him right now and cavernous freedom that he stood at the edge of, and fleetingly he thought that was the most frightening thing he had ever faced. 

----

Andrew had seen it coming. He saw the shift in Neil after the deal with the Moriayama’s had been made. Neil had been on the run his entire life. He’d been expecting to die. To have the possibility of a long, relatively safe, life laid out in front of him was something he’d never even contemplated. He had watched as Neil threw himself into anything and everything after the season ended.

He noticed the multiple runs a day, the calls with Dan about how they wanted to do things in the fall, the increase in obnoxious drill development talks between him and Kevin. He saw the effort he put in with the new recruits and the too much thought he put into his schedule. But he also saw the bags under Neil’s blue eyes, the napping without meaning to, the lack of quick reactions and spatial awareness on the court. 

“It's not uncommon,” Bee had said after he’d inadvertently spent the first fifteen minutes of his session giving her the lowdown on Neil’s declining state and his…concern… that a crash was imminent when she’d asked how the week had been. “Neil has been in a constant state of stress his entire life. But he was permitted to make a life for himself here among your team and as Neil Josten the person, not just a throwaway identity. His body can sense that shift. It’s trying to play catch up for years of trauma that he’s never had the time or space to deal with. Both mentally and physically.”

So when Neil didn’t move from bed Monday morning when his alarm went off, Andrew knew it was all coming to a head. He watched from his spot in the window as Neil lay in his bunk, unmoving, quiet except for hitching breaths that interrupted the shallow expansion of his lungs every few minutes. He watched as an hour passed. And then two. He stood to pull a hoodie and Neil’s favorite annoyingly orange sweats from their dresser, stacking them on the counter in the bathroom before he made his way to stand at the edge of Neil’s bed. 

“Neil.” He got no response except for a slight stilling of the sheets as Neil’s breath settled. “Get up. Go to the bathroom.” He watched as Neil very slowly rolled over, eyes squinted against the brightness of the window but made no further move to get up. Blue eyes tracked Andrew as he squatted so they were eye level. He reached a hand out and hovered it over Neil’s unruly curls. A scared hand appeared from under the blanket and brought Andrew’s fingers to his hair.

A few minutes of just breathing passed between them, Andrew’s fingers slowly untangling the rat’s nest that had formed on Neil’s head. “Neil.” He tugged at the strands in his fingers. Neil took a deep breath and pushed himself to sitting. Andrew held out both his hands and Neil took them so he could be pulled up. They stood mirroring each other, Neil leaning against the frame of the bunks, fatigue blanketing his frame.

“Go to the bathroom. Take a shower.” Neil nodded, moving towards the bathroom. As soon as the door closed and the shower turned on, Andrew stripped the bed and remade it. He went to the kitchen, he grabbed one of the stupid protein bars that Kevin had gotten Neil hooked on and filled Neil’s water bottle. He sat at the edge of the bed, waiting.

When Neil reappeared he somehow looked even more exhausted than he had before. Eyes empty of their usual spark, wet curls dampening the hood he’d pulled up like a protective barrier. Andrew pushed the opened bar into his hands and watched as Neil mechanically chewed his way through it, reaching for his water bottle when he was done.

Satisfied with the modicum of care he’d been allowed to push on Neil, he let him curl up under the sheets once more. Neil grabbed Andrew’s sleeve as he went to move away and tugged lightly. His eyes, on the verge of closing, flicked to the end of the bed.

Andrew nodded and Neil released his sleeve, letting Andrew slide onto the foot of the bed after grabbing his book, settling a hand on Neil’s ankle through the plush blanket Matt had gifted him. He watched as Neil’s breathing settled once more and he fell back into a stillness that Andrew had never seen from him, even in sleep. 

Hours later, when Kevin returned to the dorm, he stood in the doorway, staring for a few seconds before he opened his mouth to speak. 

“No.” Andrew’s voice was quiet but sharp. He stood from his spot at the end of the bed slowly, he knew the sleep that Neil was currently getting was the kind that shouldn’t be disturbed. He forced Kevin out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, pulling the door shut behind him. 

“He needs to come to practice. The season is starting to pick up and he can’t afford to sit out. He’s co-captain for Christ’s sake.”

“He needs this. Talk to Wymack and Winfield. They will agree with me.” Kevin glared at him before pulling out his phone and walking away. A few minutes later he came back, scowl firmly in place. 

“So?” The glare Kevin sent him was pathetic. 

“Abby says he should sit out for as long as he needs.” Andrew nodded, turning back to the bedroom, leaving a grumbling Kevin in his wake.

----

The dorm felt like a crypt, dark and eerily silent. Coaxing Neil out of bed for anything was a process, getting him to eat was harder. Neil hadn’t spoken a word, sleeping almost constantly, or just curled up staring unseeing at the wall. Despite the upperclassmen still being wary of Andrew, they all came to him to ask how they could help.

As much as Andrew was loath to admit, they all cared for Neil and he knew that he couldn’t deal with this completely alone. Abby and Wymack dealt with Neil's professors, Bee offered Andrew an outlet for his concerns and offered to speak with Neil when he finally made it through this stage, though that seemed unlikely to occur.

The upperclassmen, along with Andrew's group, worked out their schedules and took on Neil in shifts, appearing at the door when Andrew had class or an appointment with Bee or just needed a break. Neil was never alone. It settled something in Andrew that he didn't realize had been restless since Neil fell into this state of limbo. 

They all just sat sentinel keeping watch when he was asleep but when he was awake they all filled the heavy silence in their own unique ways. Allison came with stacks of fashion magazines from her merchandising class, circling things she would want to see Neil in and looking up tips for how to fix dye damage and take care of curls, a mission that she and Dan had been co-conspirators in since Neil let Allison cut his hair at the end of the season.

Matt came and sat silently with Neil, and besides Andrew was the most successful at getting him to take care of himself. Dan kept him updated on the team despite Neil's lack of response or input, and Kevin was a verbal flood of anything exy whenever he appeared in the dorms.

Renee kept the fridge stocked with fresh fruit and other foods she knew Neil liked. Even Aaron brought Neil’s notes from their shared science class. Nicky fell quickly into his parent mode that he'd been in when he'd first taken in Aaron and Andrew. Doing laundry and cleaning, but also making sure that even if Neil wouldn't respond, the silence was filled at least for a little bit. 

A week of rotating shifts passed as Neil's body tried to catch up on almost twenty years of missed sleep and repair his relationship with the concept of living past the age of 19. Thankfully, they were on a bye this week, no game, no travel. On Saturday evening, Andrew sat with his back against the wall working through another shitty mystery novel when Neil spoke for the first time.

He had been curled up around Andrew, hands grasping the hem of his pullover. Neil’s voice was rough from disuse and the tears that everyone had seen Neil shedding periodically but never addressed. It was so quiet that if Andrew hadn’t been painfully aware of Neil’s every move this week he would’ve missed it. 

“Thank you.”

[creatingblackcharacters]

"Although the concept of “doubly trans-” seems to recast and redouble “trans-” in spatial terms, that is, as a formulation that gestures toward modes of thought that move beyond matters of gender, “doubly trans-” also names the double relation (transitive and transversal) under examination in this study, wherein blackness and transness, with few exceptions, have been expressed in terms of a disavowal, which Neil Roberts explains as a “double movement: an acknowledgement and a denial” that “locates an event and then rejects its relevance, knowing full well that it occurred.”

This maneuver brings to the fore another two-part formulation, which Du Bois named “double-consciousness” to refer to the “peculiar sensation” of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Double consciousness as the expression of “two souls, two thoughts, [and] two unreconciled strivings” simultaneously articulates the feelings that emerge for blacks in America and throughout the diaspora and provides a way to perceive how race and gender are inextricably linked yet irreconcilable and irreducible projects. To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience."

Black On Both Sides- A Racial History of Trans Identity, C Riley Snorton

[sarahalainn]

NEW SINGLE. OUT NOW!

For Us to Decide (Mizu no Hoshi e Ai wo Komete)

Although I have Japanese heritage, I initially learnt the language from watching animes. I love the flow of Neil Sedaka‘s piece and reinterpreted it into a jazz ballad. A great track to play live!

Benyamin & I recorded just the one take to which I added my violin solos🎻 #Gundam

I perform jazz more often these days but haven’t yet released a jazz album (on the cards!), so this was such an amazing opportunity to record in a Dolby Atmos studio.

🎧Piece of advice🎧

＊Try turning Dolby Atmos on and off and enjoy the differences between the two mixes (spatial audio and traditional stereo)!

＊If you cannot listen in Atmos, not to worry - we worked hard on the traditional stereo mix too!

🇯🇵サラ・オレイン新作第2弾！

「水の星へ愛をこめて」

これは奇跡のOnly Oneティク(FIRST TAKE)!

正にベンヤミンとのセッション🎹🎙️

サラにハモリとジャズヴァイオリンソロを演奏🎻

ジャズアルバムはまだ出しことないから、こんなに素晴らしいアトモスの環境で今回レコーディングが出来て幸せ 。

サラ新作3部作。

どれもジャケ写とデザインに拘りました。第2弾は蒼く眠る水の星、地球���静かな愛をイメージ🌏🙏💙

沢山聴いてね！

🎧サラッとアドバイス！🎧

＊Dolby Atmosをオンオフしてステレオとの違いを楽しんでくださいね！

＊Atmosが適さないと感じる環境の方は、ステレオでお楽しみください！

こちらの動画でDolby Atmosのオンオフの設定の仕方を紹介されてます：

https://youtu.be/7vm_gUV0fGs

🇫🇷Nouveau single de Sarah Àlainn !

For Us to Decide (Mizu no Hoshi e Ai wo Komete)

Un morceau enregistré en une prise sur laquelle j'ai ajouté quelques couches de violon et d'harmonies vocales.🎻

Malgré mes racines japonaises, c'est en regardant des dessins animés que j'ai appris le japonais. Admiratrice du naturel de cette pièce de Neil Sedaka, je l'ai réinterprétée en une balade jazz. Un morceau fantastique en live !

Nous jouerons mes 3 nouveaux singles avec Benyamin Nuss samedi à Nancy Anim’est !🇫🇷

Ces temps-ci, je joue davantage du jazz mais je n'ai pas encore sorti d'album dans ce style (c'est dans les cartons !). Ce titre a été l'opportunité rêvée d'enregistrer en Dolby Atmos.

🎧🎧🎧

Neil Sedaka’s contribution to the ‘Gundam’ anime series reimagined by Sarah Àlainn into a jazz ballad. Sarah showcases her trademark vocal and violin fusion with Benyamin Nuss on the piano in this unedited one take recording.

🇯🇵

ニール・セダカ作曲の『#ガンダム シリーズ』の歴史を彩った一曲をサラが自らジャズアレンジ。

トレードマークであるヴォーカルとヴァイオリン演奏でマルチな才能を発揮。ピアニストのベンヤミン・ヌスと奇跡のFirst Take（ワンテイク）録音。

🇫🇷

La superbe chanson de Gundam Z, par Neil Sedaka, réimaginée par Sarah Àlainn en une ballade jazz... Elle y fait entendre son timbre vocal inimitable et ses talents de violonistes, accompagnée par Benyamin Nuss 🎹 dans une prise enregistrée sur le vif.

[catboybiologist]

could you explain why/if we can't just copy the genes of one animal and splice them into another animal, for example why we couldn't give humans cat ears?

There's no one easy way to answer this, but the basic answer is that it's not that simple. There's no one gene, or even easily reducible set of genes, that just is "make cat ears". Not only is there a network of genes activated within a cell, there are a myriad of signals from nearby cells (the "microenvironment") as well as cues from the rest of the body and environment.

So each one of the cells making your ear isn't just encoded to be a cell that makes your ear. In fact, most of them don't have any "ear" genetic characteristics or activation. They're generic cartilage or skin cells that were told to grow more or less by neighboring cells or distant cells during carefully coordinated times during growth and development. Each cell interprets this signal in different ways, and also receives multiple signals at a time, the combination of which can produce unique results.

The easiest to interpret example of this is finger development. During development, when your hand is still a fingerless paddle, a single cell on the pinky side of your hand (or thumb side, it could be reversed) releases a signalling molecules to nearby cells. A cell receiving the highest dose will start to become a pinky, and send a signal for the cells immediately around it to aide in that. The next cell that isn't aiding that, but still receives the initial signal, receives a lower concentration of that signal since it's further away. That lower concentration signals a ring finger, and it repeats until you get thumbs at the lowest concentrations.

That's the most visible example, but it's similar to what happens all over the body- signals that are dependent on the structure and genetics of the microenvironment, not just the genetics of the developing cells alone.

This careful network of timing, signals, gene activations, and spatial placement of cells is the core of the field of Developmental Biology (which, technically, my PhD is in as well bc it's often wrapped in with molecular bio lol).

So making cat ears on a human genetically would essentially require not only genetic manipulation, but also babysitting the fetus the entire time and adding in localized signals to the microenvironment of the developing ear cells, which is essentially impossible. There's too much "human" flying around to realistically get that result, and an attempt at doing so would essentially be akin to molecular sculpting. That's why *my* preferred approach would be epithelial stem cell manipulation/printing and subsequent grafting, but that's an entirely different thing.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, the most approachable and engaging summary of developmental biology is the book "Your Inner Fish", by Neil Shubin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik. He summarizes a lot of dev biology through the lens of evolutionary biology, which is a great way to see how differences in structures have arisen and differentiate across the tree of life.

If you want a shorter introduction, and like cute but kinda "cringey in the way you love" science parodies: the song evo-devo by a capella science is really fun and gets stuck in my head a lot:

But yeah, hope that answered your question!

[dianechattaway]

"Yep...that's me. (Becks big moment.)

I’m in the beginning of my author career… and when I say “career,” I use that term very loosely.

So far, it’s consisted of me jumping headfirst into self-publishing, making every mistake I could, panicking, retreating, learning, then clawing my way back toward something that feels like home.

In the beginning, jumping in blind was necessary, because if I’d waited to feel ready, I never would’ve jumped. But now that I’m in the water, I’m trying to learn how to swim.

I started off thinking I’d be the girl version of Stephen King. Joke’s on me, I’m more of a psychological/emotional writer with a few ghosts clinging to my coat.

After taking Neil Gaiman’s Master Class (thank God for that man), I learned the thing I most needed to hear: FINISH THINGS. My hard drive is a literary graveyard of beautiful, half-born ideas. So I set a challenge:

50 short stories in a year.

I hated the pressure. Resented the deadline. I don’t love obligations looming over head. So naturally, I rebelled… Currently 37 stories of the 50 done, and I am only on day 50. I am almost free.

Most of them? The stories, Born in a project I call In the Shadow of Giants: Tales from the Undergrove.

It started as bug photography. Then it became something else.

I take their pictures, and they whisper their stories to me. Bees. Spiders. Wasps. A few frogs. Even a snake or two. And then… there’s Beck.

Beck is a lizard my husband and I met in the yard. The guy responsible for the story I am writing today.

And, well, this photo kind of says it all:

“Yep… that’s me. Caught mid-cringe. Eye twitching. Claw out. You’re probably wondering how I got here. Let me tell you, it wasn’t my idea. I was having a perfectly normal morning. Sun? Warm. Leaf I was sunbathing on? Premium. Mood? Relaxed. And then she showed up. Big boots. Bigger eyes. No spatial awareness whatsoever. Humming some strange tune like this was her Grove. (Spoiler alert: it’s not.) Next thing I know? Snatched. Palmed. Scooped. Manhandled like some common crickling.”

Or, I assume that is what he would say.

I don’t know if this project will be accepted or if the world will think I’m daft… but I’m having so much fun creating this.

I thought I was a horror writer. Or maybe a romance writer. Turns out, I love writing for the weird kids. The ones who name spiders and whisper to lizards. The ones who find stories in the soil.

That’s who Tales from the Undergrove is for. That’s who Beck is for. Maybe he’s meant for you too.

Thanks for stopping by my strange little garden.

Have a happy day.

xxDee

[meekswillinherittheearth]

do you have any fun experiences to share? like funny situations or things like that 😭😭 i dont even know how to ask lmao

knox coming up behind me and trying to spook me but i accidentally elbowed him in the chest 😭 i felt so bad

charlie and i showing the rest of the poets our dance routine we made up, it was so bad because we kept stopping to cackle

pitts just constantly hitting his limbs off of everything, all the time. he has no spatial awareness at all. it's shocking he doesn't have a concussion atp

neil making a weird little sound and todd going "what the fuck was that?"

doing meeks' makeup and him attempting to do mine and failing miserably

"do people in britain call their dads 'dud' or do they call them dad like a normal person?" -neil

"well neil, considering that no one in the history of ever has called their dad 'dud', im gonna go with no" -me

that's some i could remember off the top of my head! i tried to make sure i included at least one memory with each of them <3

[solitair-e]

i take it back actually neil breen has a better idea of where the characters are spatially

this shot from the minecraft movie trailer is pissing me thefuck off. niel breen ass perspective

[russellmoreton]

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts. by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: 5 Procedural Architecture Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave. Architectural Body Madeline Gins and Arakawa Working Notes/Holding in Place Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry Camouflage Neil Leach For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost. Mimesis, 19. New Concepts of Architecture Existence, Space and Architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz A child 'concretizes' its existential space. A Philosophy of Emptiness Gay Watson Artistic Emptiness Everything flows, nothing remains. Heraclitus Rethinking Architecture Neil Leach Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343 Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360 Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition,annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos. Tracing Eisaenman Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences Robert Mangold Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time. Interactions of the Abstract Body Josiah McElheny Object Lesson/Heuristic Device The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects. Space Between People Degrees of virtualization Mario Gerosa Adaptive Architectural Design Device-Apparatus Place Function Adaptation The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69 Building The Drawing The Illegal Architect Immaterial Architecture Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects. Jonathan Hill Index of immaterial architectures Herzog and De Meuron Natural History Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together. My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there. The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity. Speculative architecture On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron Without opposition nothing is revealed, no image appears in a clear mirror if one side is not darkened Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619) Reflections on a photographic medium Memorial to the Unknown Photographer Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos Valeria Liebermann Working Collages Karl Blossfeldt Anti Object We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important. Kengo Kuma

[christophe76460]

DIMANCHE 25 AOÛT 2024 RÉFLEXION DU JOUR

À LA DÉCOUVERTE DE L'ESPACE

En effet, nous sommes ouvriers avec Dieu. Vous êtes le champ de Dieu, la construction de Dieu. 1 Cor 3 V. 9

Le 29 juin 1955, les États-Unis d’Amérique ont annoncé leur intention d’envoyer des satellites dans l’espace. Peu après, l’Union soviétique a déclaré son intention d’en faire autant. La course à l’espace était lancée. Les Soviétiques ont envoyé le premier satellite (Sputnik) et le premier homme dans l’espace quand Yuri Gagarin a fait une fois le tour de notre planète. La course s’est poursuivie jusqu’à ce que, le 20 juillet 1969, « le pas de géant pour l’humanité » de Neil Armstrong sur la Lune mette un terme officieux à cette compétition. Une période de coopération s’est alors vite amorcée, qui a mené à la création de la Station spatiale internationale.

Il arrive parfois qu’une compétition soit saine, nous poussant à réaliser des choses que nous n’aurions pas tentées autrement. D’autres fois, par contre, la compétition s’avère destructrice. C’était le cas dans l’Église de Corinthe, où différentes factions mettaient leurs espoirs en différents leaders. Paul a cherché à aborder cette problématique en écrivant : « Ainsi, ce n’est pas celui qui plante ni celui qui arrose qui compte, mais Dieu, qui donne la croissance » (1 CO 3.7), car « En effet, nous sommes ouvriers avec Dieu » (V. 9).

Des compagnons d’œuvre, et non des compétiteurs. Et nous n’œuvrons pas uniquement les uns avec les autres, mais aussi avec Dieu lui-même ! Par sa puissance et sa direction, nous pouvons le servir ensemble en proclamant le message de Jésus, afin de l’honorer plutôt que nous-mêmes.

RÉFLEXION

Quand avez-vous vécu une compétition malsaine ? Comment Jésus vous aide-t-il à servir les autres avec humilité?

PRIÈRE

Dieu d’amour, merci pour le privilège de te servir. Que je puisse le faire dans le but de t’honorer et d’aider les autres.

LECTURE

PSAUMES 119:1-88

1 CORINTHIENS 7:20-40

BON DIMANCHE D'ADORATION

[theohonohan]

Abstraction and architectural autonomy

I'm going to write a loose post containing notes on this topic, to get the ball rolling. Hopefully, I'll come back to this and write a longer article on this topic.

The topic I'm interested in has something to do with the concept of autonomy in architecture, with abstraction and with the problem of applying the lessons of traditional architecture to the problems of contemporary building.

My model for traditional architecture is Edwin Lutyens, not because he embodies traditional values, but because his work contains a profusion of clever architectural moves—what John Summerson considered evidence of "wit". Whether architects now can really learn from Lutyens is debatable. He enjoyed a revival during the PoMo period of the late 70s and 80s, but that's not a particularly encouraging fact. Peter Smithson, writing in 1969, said the following:

‘Trying to think about Lutyens is like trying to think about the younger Saarinen: enviable talent, but historically speaking distressingly unhelpful. Lutyens was caught in the box of his time too tightly for it to be possible for my generation to think about his work without pain…’

Smithson sounds tortured by the seemingly unbridgeable gap between his time and Lutyens'. We might most readily associate Smithson (and his partner Alison) with progressive, egalitarian projects such as Robin Hood Gardens, and Lutyens with frivolous and expensive Edwardian country houses for nouveau riche stockbrokers. What they have in common is that they're architects. Smithson recognizes the spatial richness of Lutyens' work, and senses that somehow he should be able to pick up some tricks from his predecessor. Is it a case of needing to abstract from Lutyens' designs, from his spatial moves and planning strategies? Are the lessons that can be learned hiding behind the superficially traditional appearance of his architecture? I'm tempted to think that Smithson should have been able to find inspiration in Lutyens's work. He may not have been trying hard enough, or may have been trapped in the more obvious layers of perception, of materials and appearances.

And yet, the profession the Smithsons were pursuing was very different from the one Lutyens participated in. It may even make sense to question whether they were engaged in the same activity. The Smithson, at their best, were concerned with the problems that preoccupied all of the members of Team 10: rebuilding cities in an appropriate, post-functionalist way; social housing for the masses. One could contrast Lutyens' role of architect-as-artist with the flavour of renunciation that characterizes the Smithsons' work.

The claim that they were engaged in the same discipline seems to me to be related to the idea of the autonomy of architecture. If it's true, it's a reason to believe that architecture does have an autonomous element. The alternative is that the activity of architecture is entirely contingent on circumstances. An architect practicing in 1800 might have no more in common with an architect practicing in 1970 than the Montgolfier brothers had with Neil Armstrong—in other words, the substance of architecture would be as slippery as the denotation of the term "flying machine".

Le Corbusier, whom Lutyens' couldn't stand, spoke of his appreciation of Lutyens' work at New Delhi:

‘New Delhi, the capital of Imperial India, was built by Lutyens over 30 years ago with extreme care, great talent and true success. The critics may rant as they will but the accomplishment of such an undertaking earns respect’

The new urbanist and classicist Andres Duany says of Le Corbusier “I adore his stuff, I can’t help it.” When these architects speak of their appreciation, and acknowledge the greatness, of buildings in a genre, and reflective of a ideology, at odds with their own thinking, one wonders whether there is a essential core of architectural properties than any real architect, acting in good faith, must be susceptible to. I don't mean a lingua franca, but instead, a set of abstract receptivities that might be common to every truly sensitive human architect, or maybe just every Western architect, or every 20th Century architect.

The theoretical idea of the autonomy of architecture is closely related to this notion that architecture has an independent existence. This independent "organism" links all works of architecture, past and present. It's a sort of mental space anyone who plans a building is liable to enter, if only for a moment. These moments of contact with architecture as an autonomous activity are related to abstract and aesthetic considerations, as opposed to functional concerns or the material circumstances or constraints of a building project.

I like to think of architectural autonomy as the result a kind of double abstraction. One takes the action of abstracting a moment of architectural quality as definitive of architecture, and then abstracts again over all of those moments.

What I'm saying is that architects may only touch on the autonomous discipline during a few moments of the design process, but architectural autonomy exists, all the same, as the continuum of all of those genuinely architectural moments, throughout architectural practice as a whole. So, the moment in the design process where the architect sketches an arch, for example, might be irreducibly architectural and abstract in the sense that the arch is a feature that transcends its physical realisation; to postulate the existence of architectural autonomy is to abstract over all such moments involving any part of a design.

The theoretical discourse of autonomy in architecture tends to be difficult to understand and somewhat repellent. I intend to work on some kind of literature review, but for the time being, my idea is that abstraction is central to the notion of autonomy in architecture.

Jeff Wallace has written about the ambivalent status of abstraction:

Abstraction is seen everywhere in modernism and modernity, and yet you don’t see it insofar as its meaning is so fluid—hidden in plain sight, perhaps. This modernist keyword seems never entirely to be a good thing, and is more likely to be a term of reproach. How often do people encourage you to be abstract?! Abstract and abstraction are invariably associated with coldness, distance and detachment, inorganicism, the cerebral life, calculation and generalisation, artifice. In a post-Romantic culture, we seem instinctively to prefer abstraction’s others: warmth, particularity, proximity, the passions and bodily life, spontaneity, nature and organicism.

Wallace is a scholar of DH Lawrence, so some caution is necessary when considering his views on modernity. But it's clear that his characterisation of abstraction is widely accepted, if a simplistic one. Abstraction, in the scientific sense, is widely seen a contributing to the production objects or ideas which lack soul.

The architectural historian Alberto Perez-Gomez places abstraction at the centre of the 19th Century crisis that created modern architecture:

architecture could not simply perpetuate tradition through its "making"; the classical order and proportions lost their absolute validity;

the cosmos that traditional architecture "imitated," to become the ordered place of ritual through the implementation of metaphor, was no longer a cultural reality given to perception; and

technology developed as a utopia and became the universal mentality of the modern world, effectively cancelling out the traditional order of nature and drawing its potency and pervasiveness from the human power of abstraction.

The modern world, that in Perez-Gomez's account is a meaningless and nihilistic utopia of technology, is powered by abstraction. He might not like it, but he acknowledges the effectiveness of abstraction, as a cognitive process, referring to it as a "power".

What I want to do next is write a proper analysis of the place of abstraction in architecture (at least from the perspective of asking what Peter Smithson might be expected to have been able to glean from Lutyens) and an explication of architectural autonomy that avoids the abstruseness of typical presentations of the idea.

[radiomaxmusic]

Tuesday, January 23, 2024 11pm ET: Feature LP: Rogers Waters - Amused To Death (1992)

Amused to Death is the third studio album by English musician Roger Waters, released September 7, 1992 on Columbia. Produced by Waters and Patrick Leonard, it was mixed in QSound to enhance its spatial feel. The album features Jeff Beck on lead guitar on several tracks. The album’s title was inspired by Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In 2015, the album was remastered and…

[find-me-if-you-can]

my aesthetics

RetroTechnologism

Linux

old ThinkPads

doing everything in the terminal

coding in C

Louis Rossmann

Raspberry Pi

custom Android

Jake Chudnow

caring about privacy and security

cryptography

satellites, astronomy

robotics, electronics

Military

combat boots

working out, calisthenics

wanting to be disciplined

practical and reliable gear (backpacks, powerbanks, pants with a lot of pockets, swiss army knives, walkie-talkies, rugged phones and laptops)

martial arts

Cryptidcore

south/midwest gothic

small towns and their mysteries

wooden hut in the woods

national parks

physical notebooks, physical books

computers but without internet connection

maps, compasses

flannels

hiking boots

Randonautica

Neil Gaiman

gravity falls

anomalies: - physical (spatial, temporal) - psychological (perceptual, memory)

ouija boards, EMF readers