Sketchbook II
Noting
Measurement
All the Latest
Quotes from "The Battle of the Life and Beauty of the Earth" continued.
"As we all have good reason to know, the architecture of the last 70 years has often been stark, homogenous, boring to a degree that is almost frightening, very often without delight, and - most importantly - absurdly lacking the functional co-adaption between parts that would mark it as living."
No Quote
Just kinda cute lol. Your process, your rules.
"I believe that this has arisen because during the 20th Century, the production process itself [-] were largely modelled on Taylorian notions of Time and Motion and Efficiency. This led to a widespread assumption that in the name of economy, or simplicity, or cost, we need to accept the poverty-stricken geometry of buildings, and to believe there is no viable alternative."
In Biology
Adaption among Seedlings
"The seedlings themselves are all different to begin with. They become more different as they grow, and they interact while they are growing, thus pushing the growing plants to adapt to one another and to the surroundings.Â
...As the twigs from neighbouring plants grow towards each other, the boundary is forced to shape itself to accommodate to the conditions of the next door plants."
Adapting to the Land
"That is, in principle, what an adaptional production system might be able to accomplish, and what it did accomplish on the Eishin Campus."
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"When we built the Lake, Hie made sure the bulldozers did as little grading as possible, treated it as a very sensitive work, and kept every nuance of the land as it was before we started."
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[Image: Me using my hand to measure for later reference.]
A Colonnaded Street on Campus
"The Arcade steps up as the street goes along a slope. Because the natural contours of the land are preserved, the Arcade jumps up, in small increments, as it goes along."
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"This place, preserving the trace of the land from which it started, has life. Even when no people are there, you can feel its humanity..."
Cutting through a Building
"The idea that a small street might pass through a building is very useful, as well as charming. Yet it is something that would be ruled out as too stringent a type of "Functional" or administrative thinking.
The Tulip Trees are no less important than the Judo Hall
"There is a fusion of man and nature. There is in these buildings a new kind of human possibility."
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"We succeeded in all of this by paying attention to the thousand fold, minute adaptations between places, trees, views, buildings, and people, in creating a new form of mental and spiritual life - something that allows human feeling to exist on an intimate and personal level in a newly built community, now at last taking over from the familiar mass-society that we have known.
This was our aim."
Wholeness
"The first and most directly important thing about the adaptions illustrated, is that they create freshness and uniqueness wherever they appear."
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"But there is a second, even more important feature of the Campus that came as a result of the adaption process: The wholeness and unification accomplished by multiple, mutual adaptations."
System Wars: A vs B
"System-A is a system of production in which local adaption is primary. Its processes are governed by methods that make each building, and each part of each building, unique and uniquely crafted to its own context."
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"System-B is, on the contrary, dedicated to an overwhelmingly machine-like philosophy. The components and products are without individual identity and most often alienating in their psychological effect."
"The pressure to use such a system of production comes mainly from the desire to make profit, and from the desire to do it at the highest possible speed."
"Today with current construction practices, buildings no longer have the possibility of local adaption. Nor does the assembly process permit an element of a building to become unique according to its context and position in the whole."
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"Architecture is now only transmitted through drawings. The typical architect does not personally know how to make anything - not buildings, not windows, not floors or ceilings. He or she draws drawings."
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"But it is in fact idiocy. Mass production has turned architecture on its head."
"A piece of land embodies relationships, not blind replication of components. So we need a production system that is capable of producing thousands and thousands of overlapping relationships. That is the main thing a living environment is - a system of nested, overlapping relationships."
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"It is not worth wielding a pencil or a computer mouse, if the most fundamental assumptions that affect the making of buildings are mangled, or left out. Stated more directly, we may say that we will not be able to make a living world, unless we put in place entirely new kinds of human organization and new operational assumptions, which will encourage beauty, health, and genuine humanity to be achieved."
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"System-A... is emphatically not a recreaation of any past era. It is something entirely new, a production system made today. It relies on a new kind of humane organization of building and creative process, and is carried out in a highly modern, even avant-garde form, acceptable for our time, and congruent with the technical marvels we have come to expect as every day. Its essence lies in the focus on human experience."
Mind Fnck
"System-B constrains our psyche, and makes a mental prison. System-A frees us mentally. When we are allowed to use it. It provides us, in our inner lives, with food and forms and sustenance, and the language of the soul. Even so, the spirit of directly making houses, gardens, furniture, and windows, has mostly been taken away from us by System-B, and, even now, we are still tortured."
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"People had direct connection with the land as their direct source of livelihood, soo their own wholeness (the wholeness of the people) and the wholeness of their environment were not at odds. Now, as the modern era has unfolded, people's instincts are more often shaped by external sources - fashion magazines, telling people what they should think about housing, food, clothes, accessories, cars - these exterior forces, have therefore become less reliable in terms of wellbeing, less capable of discerning wholeness, and ultimately less good for the land."
"However, during the late 20th Century there was a general process in which the old forms of society were giving way slowly to a new form of society - arising from computers, from the internet, and from wider, freer types of communication, in which human community, depth of feeling, and depth of spirit, were becoming relevant and worth fighting for."
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"Of course a change such as the recovery of System-A characteristics can never happen suddenly. It is a slow change, all across society, but an upheaval nonetheless; an immense giving away of all the basic assumptions about life and work, and a replacement of old assumptions with other assumptions... the changes require upheaval... an immense force... something like a cataclysm."
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"In the course of ancient history, changes as big as these were often marked by battles."
"System-B is designed to exploit the needs of the population. Food and shelter may be a human right, but someone will make you pay for them."
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"It is true that various noble efforts (New Urbanists etc), have tried to make needed improvements in these standardized developments. But their improvements have still focused only on the outward shape of the architecture, and as a result did relatively little to change the underlying social and human situation - the very thing which most urgently needed repair. They could only aspire to creating visual copies of old living communities, because the underlying production process was still that System-B development process which cannot generate living community."
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"Only the outward form has changed. There was too little connection to the human inner core... too little relationship of flesh and blood to dreams, and sweat, and money - a persons own money."
