read later
weekly roundup:
Orwell — Politics and the English Language
—
Benjamin — The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
—
Inventory, Catalogue, Systems of Flux…, a Statement
—
Interview with Dan Friedman — by Peter Rea
—
speak by doing
Remain as mellow as possible. Pressure builds quickly, as you could be judging yourself a little too much. Let go of this internal conversation. Go off and accomplish what you must. Tonight: Easy works.
http://www.dot-dot-dot.us/index.html?id=20
Here are three quotes which describe what I’m trying to relate better than I can — and is precisely why we repeatedly gravedig history — simply because peoeple have articulated it better than we can:
It is by omission that we might be exact.Where we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written in code and in pictures we have revealed the truth.
A person who calls his stuff the “new” this or “new” that (like a person who should always refer to himself as “the handsome Mr Brown” or “Brown the original” ought immediately to be able to convulse us with boredom, fling us into compulsory sleep or the most absolute inattention.
and
Originally meant as a spread for a small book An Incomplete Manifesto On Contemporary Aesthetic Sensibilities put together by Christopher Williams.
Then, turned into the cover.
Experiment
so if:
All life is an experiment.
&
Experimentation is the engine of progress, its fuel a mixture of instinct, intelligence or discipline is in the mix.
therefore:
The more experiments you make the better.
Joyous Urban Jumble
(What the Annex in Toronto could have looked like with the Spadina Expressway)
You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. ‘Artist’s conceptions’ and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.
It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I donot think this is so.
By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
— The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Jacobs’ main argument is that explosive economic growth derives from urban import replacement. Import replacement is when a city begins to locally produce goods which it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s. Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.
— The Economy of Cities
Jane Jacobs
In other words, Foucault contends that architecture by arrangements of space can determine activities of people through allocation, a canalization or the coding and their relations. Arrangements of space, therefore, implicate the presence of power to carry out such activities.
Arrangements of space for the activities may need an order and this order becomes a hierarchy of spatial arrangement in architecture by power that is obvious to a society and embodied in their cultural codes.
