testa desk crit // take-away points // 21-07-2010

On the role of the designer: "to make the invisible visible and to give value to what other people did not consider previously." This is also beyond the issue of form: where visual splendor has given way to aesthetic anesthesia, it is the commitment of this project to reveal other forms of relationships and undermine autonomy. this is not anthropomorphic.

On the project: creating a scaffold for situations to occur, but also creating loose conditions where indeterminancy can play itself out. "because in the jurisdiction of what can happen, there is also the underlying notion of what cannot." the role of the designer here is to, within reason, give a spectrum of scenarios, understand how it might play out and then how it might be used toward a design ambition. In this paradigm, instead of mistakes in an idealized condition, there are only opportunities within a scenario.

On representation: we need new forms of representation to accompany these ways of seeing. To wrap the old in a new skin is the equivalent of running in place, the illusion of progress to assuage the anxieties of modernity. To show the new through the lens of the old is equally useless. To describe vision through words that describe smell is equally useless, because it makes one evaluate it through old modalities. Softness, "zonal", use of gradients.

On investigation: you can't really solve all the problems. don't get bogged down in the technicalities. realize that what you are proposing are a series of proto-investigations, proposals for its investigation. The actual project should be overly constrained by it: the intentions of the investigation should support the architectural ambition, not the other way around. this also means that there need to be an overarching ambition that supersedes it. what's the big concept?

Statement:

Climates, as we conceive of them, are really typologies of growth. This project attempts to deconstruct our understanding of the environment, to shift the concept of nature as "natural" to one of enthropic negotiation.

Synthetic Ecologies: Programming Indeterminacy

Synthetic Ecologies: Beyond Zero

The Biosphere model: order not disorder, problems not opportunities, stable not entropic,

These are paradigms of thought upon which the Biosphere was modelled on.

This project is a critique of the biosphere. If there is no natural, then there is no artificial. All it is then, what we have, are the sum of flows within a system. The impulse to control these has led to reductive modes of thought: categorical boundaries, while toward the designer, creates stunted ends. to try and accept the multiple richness of a project, i had to look it at through multiple forms of representation. simulation was also a way.

The biosphere is a metaphor. In the end, the journey is the destination. "There" is never really "there" except in its pursuit.