|
PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
BOOK ONE PART 1: Space as Reality, a Hypothesis
The Partial Content of the Animism Cornucopia: The Grand Delusion The planetary-stellar God's courts Witchcraft The Cult of the Dead The Cult of just about anything as opportunism dictates Shamanism, voodooism Angels, archangels, seraphim Black magic The gods multitude and their paraphernalia Astrology Nirvana The "Great Religions" Mother Nature Gaia The Aquarian "Revolution" Deep Ecology The Chosen People The Last Judgment The Cult of icons and reliquaries One Nation under God Predestination Medieval "science" The sacred places The sacred books The divine destiny The Eternal Truth The Garden if Eden Most utopias Reincarnation The resurrection of the body The will of God Hell, purgatory, paradise The children if God The "creation of the world" The body and the soul "Touched by all Angel," and similia UFO addiction Superstition Futurism The "living God-inspired bombs" (Palestinians) All of those have in common a mild to ferocious fanaticism and intolerance. Since the subject matter is at last people, and people by the millions, by the tells if millions, were and are tortured and killed ill the name of Saint Animism, it remains one if the real mysteries of life why we persist in, endorse, and act out the commands if animism. *** Space seems to be the thing, and the only thing, that crops up always and everywhere. Everything that seems to have presence has a spatial presence, and presence is a sine qua non for existence. The only domain exempt from space is Being, the past. Rightly so, since the past is a nonspatial domain. At the Big Bang singularity, the Techne of space -- self-reconfiguration -- began, and it has been self-reconfiguration ever since. If it were to be sufficiently persuasive or demonstrable that the transformism of space is the only necessary domain of reality and its evolution, then a unified theory could be developed. If strings turned out to be the stuff of reality, and strings turned out to be geometry, then space might well be the base domain of reality, all of it. A thought is a geometry of the brain. A "second thought" is a different geometry of the brain. So it goes for emotions, rapture, rage, fear, happiness, hopelessness. It's all space, space, space reconfiguring itself from mesons to galaxies ... from hydrogen to music. From 1995 or so, I worked on the basis of dualities: spacetime, mass-energy, body-(brain)-mind, Becoming-Being, Good and Evil. Recently I dropped most of them. In my work, space-time is now space reconfiguration, mass-energy is now space reconfiguration, body-(brain)-mind is brain-d. Only Becoming and Being remain two domains, but they are totally bound or hinged to each other; the hinge is naturally the "now." With all of those dualities disposed of, the slate of reality is ever so elementary, and what comes about with it is ever so prodigious, more so than ever. The intent of the Reality-as-Space-in-Metamorphosis Hypothesis is:
1. The Apple and the Nose (and the Brain, and Everything) The apple broadcasts particles of itself into the air, the particles are specific geometries, specific to the apple. The apple itself is a coherent (i.e., "working") assemblage of geometries (space in evolution). A nose intercepts some of those apple geometries floating in the air. Among others, some of the geometries of the nose's olfactory mucus, a whole repository of diverse geometries, lock onto the apple's geometries in a key-and-lock binding. An incipient odor is generated, incipient because other geometries are conveying the "will-be odor" to the hyper-complex geometries of the brain and among them, to those geometries that are "willing" receptors of the incipient odor. "Apple!" says the brain. That is, a sequence of geometries conveys the odor message to the geometries of the vocal chord apparatus and, voila! The geometry of the air is stimulated into "sounds," very specific geometries themselves. It is all space from top to bottom. Pull space away and nothing is there, the "absolute" nonpresence of "not to be." What is true for the apple and the fortunate nose (fortunate since the apple is a fruit of excellence) is true for galaxies and passions, for gravitational pulls and force fields, for muons and moons, for joy and suffering, the brain's geometries. What it is not true for is Duration, the Beingness all those things dump themselves into in the very act of their creation, the domain of the past. Space comes in all sorts of garments in all sorts of domains. Perhaps of all of them only one is absurd: the empty-space domain, not just because space is always full, but because space is fullness. The sum total of the domains and their garments is the Becoming. One could say that space-Becoming surrenders to Being-Duration in the pouring of all presents, the domain of all spaces, into Being, the single spaceless domain of the past. Some of the space domains and their garments-alloys include:
That is, the whole of Becoming-Being generating Duration and possibly self-revelation. 2. Since in my hypothesis space is the domain of Becoming, the very nature of space is such Becoming. Because everything is part of the Becoming domain, there is no way for any of its parts, a galaxy, a mountain ridge, you, me, or a passion, to define it. It would be the auto definition of a fragment of that which the definition is seeking at the end, if such an end can be anticipated. At the end, space will have defined itself. This self-definition is, will be, the full context of the past. Defining what space is can only come to fruition with the conclusion of space Becoming into durational Being, because space is in the process of creating its own metamorphosis, including the originator of the defining attempt, brain-d. The only noninterpretational definition is the performance of the subject itself. If space in metamorphosis is the only reality, space cannot (auto) define itself before it defines itself -- i.e., as we say, at the end of time. So to try to define space via one's own thinking is a non sequitur since our thinking is itself a manifestation of metamorphosing space. In fact, it is not a manifestation but a specific sequence of space reconfigurations. Space is a presence. Since in my hypothesis it is the only presence, space is the stuff of reality. No space, no reality. No reality, absence of space. There is a presence. Space is that presence. Reality is the process by which such a presence, space, generates novelty. Space indulges in this process, evolution, because space is a singularity that generates its own boundaries out of its own "nature." Another universe would inevitably define its own boundaries according to its own different nature (the "laws" of its nature), its own nature, and the implied rules. The absence of rules would point at absence of reality itself, the absence of space in metamorphosis. This Becoming reality is the creational drift "feeding" on the now. The paradox is that the now is the singularity that consigns instantly its own creatures to the spaceless domain which the past is. Space in all of its fireworks abdicates in toto, instant after instant, its own spacefull essence. The result is Being, the constantly incrementing past. Being uninterruptedly fed by Becoming is the consumption crucible of space and if the achieving Becoming finds the right trigger, such achieved consummation could be the radiance of self-revelation. In a nutshell, this is the unifying theory of my lazy mind. Supernova fireworks, Fido wagging his tail, the leaf hitting the pond's surface, the executioner savaging the victims, the awe of a sunset, the caterpillar ravaged by the wasp's eggs, Richard Wagner's Rhine journey, a lover's gaze, the dirty snow of a comet, a woman's breast, the black plague of despair, hope, rapture ... gravitation, quarks, and photons ... All are "incarnations" of space and only incarnations of space. And space comes only as "incarnate" since empty space is only a way of seeing. If I were to be right, that space in metamorphosis is all there is, then it would be a turning point in the interpretation of reality, a pretty momentous turning point. It might be important to observe again that if space is removed from any and all domains and events, the domain or event in question is no longer. I don't know if any other "domain" or "event" can boast such "magic." Time is none other than a "way of measuring the rate" of space reconfiguration. 3 "Naturally" the only domain outside the "dominion" of space is reality in Being itself, the past. This says that space with all its glory is, in a way, the medium to the end of self-revelation, self-revelation of exactly all that the past could be via space-generated reconfigurations. So we and all things are the instruments (space-reconfiguring) working at the creation of a possible if remote event that could make us into the end, the spaceless Omega Seed. Since space is hypothesized as everything, a change of space here or there is a change everywhere. Then short of a total self-sameness, space is not the domain of Being, but the domain of Becoming: space Becoming else of itself. Reality is the unbroken Becoming of space within the only real domain, space. Where does all this Becoming of space end up? Unfailingly, it ends up in the past, and it does that instantly, on the spot. The "spot" is a collection of spots, all the presents composing evolution by way of the now. All the presents (the nows) and all the pasts of those presents move in tandem, the nows and their instant transposition into the past, the then. The gate between the nows and the then (the past) is the gate where the domain of space ends and Duration's domain potentially begins. The past engulfs space (the Becoming) in its own spaceless domain, the Being. Being is the repository, the faithful repository, of operational space, the Becoming. Being is the faultless "memory" of Becoming, the durational domain preserving the space(full) domain. How does space (self-reconfiguring) become a quark, a galaxy ... a bacterium ... a brain ... a passion? Geometry! Geometry! Geometry! It does it without an ounce of animistic lubrication, just pure and simple reconfiguration of itself, space. The will to become, that is, the intrinsic drive of that which is to become that which is, as yet, not is Techne (Techne ... Techne ... ), the virtual Being of the very first "moment," the Big Bang forced by its own presence into Becoming. But will is a misnomer in the domain of physics and geology unless one is willing to accept the original Beingness (disposing of the alternative of non-Beingness), made of totally undifferentiated stuff and on top of it an indifference that defies any sort of "restlessness" as a protowill state. If not so, this original Beingness is the stuff of action via its own intrinsic original signature. In a multiverse scenario, each universe has its own signature, the laws of its own nature. In our universe, gravitational fields, the five forces, the subatomic stuff, etc., are part of its signature. Thus that which is virtually a Being (of an origin like the Big Bang) is contextually a Becoming. 4 The instrumentality, the How, attending to this "transcendence" from Becoming into Being is the technology of reconfiguration. Technology (Techne) is thus present at the very first instance of Becoming. It is in fact what the state of Becoming is. There isn't a Being and the Techne applied to it for the Becoming to be triggered. The Becoming is the technology of space reconfiguration. Since the primeval reality is unconscious, insensible, unintelligent, unpassionate, and unloving, it is in fact meaningless. It is a technology in search of the "What" and the "Why." In fact, it cannot be searching because searching implies willfulness, and "mineral" reality is a protowillful reality. It strictly operates according to its own "innate" rules very much set by way of probabilism and determinism. All of those are, of course, labels we need to apply to a reality we can only interpret via observation, experimentation, and learning. Interpretation is the closest we get to reality. This includes the interpretation of ourselves. "Know thyself" reads "Interpret thyself": space interpreting space interpreting space. *** The personal and universal "Know thyself" would be the aim of a full-fledged Duration in which Being and knowing are really only one thing, and this one thing, among myriads of "one thing," defines the self-revelational condition, a spaceless state of total understanding holding in itself the totality of all space reconfigurations "drained" of the "space parameter." The space parameter, reality in the making, leaves the event at the doorstep of the now where the past takes over and with it the possible, desirable durational reality. Reality is then composed of two domains: the space domain of Becoming and the Duration domain of Being. The Becoming domain is the self-creating now. The Being domain is the created past, or better, the storage of all self-created nows. It is not a duality because it is a sequentiality: the Becoming transcending into Being and the Being eventually, possibly, "Becoming" the radiance of self-revelation. The tangibility and concreteness of space and the uniqueness of its domain make absence of space equal to naught (absence). If this turned out to be true, this would demand, sooner better than later, restructuring of our language: no time, no future, no animistic ruminations. Without the apt language, the brain is incapacitated. Language is one in the triangle of brain-hand-language that has produced the stupefying explosion of consciousness, thinking and doing (all space configurations) . Biology, for instance, and microbiology even more so, might find, in this space proposition of reality, new avenues of exploration and the eventual dismissal of hypotheses patently no longer coherent. In fact, the discovery that nothing in the domain of thought comes about that is not the consequence of a (spatial) operation of the brain is at the origin of my hypothesis of reconfiguring space as reality. The nature of light, of energy, of probabilism, of determinism, of opportunism, of love, of passion, of grace -- all are turning out not as we interpret them to be. If reconfiguring space as all is my position, then nothing happens before it happens. Adieu blueprint and the fatal primeval determination of all the "has to come." The creational process is real. In fact, it generates reality. My presence is, because it is the result of spatial reconfigurations, all of them sequentially acted out present after present. The "potential" is a euphemism for possibility. It never stands for objectivation preceding objectivation. This makes a folly of antiabortion: a tiny blob of flesh is not a person, it is a tiny blob of flesh rich in genetic memories. This is true from the smallest (quarks and family) to the largest (and expanding), the cosmos: Space is the container and the content, and it is a prodigious Becoming (evolution). Domains and Their Connection with Space 1. Space and the Becoming The Being at the Big Bang singularity is virtual because Becoming takes over at that very moment. At such a singularity, real Being is born, the past. Space is the nature of Becoming. The past is the nature of Being. Space is the generator of Becoming. It leaves any and all particles of itself at the doorsteps of Being, not the virtual Being of the Big Bang, but the real Being that the past is. Space has no access to Being; it only fathers it. Space and Becoming are one and the same. It is idle to search for one where the other is not. Self-reconfiguring space is reality constructing itself, the Becoming. The search for the Becoming disengaged from space is idle; one is only if the other is. But such presence is not Beingness; it can only be Becomingness. A cessation of Becoming would be the dissipation of space because a non-Becoming space is a space not engaged in the now, an empty space -- that is, a self-negation. The now is the singularity endlessly pouring the Becoming into the Being, which is the spaceless domain of the past. Metaphorically, the past becomes Duration via auto combustion. The spaceless bundle of the past, the epitome of Miniaturization-Complexification that is universal and total, reaches the meltdown "temperature," and in the final religio (binding) act (religion) it transfigures into the Omega Seed. The autocombustion is self-revelation. Speaking of metaphors: "Reaching back into time" is a metaphor using a metaphor: time. There is nothing to reach back to because time is a purely expedient "expression." Reaching back into time is, in reality, the finding via memory, a spatial take on the spaceless past, on that ex-spatial configuration that is of use to a present spatial configuration; their "juxtaposition" generates the occasion, fitting and fruitful. With the Space Hypothesis the whole "Great Smoke-In" of animism dissipates into its true domain: nothing, the not-to-be. But as we experience and know, the greater the delusion, the more pernicious its momentum on the spin of reality. The power and reality of delusion is not to be identified with the "content" of it, or rather, the zero content of it. If the magic is my delusion, I might commit murder in the name of that magic. It is delusionary because a wrong interpretation of reality makes me a murderer. That is what, for instance, the theological delusion has enacted for generation upon generation. Space reconfigures itself at different speeds. The speed of granite, the speed of a butterfly, the speed of an Einstein "intuition" and ... the speed of light. Space is an elasto-plastic stuff, stuff to make "gods" with. Space is not just the lattice within which reality constructs itself. Space is "the" itself, the lattice and its content in constant reconfiguration. 2. Space and Being Space runs; Being is still. Space "runs" to generate the stillness of Being. Space literally cascades into stillness at the edge(s) the now(s) procures. In the form of the now, the present(s), space in its own reconfiguring freezes into "that which has come about." It is the rite of passage from Becoming to Being, from the present into the past. Present is the domain of space. Past is the domain of Duration, knowing memory. It is not a duality or a confrontation; it is a sequentiality, a self-documenting sequentiality because "that which has come about," real or delusionary, is "forever." No expunging, undoing, embellishing, forgetting, forgiving, or distorting is possible. The past has all the Becoming documented for good in its spaceless domain. While metamorphosing, space keeps revising itself and consigning itself "on the spot" to spaceless Being, the past. The consigning is fastidiously precise, and it is in the form of registration, spaceless registration. Playback "time" will be, could be, at the end of metamorphosis. Space will be self-playing its own history in the radiant light of the "Know thyself": the resurrection singularity. The problem with animism (theologies, etc.) is that the registration is all at the origin ... in the mind of the creator, including my fatal crash on the 17th of February, 1999. 3. Space and Duration In generating the past, space is the author that might eventually witness a reanimation of its own doing, of the past in toto. This reanimation could be called total memory if it were not for the fact that the memory in question is no longer a memory but a reexperiencing of that which the past has been storing (the Becoming). The word "Duration" is used to put the memorized past up to its own singularity of self-revelation. As Being comprehends Becoming, so one could say that Duration comprehends Being. But though Becoming unavoidably pours into Being, it could well be that Being will not pour into Duration -- that is, the immense domain of the past could well be a dead end, deprived of durational, self-revelatory singularity. Then in the open-ended cosmos, reality would not "hibernate" as past, but would be dead as past. A self-creating reality has no way of avoiding the contemplation of such an alternative. Otherwise, reality would be an immense deterministic machine hard put to justify itself, because it already exists in all of its frightful blueprinting down to its most puny detail ... The will of God and its triumphal inevitability is the death of the creational and, in the tiny domain of anthropos, the denial of freedom, a Calvinistic, bleak pseudoresolution. 4. Space and the How (Techne) The Becoming -- space reconfiguring itself -- is a "systematic" alteration of space itself, which space submits to via its own rules. This is a kind of inevitability that does not apply to a specific resolution such as God's despotism, but is an operational inevitability intrinsic to the very nature of Becoming. Becoming is unavoidably Becoming something else. Techne is the procedure for making something into something else, so the domain of Techne, the How, is intrinsic to the domain of space Becoming. The How is therefore copresent with Becoming. It is, in fact, in the very nature of the Becoming. Science is a human enterprise. Techne is a cosmic enterprise that intellection has gotten hold of, and with the input of science plus the "providential" manual dexterity unique to our species, and as old as the species is, has been nuking the world we live in and is now intervening in the "world we are." At the Big Bang singularity, the Techne of space self-reconfiguration began, and self-configuration has been at work ever since. In the cyberspace culture, the How might become overwhelmingly and too suddenly the What. As process, space (the Becoming) is the incarnation of How, the know-how of technology (Techne). Nothing changes unless there are ways for change. Those ways are the "Howness" intrinsic to the changing agency. They can only come about in the domain of space, the domain of Becoming. But in fact there isn't such a thing as space per se and away from it a technology for the alteration of space, because there is only one kind of space, the Becoming space, and the Becoming space is Techne, the making of "that space into this space," metamorphosis. 5. Space and the Grand Delusion From time immemorial, our species has found the presence, the power, and the secretiveness of nature disquieting if not terrifying. Communicating with "her," receiving guidance and benevolence, has made us into anguished beggars and has challenged our inventiveness. We invented the gods as herself or as intermediaries. In the presence of her indulgence and fury, we ended up separating nature / reality from the gods in Western thought: God as the ultimate master, nature its own creation. This is not just an interpretation of reality: it is an invention of it, and as such, inescapably delusional as soon as we abandon the interpretive relativism and marry into the nondebatable "trueness" we dress the interpretation with. "We [as many "we" as there are adversarial theologies] hold the Truth, and the world is full of spirited entities. It is animism all the way. It is the domain of the magic. Animism has clouded our minds and our actions ever since. With the liquidity of mercury and its poisonous fumes, animism has run through all our doings and has shaped our history and bloodied it, tenaciously and cruelly. (See 16 below, "Space and Animism.") 6. Space and Time As a convention universally adopted, time is a notion ingrained in our bones and in our brains. When it really comes down to it, time, the modest currency, has "usurped the kingdom." Eventually time, the usurper, has to be cut down to its humble status. It is a measurer of change, but is not a definer of reality, as technology is, for instance. What we will do without such an accommodating device only "time" will tell. One reminder: if change were to stop -- that is, if Becoming were to cease -- time has no refuge in which to hide. Time is no longer, because time is a measure of change in disguise. Time is a useful but delusory invention. The time-space formula might have to become the space-reconfiguration formula. 7. Space and Eternity If eternity is the pouch for the totality of time and time is a delusion, then eternity is the biggest container of delusion. A ponderous word, eternity is a poor but effective hiding place for all animistic promises of the good and the bad with the accompanying delusory promises and injunctions. The ghost of time has saturated our languages for millennia. It may be about "time" to drop the fiction. Reality could drop the fiction by just freezing up. "Time" would vanish, since nothing would be there to be "measured." A self-same reality is by definition timeless. With the vanishing of the ghost vanishes eternity itself. Being, the concluded reality, confirms its own timeless nature, as it does its spaceless nature, but not for a delusory reason. As long as reality pulsates (its own evolution), eternity is an "outsider," insubstantial, meaningless. With the conclusion, pulsation is finished. Eternity is a nonentity. Reality is pure Being, the past, and Being as a timeless domain has no meaning to offer to the ghostly convention of time in its own exalted form: eternity. The ghost in the machine goes up in smoke. Time, smoke from beginning to end; eternity, monumental smoke screen. Eternity does not exist because time does not exist. 8. Space and Nirvana One way of thinking that seems to reject delusion ended up by promising nothingness at the end of a redemptive journey that per se we deemed by the same brain-d mechanism to be delusory, life. Nirvana is the final delusion of all delusions, I would say. "Since I cannot make any real sense of what is given to me as the real, I will think of it as nothingness and I will strive to drown in it." It is desperately bleak and imperiously demanding from me (as delusion) to reincarnate in the other (a delusion) to the final purification that naught is. Nirvana. 9. Space and Probabilism For eons, space reconfiguring itself is mindless and will-less. Because of its makeup (a parallel universe will have a different makeup), reality snatches from determinism enough uncertainty to define its domain as probabilistic, the quantum physics domain. Moving from the subparticle domain, and its own space geometries, into the particles domain, and its geometries, it seems that the improbable remains so and the cause/effect trappings are on automatic pilot. Determinism and statistical anticipation are the way space shapes itself. But the generator of the past (space) is full of the unexpected. If this could be seen as to be expected in the domain of the living, it remains surprising in the preliving reality. Better science, better mathematics, better brain will show where the miscalculation might be. Well, perhaps. Or is it quantum physics that holds the key to the (inescapable?) freedom from a fatally molded reality? 10. Space and Determinism It would seem that, though reality sits on an ocean of probabilism, the subparticle domain, in the grand scheme of things, there are causes and the effects that come from them. The "cause" defines the effect. What if the cause, each cause, is a bag of one or so billion sub-causes (which is how reality seems to be compounded)? Uncertainty! Uncertainty? Things seem to be on automatic pilot. All the history of the world is, one way or another, packed in the making of a liver cell. All domains and hierarchies by the bucketful are represented in the liver cell. Determinism and statistical rules seem to be in control. The architecture of the liver cell is a geometry, a spatial configuration unique to the cell. In strict collusion with millions of quasi-clone other cells, it constitutes the liver, an architecture/geometry with its own originality. The cell domain in general has its own original geometry specific to the domain but adaptable to all sorts of organs and organizing cells. To be on automatic is imperative. Automatic is the close cousin of determinism and statistics. 11. Space and Opportunism How does reality move from probabilism and determinism into opportunism? Space has to come up with ever more sophisticated geometries ... and fast. This is where Howness becomes the maker and breaker, and it is also where miniaturization and complexity, the domain of geometry by excellence, are the arbiters. The ambiguities darting around within the automatic piloting of numberless numbers of causes and sur-causes going for ever newer geometries, become the promoters of the opportune. The "laws of nature" are "molded" into the prestidigitation of ever more minute and complex geometries; the opportune geometries are effects on already "miniaturized and complex" causes and sub-causes. Opportunism is the domain of organic evolution up to the origin of Homo sapiens, where opportunism attempts to resolve itself into the desirable: The Love Project. 12. Space and Will Opportunism is the incubator of willfulness. Opportunism is a sort of jester, whereas willfulness takes more stern postures. As the geometry of the scent of a potato differs from the scent of an infant, similarly, the geometry of opportunism differs from the geometry of willfulness. Why does a chemical compound make the move that will make it into a biological compound? Perhaps in an obscure way the first blush of hedonism is sparked in the chemical presence, the chemical presence "enjoying" itself and searching for the way to make such enjoyment perennial, the will to live and procreate, the pleasure principle as the forerunner of hedonism. Hedonism is the deus ex machina of consciousness working out the miracle by way of eons of work. 13. Space and Love The space of love is the most sophisticated spatial invention of all, and its fields of expression are many. Geometries of light, of sound, of patterns, of textures, of forms, of eclectic compounding of them ... The sediment of them all, that which resides at the periphery of them all, is "good and evil," and poking at it with all extraordinary discrimination, can spill into the equitable, compassionate, loving ... esthetic, the geometry of grace. Try to expunge space from any of those domains and events and you will find yourself empty-handed; nothing is there but an uncovered delusion. Take away the lovers and love is no more. Take away the vibratory geometry of sound and music is no longer there. Take away the spatial context of the "visual art" and nothing was ever there. 14. Space and Esthequity If space can be "induced" into becoming self-aware in cosmic terms -- that is, beyond the confines of Homo sapiens (where space is becoming self-awareness) -- then space will eventually author an also cosmic equity. But cosmic equity would be the "effect" of an uncountable number of contextual local equities as aspirants to the final full-fledged equity. The result of such universal equity would be that all means would also become ends in themselves, since there is no equity outside of an equitable diffusion of equity throughout the body of reality (the past). This transfiguration of all means (Techne-induced) into ends is the very nature of the esthetic, the very esthetic that has been incarnated into "works of art" from day one of the human presence: the nonobsolescent. 15. Space and Omega Seed Omega Seed, the self-revelation of reality, is the durational domain fully achieved: the spaceless domain of the past totally knowledgeable of itself, that is, the co-presence of all that has been and the acknowledgment of all its components by all its components. Omega Seed is then the state, the Being, that the evolution of space has created and in which it (space) has transfigured itself by consuming itself into it. Task consummated! Space is no longer space; it has become Duration. Space via Techne is the stuff of which to make God. 16. Space and Animism Key to the trueness of space Becoming is the refusal of the animistic domain, because it is the animistic domain that sanctions space as a fringe domain, in fact, as the source domain of evil, a domain submissive to "spirit." Naturally it would be impossible for the spirit domain to do anything outside the space domain because whatever the anything might be, it is at last a fiction or a metaphor or a chess grid or a fun park for the "spirit." Conversely, pull out the "spirit" from eons of metamorphosis and nothing changes: The Grand Canyon keeps eroding away, the fleas keep bugging the antelope, the spring is a paean of colors, and the AIDS victim dies brutally. The cloud of animism turns out to be sinister because it is the undefined falsity and is the untrue dressed with the most extravagant paraphernalia of "trueness." Examples abound in the past 50,000 years of history. Space is in the process of defining itself. If there is an end to the process, space may find itself to be Duration. Duration is the entelechy of space. This is a bouleversement of Plato. The idea horse behind the horse is instead the horse behind the idea horse, with the possibility that the idea horse will never come about. Bricks and mortar are prancing around, but the mansion may never come about, the tragedy of an "erratic" reality, which is also the price for a true creational process -- that is, a nondeterministic, nonpredefined one. 17. Space and the Future Since reality does not happen before it happens (God forbid?!), the future is nothing more than a way of seeing. The future does not exist. It is space in metamorphosis that generates reality, a truly creational domain, and creation can, at most, anticipate the so-called future. It cannot ever be before its advent what the Becoming is creating advent after advent. But evidently it does not create from that which does not exist, the future. It creates more past through the self-reconfiguring space (the Hows) that generates in the nows of present after present. We create the past and only the past, Beingness. Why is it important to be clear about the nonexistence of the future? The animistic credo if fully displayed puts in the "hand" of gods and spirits the responsibility for our presence. I was not conceived in my mother's womb; I was conceived in God's mind. God's mind, God, bears no connection with past, present, and future. The Supreme Being or Beings are Beingness. For them, the Becoming is a fiction satisfying the ghosts we proclaim to be ourselves. "I am and I have been from the very 'moment' of the Big Bang (patience, patience your turn will come fifteen or so eons hence)." So the future is nothing but a phenomenal eternity crowded with ghosts, the presents being just the successive emerging of all the given, unfolding under the eyes of God, or dissipating in the cosmic black hole of Nirvana. Only the nonexistence of the future leaves a narrow crack within evolving reality through which the faint notion of freedom can squeeze out of the animistic-deterministic-theological trap. 18. Space and Theology The theological, a subdomain of animism, proposes a reality created by a creator with no plausible "physical" dimension, calling upon the creature for a demise of physicality at the moment of reentry into the creator itself. In my hypothesis, the creator is superfluous at best, a meddler at worst, and a cruel one at that. It is the animistic problem par excellence: capriciousness capped by determinism; goodness will prevail. No matter what! The Space Hypothesis has quasi-none of it. It is protracted self-creation, purposeless for "eons," then generating within itself the puny light of awareness that eventually could become the radiance of self-revelation. Self-deception and delusion are two of the many stumbling blocks toward a resolution of the creational process. Theologies are parts of such self-deceptions and delusionary blocks, the theological inventions demonstrating, sometimes in a grand manner, the versatility of the brain and the resourcefulness it displays vis-a-vis the fear of the unknown. It is an esthetic enterprise hiding in a bundle of emotional strands reinforced by fear, intolerance, greed, bigotry, cruelty ... A word about the intolerance for tolerance: Tolerance well invested toward the (intolerant) person is poorly invested when directed toward intolerance as such. I may well "tolerate" the individual embroiled in all sorts of animistic quirks. In fact, I may well love her. But I may not want to tolerate the animistic domain that nukes her life opaque. Racism, xenophobia, Chosen People, intolerance, hatred, greed, the true God, hypocrisy, torture, trafficking in death are not tolerable "professions." 19. Space and Light Light is on the go, going places (going spaces?), the fastest of all. Perhaps light is the most generic of space self-creation, a sort of intangibility that reveals itself only when crashing on less generic, more specialized kinds of space constructs -- a gas, a liquid, a chemical compound, the flesh ... Does the light reach to the cosmos edge? The avant post of space expanding? I am setting up laundry lines: space, present, past, Duration, self-revelation, etc. If they stay stretched, all sorts of laundry can be brought to the light. Metaphorical laundry lines have no need of poles to spread out. Space itself sets up the poles upon which to stretch its own creation, the "by-the-bootstrap" Techne. If light is the most generic concreteness of space, then "we are the light." All of creation is "the light." "Let there be light," as the sacred books say. Is light "cannon fodder" for entropy? And how will light at the far edge of the cosmos it creates make a 360-degree turn from the beginning of the implosion stage of reality toward the Big Crunch singularity? Does light come in discrete finite "moments" (a closed universe), or is it the creature of infinity (an open universe)? Light could be the first manifestation of Being/Becoming at the singularity of presence: The Big Bang. To be, to become.
Or could space and light be the twin generators of reality? How could light travel if space were not there as a target for it? Better stay with space as generator of all, light as its first creature. 20. Space and Mass-Energy My grand ignorance should also keep me silent on this subject, but ... keeping a tentative distinction for mass and energy as two vaguely distinct domains, can it be conceivable that both have "nowhere to go" in a spaceless reality? Mass implies a spatial domain. Energy implies a transferable commodity, again the presence of space. Is it inconceivable that mass and space (its space) are one and the same and that, similarly, energy and space are one and the same, keeping in mind that perhaps space could do without mass, and space could do without energy, but not vice versa?
21. Space and Passion Easy enough. Our awareness and our thinking are specific and restless brain patterns; they are spatial configurations endlessly altering themselves: geometry, geometry, geometry ... The passionate is the reconfiguring of awareness and thinking where quality and intensity are exercised as novel geometries in the folds of the geometries of the actively operating brain. Passion is one inch away from the esthetic, and as such it persistently pulls at the leash of space to find the domain of the spaceless, the domain of Being, of Duration. 22. Space and Entropy The entropy ball hangs around my neck, a whale of a ball. It may well be that spaceless Duration will never be able to transcend spatial reality by pulling it FULLY into its own domain. Consequently, entropic death may be the final episode of Becoming reality. Since there would be no witness to such a nemesis, the whole process closing with the death of the cosmos will have been for naught. You, me, Fido and his lice, stars, galaxies, dark matter ... no matter. It is a pure Nirvana closing, an immensely cold absence, senselessness from top to bottom. Or is it a mirror image of the original sin? Is it the abandonment of lastly unrescuable "matter," the definition of space hiding in the entropic Nirvana, the junkyard of a senseless and cold geometry no longer capable of Becoming, since space in its energy impersonation has exhausted itself into the undifferentiated? Then there could be Duration, the child god of space metamorphosis (via evolution) coexisting with a residual detritus of unspeakable nature to be ignored by the radiant self-revelation of reality!? It would be a spaceless detritus, by the way, because entropy is a state, not a Becoming. Space-energy is indispensable to the generation of Duration but has no meaning in the spaceless domain of Duration. It has fulfilled the task demanded by brain-d, and it is time for the dissolution of entropy. Yet entropy remains a smudge on the transparency of Omega Seed. 23. Space and MCD (Miniaturization- Complexity-Duration) If reality (the Becoming reality) is reconfiguring space, M of the MCD triad is at the very center of the evolutionary tide because miniaturization is in reference to "physical" size, the domain of space par excellence, the physical size of a system, subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular ... urban, etc., and the impact that a possible reduction in size might have on the fitness and performance of the system. Reducing the size of a system means to expedite the work processing of the same, as the microchip does. The organic world of self-adaptive systems succeeds in a measure proportional to such expediting -- that is, its miniaturization. If the elephant is immensely bigger than the bacterium, it is because the life fullness of the elephant is immensely greater than the life fullness of the bacterium. For both, the complexity they master is a measure of their "miniaturizing power," an outstanding miniaturizing power in both. The conclusive hiatus of reality achieving self-revelation calls for "infinite miniaturization" because a residual of spatial reality, the Becoming, means the failure via entropy of the process, space --> Duration, that announces the advent of Esthequity and the necessary "resurrection" of reality into Omega Seed. 24. Space and Chaos All the Becoming generating from the intervening of domains (and their garments/alloys) is space reconfiguring itself via the bootstrap process of evolution that consciousness may want to guide into the fullness of love/Duration. Presence, like the presence of the Big Bang's first configuration, generates its own rules. This would suggest that chaos is what presence rejects by the simple Becoming in which presence is engaged (presence as the "to be" alternative to the "not to be"). If chaos had hidden rules, then it would cease to be chaos. That is, it would be part of the Becoming that is the process of generating new rules as it exercises its labor of creating more past. Chaos could then be the virtual state of "absence of presence." It is a virtual state because it is the preceding of that which has no precedents, the generation enacted by the Becoming. God could be a good example. 25. Space and Duality The Matter/Spirit Duality "Spirit," if one wants to see it as a domain, is a sort of extrusion from matter. That is, "matter" is self-processing via the brain and invents the spirit, a spirited invention, but an invention nonetheless. Matter is space reconfiguring itself. Reality is the "truth," the only one. Since reality is in the making, the truth is in the making. We do not know what reality is; we have interpretations of it. Therefore, the two reasons why the truth escapes us are: (1) The ultimate truth does not exist; (2) even if it existed we have no way of knowing it. We are parts of it and the part cannot know-that is, be-the whole. The truth will be the totality of reality. The concluded past and the knowing truth will be its self-revelation at evolution concluded, the universal "Know thyself." If, if, if ... The duality of originator and originated is becoming more and more unwarranted. The creator and the created, what a paralyzing nuisance! 26. Space and Emptiness Total, pure emptiness is absence, and as such, it is unspeakable. Presence is that which automatically rejects emptiness. Since space is first and foremost presence, space is the rejection of emptiness, the nonspace, non-Becoming pseudodominion. 27. Space and Desirability Space in its fearsome bulk, the cosmos, is mindless, therefore not under the guidance of a desirability that has no place or meaning in it. What distinguishes the desirable from the feasible is the discriminatory power that develops in the cosmos with the emergence of meaning, or what is more to the point, with the onset of the "good-evil" dialectic whose "ancestry" is the life-and-death struggle constitutional to all organisms and their associations. So from the outset, the Big Bang, space has had no desires. The domain of the desirable will come later, eons later. But once in the grip of it, space cannot (ought not to) escape it, because as the author of reality it is up to space to make reality into grace. It is the bootstrap process of a meaningless "presence," the Becoming, reaching into a meaningful conclusion: the Being. For now, space is the domain of feasibility, the How. Anthropos, or the equivalent, as one of many, living, cosmic existent bodies, has generated within its domain the desirable. Since truth is in the making and it escapes brain's grasp, to pinpoint the desirable is close to an impossible task. But try we must. Eventually the cosmos will be guided by the brain groping for the desirable. What is the desirable? For reality to recognize itself, know itself, reveal itself, "justify" itself, "beautify" itself, and reach the state of grace of the "Know thyself." With the astonishing nature of such a desirable goes the fundamental equity of such a domain in which all of self-documenting evolution makes all of it, particle by particle, a presence, final and participatory, beyond being only an instrument for the coinage of evolution itself. 28. Space and Memory Space produces that which is to be memorialized. Without "remembering," the quark is at a loss for its own rules; it is no longer itself; and so it goes throughout evolution. The transition from the Becoming into Being is automatic memorizing: that which comes about is "forever." It is the indelible past, the store of all of Becoming, and it is in the form of spaceless memory. That same spaceless memory that once "vivified" is Duration, the Omega Seed. 29. Space and Cyberspace Virtuality speaks poorly of space. In fact, virtual reality speaks of simulation and of a simulation that has no use for any kind of space mass or space energy. Per se, the simulation is imaginary (a bridge model is a three-dimensional simulation). Virtual reality speaks directly to the brain, and it isn't even a simulacrum of the virtualized object (like the bridge model). The generator and the convenience of the image is through "space all the way." Virtual reality is the spaceless being of the virtual reality technology, once more the Techne defining the Being. Statement for the First International Ecocity Conference MARCH 20, 1990
Unfold the organism, plant or animal, into "components"; on their threads one can join moons and planets. Without "folding over," organisms cannot come about. Organisms are highly sophisticated, tight packagings of folded-over structures ... HOLY CROWDING. The lesson is clear and simple: Life is where crowding is immense. Death comes when the system "unfolds."
Only an as yet unimaginable degree of crowding might salvage life from such a fate (gods permitting or not). It will have to be the crowding of the mind in its purest form. Such mind will be the supercomplex, superminiaturized hyperlife we, the living, might or ought to be able to create. For crowding to become grace in full, time and space will have to face their own demise.
No ECO- THINKING can ignore the miracle of crowding/ living. To do so is to indulge in incoherent fantasizing. Worse, it is to betray "Gaia," the opportunistic coherent game enacted by the protoconscious realm. Worse yet, it is to betray Mind, the exquisite offspring of Gaia. THE CITY, A MIND PRODUCT, IS A CROWDING PHENOMENON. THE CITY IS A LIFE MAKER. FEBRUARY 18, 1993 Statement for New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) Conference on Sustainable Communities and Green Architecture: Taupo, New Zealand, September 1993
As even President Clinton's otherwise encouraging speech shows, we are at last oblivious to the environmental crunch, and there is no life outside the environment. We forget or seem unable to understand that most of the troubles making life hard for many of us populating the planet are of no interest and of little consequence for the biosphere. This sizable blind spot allows us to remain on course in pursuing the American (planetary) Dream. We are blind to the fact that the "Home Sweet Home" dream, whose embodiment in the USA is the single-family home, consumes the planet as nothing else does. To stay with such a dream to its consummation is the likes of a death sentence for human life and for a sizable number of other species.
To step into a new territory, the territory of earthly reality, on which the signpost reads, "single-family homes forbidden," will take profound self-examination, a great effort, and a relatively long incubation; since the so-called window of opportunity might be narrow (the consumption of the planet goes on at an accelerating rate), we have no time to waste. Each building permit for a single home can be read as another nail in the coffin the Dream is proposing to construct. It is a license for unnecessary destruction of another parcel of the biosphere. Another dimension of destruction is the fostering of isolation and ego gratification the single home encourages, indeed imposes. An opaque blanket of ignorance and carelessness for all the things the single home depends on is covering suburbia, further isolating the suburbanites from reality, the reality of a stressed-out biosphere.
Justice, equity, kingdoms, democracies, republics, health, families, plagues, cancer, AIDS, violence, drugs, education, freedom, self-expression, pride, bigotry, despotism, intolerance, xenophobia, hatred, vengeance, all so critically defining the human bondages and glories, turn out to be quasi-irrelevant for the biosphere and its own well-being. But what truly confronts the biosphere is our power for transformation and the appetite it forges for consumption. The number one enemy of the biosphere, and us of it, is consumerism.
And to repeat: THE SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE (SUBURBIA) CONSUMES THE PLANET LIKE NOTHING ELSE DOES. The ills of society and their resolution must be cast within the environmental-survival dimension or they become for all purposes (survival-evolution) irrelevant. Even a saintly species, if voraciously consumptive, has a dim future. The food chain says loud and clear that dead saints are maggot fodder.
As a species, we developed through history a pretty successful way of generating civilizations with a modicum of thrift and self-discipline (most of them imposed by circumstances, ignorance, and ill will), translating into an involuntary stewardship of nature. Such necessity nude into virtue seems to be dying -- at least in the technocratic societies -- and the dignity, that very dignity found in the egalitarian liberations of man itself, seems to be blurring. It is buried by an avalanche of "necessities" consumerism loves to invent. The kitchens, the media centers, the garage in the home, and the shopping centers of suburbia iconize well the production- consumption unlimited we aspire to -- the whole species, from the greediest to the most disenfranchised. Whatever the drive for such a race, the effect is most pernicious on two levels: the environmental level -- nature, and the ethical level -- culture. Since the American input in the process is overwhelming all other societies, we must see the American Dream in its present form (consumption unlimited) as obsolescent, if not obsolete, and not be overly intimidated or goaded by its still-mesmerizing strength. The most and best the USA can do for her children is to abandon ship while such an act can be carried out with a modicum of equity, tolerance, forbearance, and compassion. To wait too long might bring things to a violent shakeup with unforeseeable, perhaps even unimaginable, kinds and levels of suffering, recasting a Dark Age imprint of inequities and horrors. With the fragility engendered by the present technological and technocratic innovations, a few unconnected breakdowns in complicated productive cycles can put large segments of the population in unsustainable situations, triggering responses dreadful to imagine. And then there is the even more threatening possibility of a collective loss of anima, the existential nausea now here and there breaking through the brittle crust of economic affluence and security. Given the mood of the homosphere, dream breakdowns are waiting to happen, especially Utopian dreams of self-sufficiency and of "Chosen People." And all of the above, anthropocentrically spoken as it is, is of little concern to the biosphere, Gaia, the opportunistic resourceful boss of all. Since Gaia and the food chain rooted on the planet have no ethical qualms, just probabilistic and opportunistic drives, the presence of Hominidae or mammalians or others is of no concern. Gaia is the most unconcerned reality (metaphor) we can observe. Fitting into it is our, and only our, problem.
The closing to this statement is an attempt to respond coherently to the human predicament in the environmental context, since no other context is conceivable. Since planning and architecture and the filling up of the spaces they generate are evidently the bulkier, costlier, and matter-energy-consuming aspect of our demands on the environment, a coherent response is eminently architectural. In this scenario, the city is the maker, suburban sprawl is the breaker. The spatially and functionally segregated house is by physical necessity the most consumption-demanding of all shelters. Emblematic of such demand is the automobile, the most gigantic and costly logistical system ever invented. Our future and the biosphere's future are locked into the urban effect and in its success. Outside of highly alive and "magnetic" cities and towns, both Homo sapiens and a biosphere inhabited by humans have no future worth considering.
The city implies Complexity and Miniaturization, the two imperatives for any form of life. Suburbia is the epitome of simplistic and gigantic agencies proposing, or rather imposing, the unraveling of the living into dissolution and death. It is a supreme consumption machine producing harsh conditions. We must choose between Utopia and reality. The choice will define the nature of our "future" (or nonfuture). How to avoid the fateful pitfall of guiding Miniaturization (see computer technology) on a path that does not cater to technocracy is going to be the genius of the third millennium. But Miniaturization, the collected life and the less consumption oriented, is the lens for both human spirit (mind) and Gaia's health. Away from such concentration, Complexity is not possible and life/consciousness outside of Complexity is an absurd notion, as evolution well proves. The city is a cosmic lens of sorts -- it radiates consciousness, and it is in view of such a Complexity-Miniaturization mode that the city can and ought to be a radiant phenomenon. The city of light. 3: To Reinvent the American Dream JANUARY 12, 1993 I want to call your attention to the catastrophic nature of "Home Sweet Home" as it is cast by the American Dream -- the single-family home. Consider 6 to 10 billion people trying to achieve the American Dream. Consider the asphalt, the concrete, the garages, the basements, the attics, the storerooms, the back porches. Consider the back yards and the side yards. Consider 4 billion or more automobiles. Would a future space traveler view our society as the "landfill" species, in which we were the fill, as the "subdump" society? The agony of our society, the "luckiest in the world," is just beginning -- the sadder because our patrimony of intelligence, knowledge, technology, and drive is truly magnificent. Our leaders-economists, financial wizards, politicians, scientists, humanists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, media gurus -- are ignoring the basic problem: Our primary social goal, the American Dream, is inconsistent with the dramatically burgeoning population of Spaceship Earth. More than three decades spent in researching, experimenting with, and proposing an alternative to the impending catastrophe legitimizes, in my mind, my call to mankind to wake up, to consider where it is we want to be before we begin our journey there. We must redefine the American Dream before we rebuild the infrastructure on which it is based.
There is an ethical consideration here, too. Americans cannot much longer protect their power to consume five times their share of planet Earth's resources. Unlimited consumption -- greed -- is ultimately catastrophe unlimited. We, gravity-laden, thermodynamically disciplined, happiness-hungry, must choose whether we wish to continue to purchase our pleasure with the torment of our children and future generations.
DECEMBER 6, 1993 Statement in A Taliesin Legacy: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's Apprentices, by Tobias Guggenheimer.
Reality is in constant metamorphosis. One tiny fraction of such metamorphosis is the transformation generating from our planning, our habitat, our architecture. Tiny in the scheme of things, but very massive for Homo sapiens. It seems to be second nature for architects to chase after "orchids," the beautiful exotic flowers of their imagination. But it is the good fortune of life that more substantive phenomena are sustaining life's metamorphosis: the forests. Forests do not appeal to planners(?), to architects, to designers in general. Defoliation for the sake of orchids seems to be the involuntary fixation of architects, a pernicious inclination at last: beautiful buildings, on some rare occasions, among the devastation of disemboweled cityscapes (the forests of the mind) and lost in the mindless suburbias. The city even in its own decadence remains the mind to which suburbia parasitically plugs in. Frank Lloyd Wright produced splendid orchids, exotic flowers of great virtue. As for the forest ... he mistook Broadacre City for a (motorized) forest. A critical error, a pernicious archetype opening the gates to and soliciting the consumption-gratification unlimited of today.
My work has been, is, to oppose, to arrest, to see the demise of suburbia of which Broadacre City has been the lure. THE FOREST IS THE SUBJECT OF MY INTENT. The Urban Effect is at the core of all living systems, old and new, elementary and complex. The Urban Effect is the fruit of Miniaturization, Complexification, Duration: MCD. The MCD paradigm binds the onset of Complexity to the onset of Miniaturization (the space-time dwindling). The twin work of C and M generates at last consciousness, that which space-time no longer controls, Duration, "where" and "when" the fertile ground of transcendence becomes accessible. 5: Eight Variations on the Two Suns Arcology (with Some Observations about Two of Them: Phoenix / Phoenix Urban Village and San Francisco Presidio) NOVEMBER 1991-MAY 1993
1. Arcosanti 2000: the design for the third phase of Arcosanti in central Arizona. The apse variation will have a population of about two thousand people.
2. Phoenix/Phoenix Urban Village: a proposal to the City of Phoenix for an "urban village" in the center of the city with a population of about three thousand people. Emphasis on agricultural aspects and equinox celebrations. 3. Expo 2000: a proposal to the City of Hannover, Germany, for the international exposition Expo 2000, with a population of about eight thousand people: the deemphasis of national pavilions with an emphasis on vocational communities.
4.Venice on the Rocks (Sonora, Mexico): a proposal for the development in Sonora of a town with a population of about twelve thousand people, connected to the superconductivity- maglev (magnetic levitation) superspeed "trains" extending the length of Mexico through Arizona and beyond. 5. Bering-Diomede: a proposal for a town cut into the granite of Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. The project would be one of the features of the superconductivity-maglev line connecting the Siberian land mass to the Canadian-Alaskan land mass and reaching the southern tip of Argentina on one side and the tip of Africa on the other. 6. Denver Stapleton: a proposal for the ex-Stapleton Airport. The fifteen thousand or so residents would be the main labor, research, and urban activities pool for that section of Denver, Colorado. 7. San Francisco Presidio: a proposal for collecting the Presidio residents and guest-visitors in an urban village designed to be sensitized to the environment and climate, with a population of six to ten thousand people. The urban village has full-fledged facilities for congresses, exhibitions, celebrations, etc. 8. Sun Dial: a proposal for a floating town of about seven thousand people. The main activities are agriculture, fisheries, marine sciences, and tourism. The town-barge rotates to follow the sun's trajectory.
Premises A. The Apse Effect The apses: The architectural form of the apse is a quarter of a sphere skin on top (or not) of a half-cylinder of the same diameter. "My" apses, with the convexity turned toward the outside, are a habitat per se, where the skin has doubled to make for an interspace 10 meters or more in depth. Or they are also part of a habitat developed behind the convexity of the apse. Persian architecture offers the closest approximation to such apses. A morphological characteristic of the apse is the focusing of sound coming from the outside or the radiating of sound coming from its center. This characteristic I transpose by substituting people for sound waves, while at the same time letting the people-wave penetrate through the apse walls by way of portals. So the convergence or divergence of people moving through the lens of the apse makes the apse into a true-to-form threshold. But this is only the beginning of the story. The Apse Effect: To the above connective function is added the sanctioning-characterizing aspect. While acting to focus peoples and things in motion, the apse, opened to the south, acts also as a device selective of the sun's radiations projected within its architectural boundaries. It is easy to see that, according to the seasonal changes of the sun's trajectory, the south-exposed apse will accept, deep inside its "territory," the benign, welcome winter radiation while turning away such radiation more and more as the seasons change from winter to spring and to summer, when Father Sun mutates into Stepfather Furnace. The apse is an effective passive "sun machine." Within its boundaries, it generates a sunny ground for work, play, repose, socializing during the winter months while it offers a shaded ground in the hot summer season-shade against the cool backdrop of the apse structure itself. The American Indian cliff-dwellers knew a thing or two about the apse effect, and in environmental dimension. B. The Apse and Exedra What follows is not an architectural manifesto; neither is it intended to be the "truth" throwing its weight around. It is what I think to be an effective analogy that strongly marks the subject matter -- an analogy to the reproduction imperative of the origin becoming "eros" and investing with its power the social and cultural patterns of society: the lingam expressing itself in the skyscraper-slab; the womb expressing itself in the apse-cradle; the petri dish expressing itself in the (suburban) diaspora. The lingam-erection has been in all cultures, up to the skyscraper of today. As antidote and antithesis, there has been from the very beginning the low profIle of the diaspora, the oldest of all human settlements. The lingam is a typical one-sided challenge that will "never" be responded to. Indifference (reality) is the continuum the lingam has no impregnative power upon. The diaspora, a pretty "unnatural" phenomenon, is the chatting and quibbling of the sightless and the listless, given to its own inescapably parochialized anguish. In the curving upon itself of the apse, one can trace a recognition of the innerness characteristic of the living combined with the broadcasting power such living is endowed with. The dialogue with itself is punctuated by the voices emanating from its focus, the same focus that collects the "noises" of the impinging reality. Thus the apse is a focusing with the double faculty of collector and radiator, depending from where the energy comes. So does the womb: Now it receives, now it gives. The lingam only "gives." It is a case of broadcasting (skyscraper) versus dialogue (apse). The transparent skin of the skyscraper hides its inner workings and cannot conceal its fortress-defensiveness "against" the outside. The hostility of the skyscraper toward the "ants" crowding at its feet is well documented, well advertised, and well reciprocated by the ants themselves. In the apse, the inner and outer distinction is mediated by the space that partakes of both. As the physical center of gravity falls outside the physical container of it, so the "performance" of the apse is extended in the vicinity of this center of gravity (or the vertical projection of it). Intermediately between the skyscraper and the apse is the slab. If the skyscraper is cut in two and the two halves are put side-by-side, one has the slab. The slab suffers from the same "estrangement" afflicting the tower: a confrontation posture vis-a-vis the Urban Effect, which contributes to the unease of the citizens. There are five other unique offerings of the apse:
From "The Third Generation Arcology" (January 1982): As the "slab" has been for some time the basic model for the international corporate-technocratic image for buildings, so we propose the "apse" (section of a sphere) as the generating structure for the "post-slab" habitat. The choice of the apse is not arbitrary; it is the result of a prior process of research and development of urban form undertaken by the Cosanti Foundation: The Two Suns Arcology. One might envision a process in which the "slab" has been warped to envelop space and focus its strength. The "slab" becomes the "apse." In the process, it has also become an anchoring structure for the deployment of transparent or translucent membranes and shading devices. The membranes outline, with the apse, volumes of space whose climate is a modification of the out-of-doors. Temperature, moisture, and air circulation are altered as needed. The greenhouse effect, the chimney effect, and the heat-sink effect play active parts in the definition of the physical climate. The apse form is a passive sun device when oriented to the south. This metamorphosis from "slab" to "apse" is the central step that provides the conditions necessary for the development of a new habitat. This three-dimensional landscape with its own controllable climate as defined abstractly by the warpings of the "slab" can be, by way of diverse spatial and functional transformations, adapted to purposes as varied as straightforward hospitality (a hotel) or a residential shelter integrated with a variety of other functions. The transformations of the prototype are accomplished by vertical and horizontal rotations and dislocations, scale and size changes, orientation and morphological changes, and the interjection of additional grids. The exedra is one such transformation. The apse-exedra is a feminine alternative in the lingam masculine domain. C. Garment Architecture The structures our society has been building are based on climate rigidity -- that is, dependence on total air-conditioning of buildings. This is a sledgehammer response to the vagaries, the subtleties, and the pleasures of climate variations. Garment architecture is what the words say: an architecture that is not a climate fortress but a climate "intercessor-modifier" working in association with air-conditioning technology of a more subtle and less costly nature. The structures dress according to the season, like people and many vegetable and animal species do. After all, physical comfort does not mean physical dullness (death) if and when the body is alert and lively. This confusion is the main fault of our climate-control wizardry. The equinoxes will be dates for two major celebrations of Double Exedra, the times when the urban village changes garments, the spring equinox as the trigger-date when the transparent garments will be taken down and the shading garment will be mounted in place. At fall equinox, the reverse will happen: the shading garments taken down (and put up for bids) and the transparent garments mounted in their place. As a bio-mirror to those technical transformations will be the cycle of deciduous fruit trees: sprouting shade in the spring, divesting themselves of leaves to let sun in in the fall. The annual recycling of garments (with bidding ceremonies) will make improvements part of the process and will afford an ever-changing palette of design and color (possibly via annual competitions). This winterizing and summerizing will be substantive celebrations in the field of function and in the field of esthetics. D. The Feminine Alternative The Kennedy Space Center is an ejaculation plant. The sky is "my" womb! it proclaims. The "call" seems to be coming from an immense and immensely hostile womb-reality. Is it perhaps in the mode of rape that the male-dominated species is targeting the cosmos? Familiar? Nature abhors a vacuum, the cosmos, such an expectant, empty womb. Where is the impregnation, and of whom or ... what? It smacks a little of a gay-male initiative, constitutionally sterile, at least to the day when an embryo is attached to a moon, a planet, an asteroid placenta. From that moment on, the sky would be the (unlimited) limit. For the time being, the womb remains sterile because the gametes' intrusions are too weak and simplistic, the Complexity-Miniaturization endowments still insufficient (more like a loose gun in the shopping center seeking meaning while delivering death). The womb is immense, forbidding, black, hostile ... a critical mass-temperature-pressure has to be conjured up, and that, by the way, may well be the ultimate imperative for life, the whole of it. While the lingam's orgasms are succeeding one another, big and small, with all the dramas of arousal, erection, orgasmic (orgasmo-cosmic?), on rush we; the family of man-woman (wo-man) must go on in our survival-metamorphosis task. But our male-dominated species has been erecting lingams for millennia, the space program as the latest manifestation of that obsession. The obsession of all reproductive, bisexual lives. But lingams with no effective (affective) receptacles will turn out to be pathetic. Architecturally, we propose an effective-affective receptacle in the apse-exedra in contrast and in the taming of the pathetic, lonesome skyscraper lingam. The wombs "Mother Nature" has invented throughout evolution are of the opportunistic kind, a sort of pre-neo-Darwinistic, prematerialistic, protocapitalistic maternity. The womb that consciousness is in the process of inventing must enrich reality with a new dimension: the equity-esthetic dimension: Equitable toward life in general and toward human life in particular. Esthetic as a transfiguration of nature's beauty into "loving-grace." We are at last dealing with a purely human invention: "The Love Project of Consciousness." Arcology is the latest modest and fragmentary offering of the Love Project, a postopportunistic (not antiopportunistic) offering. The receptacle-womb offering is some sort of a rescue offering. Who are the victimizers? Who are the victims?
E. The American Indian Connection The American Indian culture has been on hold for about three hundred years, thanks to the genocidal actions of the European "discoverers" and then the quarantine with no end in sight that the survivors were and are boxed into (the never-never land of concrete blocks, corrugated roofs, and pick-up trucks). A creeping "business as usual" will never do for them. Their makeup and their gifts are not resonant in the white mindset. But what could restart the American Indian engine would be a robust graft on the old trunk, a young but radical shoot rooted in their history. This young, healthy shoot would begin to grow from the point when the European calamity descended upon them, when they had the Hogans, the Mesa Verdes, the cliff dwellers, the Casa Blancas ... On such strong trunks they could build new towns and a new culture. The apse-exedra is the archetypical frame within which they could develop their own new communities. In the apse-exedra, there is not so much subordination to nature, evident in the "old trunk" works, but such insubordination is largely compensated for by the intentional dependence on the astronomical- climatic reality that turns necessity into a virtue. Contamination?! Another intrusion of white despotism? Human history is a long, glorious, tragic history of "contaminations"! If contamination can equate with genocide in the most unfortunate of circumstances, in the most fortunate it can be splendid cross-fertilization. Sometimes it takes two to make a baby. Phoenix / Phoenix Urban Village: The Double-Exedra Proposal 1 Phoenix/Phoenix is made of two exedras of about twenty-five to thirty double-story units and public facilities. The exedras are concentric, open to the south, and defining an internal curved space as the main null and public space.
Exedra South Side: Energy Apron The grounds under and adjacent to the energy apron-a vast greenhouse of diverse uses -- are for gardens, promenades, encounter areas, open markets. Some of the energy trapped is conveyed into the exedras-interfaces (winter climate). Those grounds are, on occasion, for: events, concerts, rallies, light-sound shows, festivals, moon walks, ceremonies, fairs, theater, special anniversaries, etc. At the center of the energy apron is to be constructed a one-of-a-kind "Indian Structure," echoing the cliff-dweller towns to which the Double Exedra Proposal is indebted. Exedra North Side: Energy Mantle (a quilt of green canopies) An orchard originating at ground level is draped on the "back" of the two exedras, with one or two fruit trees on each large terrace dotting the structures from extreme east to extreme west (via north). Each terrace produces fruits, vegetables, flowers: x percent for terrace residents, x for Double Exedra markets, and x percent for charitable organizations. The Energy Mantle is operated professionally -- a crew of about ten gardeners and ten assistants can "visit" each terrace once a month and converse with the resident while working on the needs at hand. For showing and harvesting time, the visits might be intensified. In November, December, and January, the trees might need less supervision. Given the different position and orientation of each terrace (nested upon the spherical "back" of the exedras), it is possible to contemplate extended harvest schedules, matched to market demands. The "rewards" from the Energy Mantle:
The synergistic combination and the focality of the activities developing in the Double Exedra, the climate transformations via the apse effect and others -- the Energy Apron (warming up) and the Energy Mantle (cooling down) -- will generate an intense social-cultural milieu sustained by the market and economic enterprises of the town (urban village). This rich atmosphere will also generate national and international participation in the life of the town. Most desirable and "easily" achievable will be a graceful balance between the residential, the commercial, the horticultural, the social, the cultural event-full life of Double Exedra.
The Urban Village will be a true calling card for Phoenix and the State of Arizona with a legitimacy that timeliness makes even more remarkable: how to reconcile Homo faber with the biosphere without demeaning either one. The "universal" applicability of the ideas presented (archetypal) and the formal-functional applicability to diverse geographic conditions will make the Double Exedra a subject for studies that would preferably be developed on-site with all the attendant support facilities. Such outside interest could generate an urban ecology institute, much needed, especially for arid lands applications.
I am interested in producing something the citizens might find pleasure and pride in because they enjoy it and like to be with it; something that is humanly coherent and also environmentally suggestive; that is not a financial burden to its citizens; that does not foster segregation, zoning, and dereliction; and that fits the physical climate of Phoenix. If the proposal were to "send you," you politicos, financiers, developers, and citizens will find the best way, together, to implement it. It will put Phoenix on the international map, it will bring visitors in droves (with their charge cards), it will make Phoenicians slightly more optimistic about their own unhappy city, and last but not least, it will give to the Indian Nations something to "toss around" for their o\vn future.
Notes: If this project were to be realized, it would open at the end of this decade. By then, optimistically speaking, the driving force of civility and equity will imprint more forcefully our doings. The trueness of both will depend on a coherent relation with the assets and limitations of our planet's reality. It is in view of such a triad -- civility, equity, and sustainability -- that Double Exedra is conceived. This, among other things, entails a rejection of conceptual drabness, of pretentiousness, of callousness. Most of all, Double Exedra is a copresence and interaction of a true urban setting with a no-less- true agricultural undertaking. With the climate modifications generated by the morphology of the structures (see garment architecture), productivity will be complemented by festive, colorful, educational, symbolic manifestations.
There would be two main divisions -- the urban division and the "agricultural" division -- and a connective agency bridging the two. 2: Four Critical Elements
Uncommon Features 1. The Equinox International Festivals: The highlights would be a change of garments, with two main projects to be developed by yearly international competitors:
For the spring equinox, the installation of the new shade awnings and the opening of the competition for next spring season's shades. The competition would take into account the technical innovations dictated by the preceding (spring) season.
2. The fall equinox with a similar program, but with the fall-winter transparent awnings substituting the shading ones of the spring-summer. For both occasions, the works of the garments themselves and the related activities-celebrations would be recorded for historical documentation and international public relations. One related event would be the documentation of the equinox events throughout history with rich archaeological and anthropological chronicles. 3. The "Aqueduct" Works: A water intake upstream of the canal can be foreseen that via an "aqueduct" brings the waterworks water at the Double Exedra site to be redischarged downstream in the canal. The water loop into Double Exedra will measure about two kilometers and will cut through landscaping and structures, generating ponds and other waterworks. The Water Wall is a long wall partially washed by cascading water and reflected by the stream parallel to it. The wall penetrates Double Exedra and reaches the north orchards before discharging back into the canal. 4. The Cypress Panoramic Promenade: It originates where the Water Wall begins. It starts as a long ramp reaching the west side of the large exedra at its tenth floor and wraps it along the north side to the east end of it. From the north side, similar promenades climb through the orchards, reaching the upper rings of the large and small exedra in a not-fully-symmetrical pattern. The trees for those promenades will be Arizona Cypress alternating with Italian Cypress. 5. The Billowing Fields: Areas of landscaping are reserved for special cultures:
San Francisco Presidio, May 1993 1 San Francisco suffers from two maladies common to most American cities. For one, "Your backyard is my living room vista" or our back alleys, or our parking lots, or our junkyards ... The other is the lingam-male genitalia display historically grounded in Egypt, China, India ... Italy, the city centers in full erection display. "Vistas" is a singular patrimony of San Francisco. The suburban sprawl does a commendable job in space disposing of the golden-egg-laying goose: all those mind-inspiring vistas. For the other, the popping of guns and semiautomatics are now part of the city's sound track in parallel to the lingam-abstract popping semen toward the mute void of space.
A pathetic display of sterile insemination into space which, as we know, demands for life the opposite intrusion: the intrusion of "eggs and placentas" within which life, screened from lethal space, might flourish. The one speaks of laid-down flat gigantism, with all the flaws of sclerosis, gridlock, incalculable waste, pollution, frustratlon, etc., etc.
The other speaks of misplaced prowess and power, the naked erection ad eternum. From opposite directions, the horizontal and the vertical, they came to wring the life out of the civilizing Urban Effect by making waste of the urban-scape. Both are symptomatic, in fact emblematic, of mindsets whose fruits are the frightful problems of nonsustainability, inequity, and lack of excellence. 2 The Urban Village Proposition This proposal is not about an unobtrusive, camouflaged, "gradual" transformation of a breaking-down cityscape. I am proposing the intentional, coherent conversion of the hostile pseudomasculine, collective-corporate erection common to so many cities and of the all-consuming, one-family, one-house Utopia of the American Dream (on its way to becoming culprit number one in the demise of the biosphere) -- of converting them into the feminine, nurturing cityscape; enclosures of spaces, modifiers of climate for people and their institutions: living, learning, working, producing, marketing, socializing, civilizing ...
Remaining with the biological metaphor, try to imagine the difference between the hermetic clenched fists of the skyscrapers (many of them) and the two hands, one cuddling the other offering -- offering the urban richness, a precious instrument for oneself and for others. Condom (the curtain wall) or not, the lingam-clenched fist is naked and victim of the climate vagaries, therefore, the relentless pumping into it of energy via air-conditioning. Since the sky, via the sun, delivers light and heat but also the cold radiation of deep space, the two hands rotate differently: one to become cradlelike, the other shieldlike. Or, more directly, the palms of both take positions and forms that respond coherently to the climate cycles (which are also defming a north-south plane of symmetry). This positioning is strongly influenced by the daily cycle of the sun. Moving from biology to architecture, the "structure" is a multiblade exedra open to the south.
The Urban Village is then the architectural translation of the coming together of the heterogeneous dimensions of climate, topography, environmental coherence, and the specifically human dimension -- performance of economy, market, production in the function of living, learning, working, socializing, civilizing. 3 The Presidio Urban Village The Presidio is an island privileged in space-time, in climate, sea, and history. It is part of the San Francisco magic and, providentially, relatively independent from the speculation vise. It is a place for the millennium. I propose an urban village for six to ten thousand residents and guests. Mindful of the many facets of the environmental crisis, the structure assumes a climate-oriented insertion on the site and a climate-sensitive display of its structure. The three concentric exedras form a sequence of structures and the spaces they envelop. Those spaces have a modified climate but they are not sealed off from the outside. Those spaces are essentially the societal, interactive locus for residents and guests and are provided with the commercial, hosting, cultural, informative, celebrative functions that make the Urban Village (give it its Urban Effect). The upper levels are residential, the intermediate levels are for guests, the lower and ground levels for the mentioned Urban Effect. 6: Arcosanti: "A Dream Made Reality"? JULY 29, 1992, ASOCRETO, COLOMBIA
Contrary to the general notion that I am a dreamer, I say in full confidence that I am a realist, realistic about a reality that is not the one fantasized by the do-gooders of the "New Age," steered by Deep Ecologists and Eco-theologians, the "Mother Nature" lovers. "I love nature," they say: true in some instances. "Nature loves me," they say: false in all circumstances. Love is a strictly human invention, a truly magnificent invention. Under the spell of such an invention the human species is engaged in the Love Project. But nature minus consciousness is a protoloving domain. It is an opportunistic realm (the living reality). If I were a dreamer, I would have to dream in the context of an unloving nature. Not a speck of benevolence in it.
I rather strive to understand Stepmother Nature and find a coherent path that spells congruence (as much as it is possible) with a nature that generated us in full indifference to our humanness. I deem it necessary to be unequivocal about the nature of my relationship with reality because it is a relationship that has the importance of a biological imprint: like the ducklings following the very first moving thing they come in contact with. My relationship with nature is one of awe, not one of submission or resignation, nor one that expects love in return. As I said above, I do not see any sign of love in reality, just a probabilistic (mineral), opportunistic (organic) duet of prodigious splendor and frightful violence.
The emergence of consciousness from reality is a true emergence -- not a concession, a gift, a mandate, a predestination, a loving pneuma that reality delivers to consciousness. Reality couldn't care less (it has no care "in the world"). Love is a one-way street. It goes from consciousness toward nature with no reciprocity: from nature to consciousness. Proto conscious nature is constitutionally unloving. Nature inclusive of consciousness is nature "surprised" but not moved by the love process generating in "her." By the way, living nature (the food chain) goes about its opportunistic business not unlike the "unadulterated capitalist" goes about its own (social Darwinism). It is the good fortune of Homo sapiens not to produce, ever, any unadulterated capitalist. So what is Arcosanti? It is a modest attempt at developing a habitat that would be sufficiently persuasive for people to understand and endorse "frugality" not as a necessary evil but as a necessity fully capable of becoming a virtue. A necessity because the planet is "suffering" from the profligate consumption-unlimited pursuit of "happiness." A virtue because living reality, us in it, is the fruit of eons-long stumbling around that will eventually generate those agencies that would in turn bring about consciousness (via frugality). To make it very, very short: Can anyone conceive of any phenomenon even dimly paralleling the immense frugality of a performing human brain?
Without the coming together of elementary particles in ways immensely informative, cooperative, interactive, pedagogical, without such an implosion of space-time-mass-energy, no brain is conceivable (carbon or silicon based). That our psyche (followed by deeds) has made a 180- degree turnabout and embraced the profligate par excellence, suburbia, is a sign of the embryonic phase of development we are in. Come to think of it, materialism is compounded with the same basic error that magic and animism are awash in: the notion of getting something we like, and for real, from that which is not that which we think it to be, as a thousand mediocre instrumental ensembles blasting away trying to get to the stellar level of a piano prelude by Debussy. It is ironic that we, the transcendental agency par excellence, must be admonished by protohuman life that coherence -- that is, realism -- is at the end of a different tunnel, the tunnel instrumentalized on how to ephemeralize matter into Mind!
So it is the task of Arcosanti to remind ourselves, in a crude manner, that nothing is more apt to salvage our bodies and our souls -- do it "radiantly" in one with returning to nature a degree of health and exuberance -- than the restoration of those values, leanness, excellence, which are also the catalysts in the process of matter becoming conscious (Mind). Let's remember that lean cultures -- civilizations -- are the only rite of passage from environmental devastation and cultural squalor (see suburbia) to environmental sanity and cultural radiance.
As for being practical, rule number one is the practice of realism. Under such a self-evident rule the USA, and to a lesser degree the rest of the technocratic societies, has chosen to embark on a fateful binge of impracticality, that is, antirealism. The time has come to reverse the trend if we want to move from fate, an animistic agency by the way, into a possible self-generating destiny, an evolutionary notion by the way. The fate of life is annihilation courtesy of "Mother" Nature (on this planet, the annihilation by the sun, "Our Father.") She "giveth and taketh away." The destiny of consciousness could be the avoidance of such a nemesis by the hand of transcendence (via evolution). Only Mind can ever dream of such an exploit: to make reality Mindful!
To stay with (return to) nature, as the New Age proposes, with or without all the flourishes of the lunatic fringes, is to remain "animal." Animism is the "discipline" of such Mind-betraying agitation. To animate matter is a far different task: it is the task of Mind. The animistic dream bound to a misread reality is idle if not pernicious.
I count in not having part in it. My intentions have been to envision a fragment of a possible reality coherently acting within such reality -- the one we come from, partake in, and help to generate (or destroy). Given the awesome nature of such reality, the task can be truly exhilarating. I would hope that a pale reflection of such "fire" might be noticed in my work. 7: Survival in a Hostile Environment Statement for American Institute of Architects, Desert Forum OCTOBER 6, 1993 Being among the few that do not believe in a loving creator or a Mother Nature, I resonate, perhaps erroneously, with the theme of the conference. I expand the hostile mode from the desert to the cosmos, inclusive of the whole biosphere. INDIFFERENT is a better term than HOSTILE. I also definitely believe that survival is necessary but not sufficient. Survival without the grace of an ongoing metamorphosis is a grim prospect. The business as usual of this country is hedonism, that is, consumption-gratification-show biz unlimited. This might well be engendered by the grim connotations of "survival" and the void of the psyche it causes. My counter-"survival grimness" model in this presentation is the development of lean, coherent, logistically efficient urban "rivers," whose intensive urban effect would reinvigorate the culture of the North American continent while performing at the sanme time an overdue rehabilitation of the environment. The intrinsic frugality of a lean and rich urban habitat is the ONLY hope we have for a condition where necessity is foiled to sufficiency.
|
