Week 12 Questions: Movement

Rudolph Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception. Ch. 8-Movement

1. “At any particular moment we may not know what will come next, but we must not dismiss from our consciousness what we have heard or seen before.” Pg. 374
How does this relate to architecture? Mental maps? Viewing details of buildings?

2. “The activity of a climbing plant does not appear merely as a displacement in space. We see the vine searching around, fumbling, reaching, and finally taking hold of a suitable support with exactly the kind of motion indicative of anxiety, desire, and happy fulfillment.” Pg. 385
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xMz2SnSWS4
How can we use this notion of time-lapsing to our advantage as designers, to observe otherwise static tendencies and track their nature in time and space? How can we use this knowledge to understand human behavior dynamically in process, using this as a tool to understanding motivational efforts of the people who inhabit?

3. “When we watch a man exploring a cave, his progress is experienced as a happening in space. New aspects of the cave reveal themselves I succession. Such an event, in which a physical setting provides the framework, is not really different in principle from others in which no such framework exists.” Pg. 374
How can we more readily define this succession, thus defining the mental framework for the spaces we design? Just as the dancer utilizes the entire performance to inherit a sense of emotion, how can we achieve this through spatial discovery?

4. Pg. ¬407 “The dynamic nature of kinesthetic experience is the key to the surprising correspondence between what the dancer creates by his muscular sensations and the image of ¬¬¬¬¬his body seen by the audience.”
Can this relate to the way we create architecture? We are the dancer, the dance is our architecture we create, and the audience is the user?
There are different perspectives from the dancer and the audience. Is there a way we can come to a similar conclusion of our designs? Or is that an illusion? Do we want that to happen?

Stan Allen- Notations + Diagrams

1. Crossing the line between Notation and Diagramming. First, what are they and what are the differences between them? What are some examples of each? Where does architecture fall? How does it straddle the line of notation and diagramming?

2. What is diagram architecture? “It is an architecture that takes pleasure in the immediacy and directness of procedures that often short-circuit conventional design processes.” Is this an effective way to design?

3. What is lost, if anything, when using diagram architecture? “a diagram architecture is part of a new sensibility characterized by a lack of interest in critique or the production of meaning, preferring instead immediacy, simple forms, direct accommodation of program, and the pleasures of the literal.” Pg. 53 how does this compare to the other forms of design?

4. Pg. 51 “The diagram may be the channel through which any communication with architecture’s outside must travel, but the flow of information along these channels will never be smooth. The resistance of each medium needs to be taken into account.”
Graphically, how can we begin to use diagrams as a transfer of information from other fields to incorporate their knowledge into the wider perspective of architecture, through a language that we as designers are used to?
-“Architects should work with other cultural fields, poets, musicians, sculptors.”
Juhani Pallasmaa

5. Pg. 60 “To propose a new attentiveness to notation in architectural representation is not to propose another paradigm shift…..but rather a proposal to enlarge the catalog of techniques available to the architect working in the city.” “New maps and diagrams might begin to suggest new ways of working with the complex dynamics of the contemporary city.”
How can we begin to open the catalog of techniques available to the architect, and would the world of architecture be subject to change to a new world of mediation and expressive technique? Would it be beneficial for the culture in its use [diagramming and graphical techniques]? Would they be used primarily for the designer or could the client read into them more clearly as well?

6. According to the reading, the five working definitions of notation are under the categories: anticipation, invisible, time, collective, and digital diagrams. (Pg 65-66) did these definitions help clarify the rest of the reading?