Week 15: LTL - SNAFU

1.    The original meaning of snafu is “a condition of disorder created by an excess of conflicting Army rules and regulations.” Now that the translation has been lost in “contemporary usage and the tension is held in the original phrase between two seemingly incompatible conditions occurring simultaneously: the normal and the fouled-up.” “If something is normal, everyday, and ordered then how can it also be disordered and jumbled?”

2.    “Conventions of architecture are the aspects of the discipline that are taken for granted through daily repetition and habit. While conventions are meant to aid the practice of architecture, architectural conventions often insure that tenuous social constructions remain unexamined.” Should there be a reexamination of the rules in hopes to release the normality, therefore opening exploration?

3.    In the logic section, LTL states, “while the subject changes, the tactics of investigation remain consistent. Each project begins with a close inspection of an existing situation, triggering a speculative “What if…” question that postulates an alternative derived from the logic of the given object of study.” Are they saying that nothing is original anymore? The only way to be different is to argue on a specific part of an idea? Does this just show that everyone has a variation in logic? 

4.    LTL stated multiple examples about nonconformity, what ones stood out the most to you? What did they question and what was the outcome?

5.    Tactics are the modes of creative opportunity that operate within the gaps and slips of conventional thought and the patterns of everyday life. In what way(s) do you think LTL uses tactics in this writing, in its practice, and/or representation style. Are there specific tactics that you personally use?

Week 15: Lebbeus Woods

1. “It is natural to want to replace something important lost to the destruction of war. Ideologies count on this desire among people, and thus make restoration their first principle of reconstruction. Is the restoration/recession part of a new typology and exploration or is it firmly to recapture something irretrievably lost?

2.  The “first city of the 21^th century, Sarajevo, was a place of symbolized reason. What exposed the city with a serious challenge during the outbreak of war? Was there a solution?

3. Woods’ gives examples of cities that experience war, destruction, and separation. Do you think that he is stating that we need war in order to create architecture and knowledge? Is it a way to “generate the energy for reconstruction?”

4. Woods’ argument is, “what happens when the normative is disrupted, as in war (Sarajevo), economic strangulation (Havana), or earthquake (San Francisco), or as a result of the equally radical but largely hidden transformations created by rapid political, social, or technological change? And what if this disruption reveals the normative as a comforting illusion, nothing more than a ritual of conventions repeated mantra like in order to shield people from a horrible truth: that life is without universal or even a common reading?” What commonalities do you see with LTL’s “snafu” ideology?

5. In the last section called “Twenty Tactics of a New Practice” there are 21 suggestions. Were there any that stood out to you and why?

1)

agrest states that ____________ is the most important operation that articulates theory and practice

2)

Architecture is produced in three different registers through three different "texts" 

Drawing 
Writing 
Buildings

Which of these can contain multiple referents?  
Which one of these are compared most closely to dreams?    

3)

Lissitzky claims, "__________has extended the apex of the finite visual cone of perspective into infinity. . . . It has broken through the blue lampshade of the heavens." 

"As Allen observes, In Lissitzky's irrational space, viewpoint and vanishing point are both located at infinity. The infinite extension in depth coincides with the suspension of the subject's privileges of self-location." 

-Agrest quotes Allen quoting El Lissitzy. 

What drawing method is he referring to? 
Do you agree that this drawing method provides "divine perception" of the subject?  

4)

"Architecture has always related to other practices: painting, scenography, and theater in the Renaissance; photography and film, in the modernist era." 

"Other systems that are not visual, such as music and literature, are transposed into architectural form through the different mechanisms at play in the process of representation in a purely symbolic manner."

What practices specific to the information era are related to architecture?  

5)

"What representation represents is another representation in a chain of signifiers that circulate from one medium to another all the while believing, or letting us believe, that there is a direct referent" 

"In Alberti's definition of beauty for example, a chain of signifiers that goes from nature to the human body, to man's body to proportion, and then to geometry allows for a particular concept of beauty to be transposed to architecture"  

What are examples of a representation where the referent Is not a representation of something else?  

6)

While the viewing subject is producing the act of framing, the framed "other" is looking back, thus establishing the gaze as different from the eye.  

"In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it; that is what we call the gaze"

"While the eye is that of the perceiving subject (the architect), the gaze is that of architecture looking back at every stage of the design process: approving, censoring, or repressing the system of rules to be thus followed, avoided, or subverted. "The eye and the gaze-this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested" 

Is this stating that the "gaze" is like the parti of a project? 
What relations does the "gaze" have to the site of a project?  
What are some examples of the gaze of a project?  

7)

"Given the nature and the characteristics of the contemporary city, and urban culture, the mode of its representation needs to be re-thought"

"The city now questions the dominance of the visual. Other senses beyond the limits of the visual and the spatial -- become relevant as part of representation. Speed, a dimension inseparable now from space-time, is perceived with the entire body and in particular through the "vestibular," a sixth sense that, named after the inner ear, accounts for balance, motion sickness, dizziness. and vertigo" 

What other "senses" are applicable and could be somehow represented within architecture? 


8)

"The computer, cybernetics in general, and television have created a dystopian and disembodied urban culture"

"Allen says, "The same system that lays out the grid of the surface in the design process can in turn drive the machine that cuts those elements. Design and fabrication are linked together. . ." 

This contradicts the previous statement....  

The moment of separation between the field of construction and that of drawing (as a tool) that occurs during the Renaissance is crucial. This separation allowed abstract thought to guide the process of design as separate from the process of construction" 

Do these programs limit our ability to allow abstract thought to drive a project?  

9)

in the reading it is discussed how The plan in the Carpenter Center refers to movement  

"The plan that generates the project is incorporating a hidden representation of a different kind, the body of a woman. The thighs of Le Corbusier's many drawings of women are clearly there and it is between them that the ramp penetrates the building. " 

Do you think Le Corbusier utilized sexual penetration as a referent during the contemplation of the carpentry center plan or was this an external or post realization?