walls
I’ve always found idiomatic expressions fascinating for their cultural unveiling, so I have written down a few expressions in relation to walls as a starting point. Go over the wall: escape. Push to the wall: forced in desperate circumstances. Hit the wall: reached one’s maximum. Off the wall: eccentric. Up against the wall: in a tight situation. Walls clearly have a very strong presence as a point of demarcation, privacy, exclusion, support and security.
Definition is valuable as a psychological tool to organize and understand the world, but we have to be careful not to create walls that are too thick, because it is diversity that attracts, propels and inspires us. Innovation emerges at walls where people open the window or crack the door. I am interested in walls that breathe. Nature is a self-organizing system that we need to start simulating in our architecture.
In thinking about structural elements and the organization of populations it reminds me of the work of Ron Eglash on the presence of fractals in Africa. The layout of their villages follow robust self-organizing algorithms that map social scaling onto geometric scaling. To see recursion used intentionally on such an integral level of community organization is really astounding to me.
No Comments Yet