over the last couple of weeks urbophilia@Substack was pulsing in some real, and in some truly surreal places
I repeat (as, by now, you know well – urbophilia is repetitive) - term writing here is only a metaphor; it stands for doing territorialism, urbanism, planning, design, intervening in space, in diverse ways; we have talked about spatial, visual eloquence; about eloquence of the text; eloquent can be a sketch, or photos taken (sometimes taken apart) with a point, to make a point (that words, perhaps, can not make)
they all are about communicating … meaning, finding, capturing, hijacking it +++ wanting it, inventing it ...)
orihon has show us how the text can acquire eminently spatial qualities, how the medium and message interact, how rhythmicity, tactility, participation, involvement ... provoke, define, redefine and transmit meaning
in orihon, a dead-serious Mnemosyne plays
(»»» for a bit more on orihon, see the Post Scriptum, below)
architecture (understood in an integrative, non-exclusive sense) rests upon memory
in order to (be) create(d), architecture digs into and it builds upon collective and individual remembrance
today, paradoxically yet logically, Artificial Intelligence [... why on Earth do we (accept to) capitalise the latest fascination of the tech?! ...], our dear AI is founded upon, it entirely is about collecting data, about creating and (ab)using super-human memory, it is about the machine that will (re)collect (the past), all in the name of (conquering, reframing, redefining) our future; that points towards dramatic, total oblivion of the humankind sanitised by the Spectacle (oh, how prophetic Guy Debord was in choosing that name for the shallowness of power ruling us today!)
where Mnemosyne is (needed), cold Lethe rules
the capitalised Capital (with “the”, as in Das Kapital) wants us to believe that what is the latest (in tech, in making money) inevitably has to replace all that has been (known, lived; that should, at best, be stored on/in the Cloud)
Lethe creates voids; voids can be(come) pregnant, pregnant with meaning
in what I am trying to develop here, we need to speak about textuality of voids
precisely as in architecture, where lives do not unfold in solids, but in voids - where our memories get layered
the lines in common, self-conscious books are separated by voids; these voids facilitate easy reading; (with you) I want to explore possibilities of “reading” which is not (meant to be) easy; various readings between the “lines” in/of the texts, in/of (architectural) texts, urban text(ure)s; variously (un)intended
in such (all but) “empty” lines (perhaps akin to the ways in which thought seem to dwell in the voids of zen), the writer (“architect”) injects and the reader (“dweller”, “citizen”) finds spaces for/of personal experience, intuition, imagination, inspiration – and further texts(ures)
we will continue with what I have attempted to explain in the ON the road post; in faces+places and walks+talks folders you will find texts and “texts”, which have emerged on the road, at the margins of an international Symbiosis workshop, lead by Davisi Boontharm and conducted at Politecnico di Milano in Lecco, a town at Lago di Como (3-14 June 2024); in some situations which halt language, which overwhelm words
see »»» SYMBIOSIS posts I-VII … and write yourself into the voids you find there
(those posts were not sent to you my e-mail, as I do not want urbophilia to make your inbox overflow; but I do love to receive feedback; as, most recently, was an inspiring exchange with Maggie; thanks; a move from monologue to dialogue helps !)
+ do not read urbophilia in e-mails only; they look better at urbophilia.subctack.com
P.S.
>>> again ... from On subjectivities in investigation of the urban (Radović et al., 2017) 002 ON SENSIBILITY)
... As part of “Measuring the non-Measurable” – Mn’M research project, in 2017 the co+labo radović team has conducted a number of fast, intense research “drift” experiments, among the most memorable remain dérive Asia sessions in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore.
... In my call to dérive, I asked all team members to, in a suitably non-hierarchical fashion, take their academic habitus off, and to bring their own sensibilities, inspirations and values in. Mn’M fieldworks in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore were designed to let go, to drift in spatial, experiential and intellectual sense. Our focus was on phenomena which seem to be of critical importance for definition of particular urban qualities which we feel, but find difficult to pin down. Discussions between the local and visiting team members were of critical definition in our attempts at exhausting the discovered places and practices (Perec, 2010).
… That demanded an unusual formatting of the resulting book. My introductory essay (quoted in some of the previous ON the Work urbophilia posts), and Hong Kong and Singapore segments were produced in a standard, codex book format. But, in order to communicate some of the subtlest of our findings in Bangkok, that segment of the book had to be an orihon. What felt, and what is the essence of that city was – water. The defining aquatic character (Jumsai, S., 1988) of traditional Thai settlements, is still preserved along the mighty “mother river” Chao Praya and especially along the once ubiquitous khlongs, still very present canals, demanded that the pages representing that city “flow”. Such visualisation at least hints at defining qualities of life and of the morphology of this city.
(illustrations: co+labo team leaders Darko Radović, Davisi Boontharm; research assistants Milica Muminović, Ilze Paklone, Tamao Hashimoto and Rafael Balboa; graphical designer Boris Kuk + Kyushu Pistols)