Monday, September 28, 2009

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  1. RjCSeptember 28, 2009 at 10:46 PM

    This sounds like a good start. Reminds me of my thesis from too many years ago. Excerpt follows:


    Growth of the Sign

    Times Square connects all aspects of communication in one space - the metaphoric "Cross Roads of the World". Here the act of communicating goes far beyond the written or spoken world. The square with its publishing houses, theaters and then cinemas attracted many to a stage whose curtain of sign/signboard/billboards entertained, informed, and influenced the evolution of culture. The transformation of this space over time has created one of the most recognizable symbols for societal exchange in the world. Times Square represents communication as a by part of culture, and presently promotes the possibility for expanded global communication manifest within the urban fabric. It is a place "where the video screen becomes both window and doorway."

    Before there were buildings in Times Square there were signs and these signs' messages have
    GROWN


    The signlsignboardlbillboard advertising is a language of images. It is the action of visually calling something to the attention of the public, especially by paid announcements.


    "If the language of images, which acknowledges no boundaries, needed translation, if it possessed the complexity and potential flexibility to give things a name - a characteristics of natural languages - the problem of intemationaiization and globialization would be solved. However, as we all know, images are read according to blocks of meaning and are recognized by means of analogical mechanisms; and these prerogatives lay down the objective limitations of visual communications and its instrumental exploitation in the production of (generalized) thought."

    Therefore, images that are able to be "decoded" (reread) by people in all industrialized geographical areas are those images that are anti-analogical interpretive. The widespread possibility of anti-analogical interpretation will gradually produce a kind of cultural homologation on both an international and global level. "The process of homologation has received considerable impetus from the technological images. Technological images have become the real social experimenters on the basis of this new common language. The possibility for
    simultaneous broadcast as a means of visual communication is only one of the outcomes, (which has yet to be fully utilized interactively in Times Square or anywhere around the world). Visual information technology has been affected by means of what we could term an individual rapport between source and receiver." (allowing for a private event to become more public and part of the urban fabric)

    According to the ideas of globalization or internationalization to whom you are advertising to, from where you the advertiser is coming from, is not top priority. Even what you are advertising is generalized to allow for this process of cultural homologation. The idea of simultaneity affords this. It gives the advertiser a home base as an international connector.

    One of the first examples toward a kind of cultural homologation occurred in Times Square when Sony located their jumbotron on the Times Tower. It allowed for the possibility of simultaneous broadcasting on an international and global level. The jumbotron is an inconspicuous advertisement for Sony. It presently acts as a displayer of many different kinds of live and prerecorded information, from political and social issues that transcend racial differences, native cultural issues, political ideologies, to traffic, weather reports, and pure entertainment events. It also calls to the public attention the desirable quality of Sony's capabilities in their industry of electronics so as to arouse a desire not only to buy its products but to also participate in its investments. Sony's jumbotron almost advertises without advertising.

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  2. RjCSeptember 28, 2009 at 10:46 PM

    Space of Flows - Organization vs. Information

    "No architect has ever designed a bank, or a university, for that matter. They have designed only the physical shell that houses them. Banks and universities have an informational structure and content more marvelous by far than any architect can depict or has yet needed to."

    The informational structure Michael Benedikt speaks of is a space of information. This new spatial paradigm for architecture will be made from a “Space of Flows”. The spatial patterns determined by informational processing activity will result in spaces characterized as a network whereby planning will be determined by information flows. Interaction between spaces will be made in response to these flows of information rather than by organizational schemes. Reconfiguration and modification will be the dominant strategies for the planning of space. The process is now interactive and the flows multidirectional.

    In this informational mode of planning and development a flexible, pervasive, integrated and reflexive spatial order rather than additive evolution will prevail. Informational systems transform the city into scaffold where “Places” become “Flows”. Manuel Castells author of The Informational City and The Rise of the Network Society writes of how information processes will reorganize space and time in the network society. "The new spatial order is a "space of flows" quite different from the "space of places" to which we have been accustomed. People still cluster in specific locales, but these clusterings take their shape from their involvement in global networks. Consider the City of London. The City has been in roughly the same area for many years. It would seem there is a simple continuity from the 19th century to the present day. For Castells, however, this is not so. The changing physical structure of the City over recent years, with its dazzling variety of unorthodox architectural creations, is now dominated by its position in global electronic money markets. London, New York and Tokyo form a financial trading network, carrying on an endless series of transactions. Physical proximity and highly concentrated transactions remain important and even acquire increasing significance - but they have their origin in globalized information flows. They are no longer "places", where "place" is defined as a locale, the form and meaning of which are contained within its boundaries."

    As the city is a node of the global network, gathering places of the city are nodes of the network. Within these nodes are "parcels or packets" of informational spaces. Historically the City Square was a broadcast mechanism where information flows spread between people. Today these same spaces have become filled with manipulative mechanisms as discussed in Growth of the Sign, which are not broadcast mechanisms but advertising mechanisms. These mechanisms resolve a cultural homologation but not an informational one. For example in Times Square the parcels of information, i.e. the sign/signboard/billboard, are informational but the spaces between are not. To make the square informational is to amend the space between, that space which may be considered as the "flow". To control this "flow" is to interpret the space as a compression of signs.

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  3. RjCSeptember 28, 2009 at 10:49 PM

    Proximity, Context and Place

    The typology of space one occupies in the Digital Age is changing. This change may seem threatening to the sensory feel of architectural space, however, before we hastily posit this as a threat, it is important to remember that changes in technology, which initially dismissed the significance of proximity, context and place, also ushered in the transformations brought about by modern times. These changes were particular events. For example, it was the mass production of the Model 'T', not the invention of the automobile, which altered society, cities and culture. The car was now afforded by "all" and the sweeping change this production model brought to the masses was not truly understood for many years. Technological invention in combination with the production model brought about marked change as well. For example the transistor resulted in television becoming ubiquitous, which in turn transformed culture into commodity. These and many other transformations at the turn of the 20th century, however, pale in comparison to the global transformations of today. Now its America Online, the Model 'T' of the Internet, and the commodification of information, which has altered society, cities and culture. This impending change has been occurring much more rapidly not allowing.

    Architects during the time of the Model 'T' examined changes being brought by technology, in particular structural engineering. The pure geometry of early modernism was a response to the "machine age" ethos. These changes also fundamentally affected culture. It was enlightenment through technology.

    However, at the same time, changes in culture tend to form a veil of nostalgia that presides over the elitist circle. When this regretful fear of change set forth finally trickles down to the bourgeoisie and through society a rupture ensues. We saw this happen during the advent of the Industrial revolution in 1820, then in 1917, then again in 1939 and finally in 1989 when the Berlin wall collapsed. This final time however, the collapse was marked by information not fear.

    In particular when applied to sensuous architectural space, the contradiction between technical advance and the nostalgic view, as it has in the past, creates anxiety for architects. "Can anyone doubt that our ability to produce more pervasive virtual space will threaten spaces of palpability and touch, the materiality, the physicality of building?" . We should look to the past only to find that momentous change when seen as guiding not as impeding can only aid us in creation not stifle it.

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