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[full text pdf link]

The intro to Collage City waivers between two quotes on nature and the mind, science and poetics, ideals and community, science and people, order and disorder, and the simple and the complex. 

Just another day in the life of an architect and urban planner.

Keep calm and 'bricolage'.

"It is suggested that a collage approach, an approach in which objects are conscripted or seduced from out of their context, is - at the present day - the only way of dealing with the ultimate problems of, either or both, utopia and tradition; and the provenance of the architectural  objects introduced into the social collage need not be a great consequence." [p. 144 from Collage City]

[cover art by Michael Whelan for a later edition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, compare with Ian Miller's illustrations from initial editions]

With each human wave of immigration to Mars in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the Martians dealt most effectively with the humans by providing an environment that was their past re-created in it's most ideal conception based on key memories from earth. 

How did the Martian's know what the humans wanted - telepathy.

How did the human's know the existence they discovered on Mars was what they desired and needed-   ideal nostalgia.  

Even the overly cautious Captain John Black in the third expedition to Mars [April 2000]ended up accepting the obvious hallucinations as reality just so that he could re-live a fonder existence in the past and when he became suspicious of their origins and wanted to escape  he was killed (or was he?) - the Martians have telepathy - a lie is easily detected.

The stuff that's in your head needs to get out occasionally, so you "create".  The few renderings shown here by this blogger may appear original or at least "creatively" derivative, but ultimately nothing more than expressions of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicle imagery merging with the cover of a Judas Priest album - Point of Entry. (the Japanese and North America Cover), which was stuck in the bloggers head for a few months now.

Wikipedia will tell you that Columbia Record's John Berg created the cover shown above.  It is printer paper as a highway line.  A single released from that album is Heading Out on the Highway....wait was the internet super information highway invented by Al Gore around in 1981?  Maybe John Berg had just finished a copy of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave published in 1980.  Maybe this is the most prophetic album cover ever?

Is it possible that all of social existence is a material to theoretical dialectical process visualized and memorialized in collage format?*

Are there any new sounds in music? Any new looks in fashion? Is anything really original? 

Maybe the following is Bjarke Ingel's secret: he just presents the current developing social collages on architecture, simplifies them, and expresses what we all already know,  or should know.  But, now that BIG presents it in a simplified diagram it appears genius - if not obvious!  Perhaps BIG is just that much more "creative" than the rest of us.

How much data in an Ionic column?









* If you read Collage City intro, then reference the "dialectical" process to its historical  source - Hegel, this question is somewhat of an oxymoron.  The answer to structure is deconstruction...

[All renderings not labeled - by blogger,  titled "the shit that was in his head for months, took a few hours to express it in the computer today"]