Another good paper on the topic is Mark Wigley's 'On Site', which is in an old issue of Lotus. I think Tschumi's right. We validate our ideologies by ascribing them as conditions of the site.
context is a multiplicity of factors that cannot be simply reduced for design reasons....therefore you need to edit those factors for use....therefore meaning that by editing you ideologically place higher value on some aspects more than others....denari also gets into this in a lot of his writing. check out his interrupted projections book from his gallery ma installation.
So context in architecture then means not acknowledging some aspects of the reality of context for the preservation of ones point of view or architectural concept. Or as Tschumi would say, context as ideology is necessary for the preservation of architecture (in the Hegelian sense of architecture as artisitic supplement to building) because 'if architecture is to succeed it must deny what society (reality) expects of it.'
domestic...interesting stance...although i think what you said ideologically reinforces a post-modernist sensibility in relation to architecture. you could also state that no person can fully accomodate all realities of a given context and fulfill them. there is inherently a selection process that involves creating a hypothesis and testing it. i mean this is really the main reason we haven't been able to create artificial intelligence yet or completely predict weather patterns. they are based on an inherently complex inter-relationship of variables that is constantly mutating. some call it chaos.
the context is only real in the meaning that we give to it. and by denying certain (con) texts while realizing others we give it the meaning that we want to give it. just the denial of those (con)texts provide meaning.
Some context is factual - wind direction, slope, sunlight hours, size of the site. A lot more is interpretive: history, significance of adjacent structures, future specualtion.
As vado said - I'm SURE this is what he said - what one chooses to react to and label as "context" is ideological. futureboy also said this. I'm mostly just chiming in to laugh at the eyebrow antics.
But which things count as factual, LB? There are an awful lot of parameters that can be measured from a site. The fact that we commonly privilege sun hours, prevailing wind and size of site as 'primary' characteristics of the site is an expression of an architectural ideology. (Quite a reasonable one, of course, but who said ideologies were necessarily unreasonable?)
context is more of a text than site condition... is meant to be read and re-written.
the worst are some who confuse the two especially when i see architects saying due to the multiple "vectors" surround the site and therefore they have deformed shape to respond those "imaginery force"... and when i see those site pics, is more like a deserted town as to compare with one of those asia city.
agfa, I'm not saying that the decision to use "factual" site conditions is any more or less ideological than is using "socio-historical" site conditions as context, as is using both or neither.
i don't think anyone yet has disagreed that 'context is ideological'. it would be kind of silly to question it.
a key thing to realize, though, is that until tschumi (or someone like him before) made the observation that context is ideological, a lot of people probably treated context as a given and thought they were being 'objective' in their reading of a site's conditions. a burden of our mature postmodern condition is that we can(should?) no longer simply record what we see but we begin to realize what influences from our own experience are bearing on our recognition and appreciation of a place's characteristics. this wasn't always the case.
blame it on descartes and his era. before we began to quantitatively measure and record the facts of a place in order to define it, people were more likely to assess a place based on its particular character and essences, felt as a sort of pressure acting on the location (a liberal paraphrase of aristotle). it's taken us a while to get back to that kind of thinking, but so much has happened in between that we've become hyper-aware/self-conscious about how we think about what our senses tell us. and that's a good thing.
I think we are finally waking up to the fact that reality itself is subjective. Humans inherently precieve reality in an ideological fashion placing our subjective biases on objective reality. Everyone truly lives in their own little world, imho. Take relativity for example, if reality is realative to the observer, and not absolute as previously thought it is possible for two people to disagree on something as fundamental as what time it is and both of them can be right. If something as fundamental as time can be subject to debate than that i think would pretty much make everything open to individual, ideological interpretation.
site conditions are con(text)ual as well. every site has a geological history that can be extrapolated upon.
reality is real to the observer and conversely the observer is observed by other observers who subjectively impose their reality upon the observed, which therefore, alters the reality of the former obverser who now has been observed. and vicey versey.
I haven't stated it but my reason for asking this question has to do with morality.
It isn't my postmodern stance but Tschumi's that i'm trying to understand because i never connected context to ideology. When i think of context and how people use the word i think of reality. When we mention bringing something into context we mean bringing something into reality. We are trying to avoid being ideologically biased by bringing something into context/reality by considering all the facts as is case in politics all the time where politicians accuse one another of letting policitical ideology get in the way of the facts i.e. Al Gore's book Assult on Reason (assult on Bush). But in light of this discussion this would mean not an absence of ideology but an ideology that emphasizes a cartesian logic.
Ideology always hides something in order to preserve itself, which means some facts are choosen to the exclusion of others all the time. In attempting to be objective, using cartesian logic you could be ignoring some aspects of reality - uncertainty. But what all this means is that in choosing certain facts of reality over others, to what consequence, to what detriment to those ignored facts? There are moral considerations to make when choosing vs deferring to context/reality where morality is automatically given by default of the fact one thinks they are acknowledging all facts.
My point is that critics of theoretical architecture tend to imply that ignoring context is immoral - by not considering site, client, production process, program etc.. you are being ignorant, our understanding of context then becomes moral because we think to acknowledge context is to acknowledge all facts of reality, which as we have discussed here and stated by Tschumi, not possible, and therefore this totalizing notion of context as moral is null and void.
i find it intersting that you equate context with reality. typically i view the term context (with theoretical arguments, scientific research, and political discourse) as putting something into relatiionship with other explored knowledge with characteristics that position the studied argument. so in a way, it might be putting it into reality, but a contrived reality. and hence, that's why inherently morality is also ideological.
this all makes me think of a story that i believe borges wrote about the orator that argued with socrates and lost the argument....anyway when i find the name of the short story i'll post it. the thing about the story is that he looks at the logical argument made by the alternate thinker and finds the arguments to be just as valid as socrates...but socrates was determined the victor by history. so what is truth? truth is written into history by the victors.....those that lose are lost in the space outside of "truth"
'i find it intersting that you equate context with reality.'
Some of the philosophers i read do that - they see context as being reality - context as a big picture thing, a total, a whole, context v. fragment, although i do know context can also mean a fragment.
But by defintion of the context as total - ideology would be a fragmentation of the whole and so according to these thinkers not such a good thing but the point here is see that there is no avoiding this fragmentation - context is ideological, it is fragment, not a whole.
domestic, why do you think context is about a totalising view? Don't we commonly use context to mean local conditions.
Perhaps instead of 'reality', you could use the word particularity. A context is a set of particulars. 'Reality' (if we insisted on the term) would be the set of everything particular (and nothing in general).
I think as others are saying, context is what you want it to be, or what you want to see. In other words its the reading, reaction and agenda from the surroundings of the site.
For example, I have a project in a small town. I could see my context as quaint, human scaled and charming-- something I may want to emulate. Or I may see it as a rundown, cramped slum-- something I need to clear out and recreate or react against.
Things that or even more 'factual' are also up for interpretation: my site gets direct sun- I may want the sun, or I may want to block the sun. And not due to the program, but because of my attitudes about the sun...
Its all relative...
Each action has a separate and equally opposite reaction....
Love the one your with...
When life gives you lemons make.... what you make is how you read the context.
Its all contextual. Which is arbitrary.
It totally comes down to your values, culture, agenda, whatever you want to call it, and how those things color your view of the surroundings.
Most of the time context boils down to orientation, height controls, setbacks, whether the neighbours might approve, fitting in, topography etc.
When Libeskind started dragging in lines marking out prominent Jewish places into the Berlin project, it was pure ideology.
When Eisenman references flight paths and distant "arbitrary' points in various early 1990's projects, it was pure ideology.
When Gianni Botsford starts creating voumes and voids based on an analysis of how and where light hits a particualr site, it is not arbitrary.
There are choices in what informs the design in terms of context, and they are not arbitrary. The choices might be lazy, irrational, or far-reaching, but they have their effect which can be judged.
I think you may have misunderstood me, jbirl (not that I gave you much to go on). Subjectivity is not about opinion. Your constitution as a subject is not simply a matter of your wants and desires.
Ideology occurs at a much more fundamental level. Althusser discusses the role ideology plays in subject-formation.
Back to the original post- I think context is ideological, or, ones reading of the context is ideological.
Everyone lives their life within some ideology, or some set of principles that one views/ experinces the world they live in.
That fact that more than one ideology exists, in my opinion, makes none absolute. If they are not absolute, are they not opinions? Or, neither are facts, and both are open to interpretation, criticism and discussion.
My use of the word arbitary was off perhaps, because if context is ideological, and ideology is not really arbitrary, then context cannot really be arbitary.
But, I agree with others that say that context is a collection of things you want to see that are then used to inform your design in the larger 'context' you are placing it in.
okay imagine a ray of light. imagine the a prism. imagine that ray of light passing through that prism. imagine the spectrum breaking the light up into its spectral colors. that's analogous to what we're talking about. subjectivity is one of the spectral colors of the truth. drop some acid. be the prism.
I never said anything about ideology being absolute. Absolutism/relativism is beside the point. I'm questioning your idea that what I see what I want in a context. Ideology and desire don't always align. Ideology may force me to see in a way that I might never have chosen if desire had any part in it. Subjectivity is rarely something I choose.
"domestic, why do you think context is about a totalising view? Don't we commonly use context to mean local conditions."
absolutely:
"although i do know context can also mean a fragment" (something particular)
I think what i was trying to understand was that you can't avoid being ideological and it has to do partly with something Gaston Bachelard said and it refers to what i've been saying earlier.
Gaston Bachelard said ideology is an obstacle to the production of knowledge, which implies there is a state of acting which is not ideologically based and that basis is to consider a wider constellation of facts that is reality. What Bachelard maybe doesn't consider is that reality is unknowable in this sense because this prism effect will always happen as people by a combo of bio-genetics and cultural experience think differently.
"Ideology and desire don't always align. Ideology may force me to see in a way that I might never have chosen if desire had any part in it. Subjectivity is rarely something I choose."
A good example of this are the Russians right now. Russians where recently asked if the wanted freedom or order and choose order. They may desire freedom but order is a natural prediliction of their shared historical experience of Communism. A concept political-sociologist Martin Lipset mentioned: a shared historical experience determines common values or ideology and this subliminally informs ones decisions or choices in acting. There is also Foucault's concept of discipline, where peoples choices to act rationality and orderly is caused by the modern enlightened man's imprisonment of the soul by reason.
Thanks for your example of subjectivity and desire, domestic. That's what I was trying to get at. If Bachelard says that (I don't recognise the idea from him), then he's wrong. The decision to treat something as a fundamental fact (like biogenetics or cultural perspective or sun angles) is a symptom of ideology, not a way to avoid it.
765, if you're not interested, perhaps you could go read another thread.
Is Context Ideological?
scanning over some Tschumi where he says context is ideological.....it is not facts, it is interpretive.
any thoughts?
Another good paper on the topic is Mark Wigley's 'On Site', which is in an old issue of Lotus. I think Tschumi's right. We validate our ideologies by ascribing them as conditions of the site.
Sure it is. Unless your ideology is taken out of context.
context is elastic
"fuck the context..."
context is a multiplicity of factors that cannot be simply reduced for design reasons....therefore you need to edit those factors for use....therefore meaning that by editing you ideologically place higher value on some aspects more than others....denari also gets into this in a lot of his writing. check out his interrupted projections book from his gallery ma installation.
context is dead
So context in architecture then means not acknowledging some aspects of the reality of context for the preservation of ones point of view or architectural concept. Or as Tschumi would say, context as ideology is necessary for the preservation of architecture (in the Hegelian sense of architecture as artisitic supplement to building) because 'if architecture is to succeed it must deny what society (reality) expects of it.'
domestic...interesting stance...although i think what you said ideologically reinforces a post-modernist sensibility in relation to architecture. you could also state that no person can fully accomodate all realities of a given context and fulfill them. there is inherently a selection process that involves creating a hypothesis and testing it. i mean this is really the main reason we haven't been able to create artificial intelligence yet or completely predict weather patterns. they are based on an inherently complex inter-relationship of variables that is constantly mutating. some call it chaos.
the context is only real in the meaning that we give to it. and by denying certain (con) texts while realizing others we give it the meaning that we want to give it. just the denial of those (con)texts provide meaning.
I think we're ignoring the real question here: Is ideology contextual?
*raises one eyebrow*
thats what i just said.
... or did you?
*raises other eyebrow*
lol 765
you, my friend, are out of eyebrows.
*rests chin on fist and stares off into distance*
LOL, you jokers.
Some context is factual - wind direction, slope, sunlight hours, size of the site. A lot more is interpretive: history, significance of adjacent structures, future specualtion.
As vado said - I'm SURE this is what he said - what one chooses to react to and label as "context" is ideological. futureboy also said this. I'm mostly just chiming in to laugh at the eyebrow antics.
But which things count as factual, LB? There are an awful lot of parameters that can be measured from a site. The fact that we commonly privilege sun hours, prevailing wind and size of site as 'primary' characteristics of the site is an expression of an architectural ideology. (Quite a reasonable one, of course, but who said ideologies were necessarily unreasonable?)
sun hour, wind direction... are site conditions.
context is more of a text than site condition... is meant to be read and re-written.
the worst are some who confuse the two especially when i see architects saying due to the multiple "vectors" surround the site and therefore they have deformed shape to respond those "imaginery force"... and when i see those site pics, is more like a deserted town as to compare with one of those asia city.
i consider site conditions to be a part of context.
when we look at site we make a projection upon the site and depending our ideologies the context rises
the glance is ideological because is conditioned by a context historic, cultural and psichologist, individual and collective
we don't look a beach as Romans or Greeks looked at it
relatiosnships between temporal context and spatial context are known and interpretables
spatial context = physical context
agfa, I'm not saying that the decision to use "factual" site conditions is any more or less ideological than is using "socio-historical" site conditions as context, as is using both or neither.
i don't think anyone yet has disagreed that 'context is ideological'. it would be kind of silly to question it.
a key thing to realize, though, is that until tschumi (or someone like him before) made the observation that context is ideological, a lot of people probably treated context as a given and thought they were being 'objective' in their reading of a site's conditions. a burden of our mature postmodern condition is that we can(should?) no longer simply record what we see but we begin to realize what influences from our own experience are bearing on our recognition and appreciation of a place's characteristics. this wasn't always the case.
blame it on descartes and his era. before we began to quantitatively measure and record the facts of a place in order to define it, people were more likely to assess a place based on its particular character and essences, felt as a sort of pressure acting on the location (a liberal paraphrase of aristotle). it's taken us a while to get back to that kind of thinking, but so much has happened in between that we've become hyper-aware/self-conscious about how we think about what our senses tell us. and that's a good thing.
I think we are finally waking up to the fact that reality itself is subjective. Humans inherently precieve reality in an ideological fashion placing our subjective biases on objective reality. Everyone truly lives in their own little world, imho. Take relativity for example, if reality is realative to the observer, and not absolute as previously thought it is possible for two people to disagree on something as fundamental as what time it is and both of them can be right. If something as fundamental as time can be subject to debate than that i think would pretty much make everything open to individual, ideological interpretation.
site conditions are con(text)ual as well. every site has a geological history that can be extrapolated upon.
reality is real to the observer and conversely the observer is observed by other observers who subjectively impose their reality upon the observed, which therefore, alters the reality of the former obverser who now has been observed. and vicey versey.
I haven't stated it but my reason for asking this question has to do with morality.
It isn't my postmodern stance but Tschumi's that i'm trying to understand because i never connected context to ideology. When i think of context and how people use the word i think of reality. When we mention bringing something into context we mean bringing something into reality. We are trying to avoid being ideologically biased by bringing something into context/reality by considering all the facts as is case in politics all the time where politicians accuse one another of letting policitical ideology get in the way of the facts i.e. Al Gore's book Assult on Reason (assult on Bush). But in light of this discussion this would mean not an absence of ideology but an ideology that emphasizes a cartesian logic.
Ideology always hides something in order to preserve itself, which means some facts are choosen to the exclusion of others all the time. In attempting to be objective, using cartesian logic you could be ignoring some aspects of reality - uncertainty. But what all this means is that in choosing certain facts of reality over others, to what consequence, to what detriment to those ignored facts? There are moral considerations to make when choosing vs deferring to context/reality where morality is automatically given by default of the fact one thinks they are acknowledging all facts.
My point is that critics of theoretical architecture tend to imply that ignoring context is immoral - by not considering site, client, production process, program etc.. you are being ignorant, our understanding of context then becomes moral because we think to acknowledge context is to acknowledge all facts of reality, which as we have discussed here and stated by Tschumi, not possible, and therefore this totalizing notion of context as moral is null and void.
i find it intersting that you equate context with reality. typically i view the term context (with theoretical arguments, scientific research, and political discourse) as putting something into relatiionship with other explored knowledge with characteristics that position the studied argument. so in a way, it might be putting it into reality, but a contrived reality. and hence, that's why inherently morality is also ideological.
this all makes me think of a story that i believe borges wrote about the orator that argued with socrates and lost the argument....anyway when i find the name of the short story i'll post it. the thing about the story is that he looks at the logical argument made by the alternate thinker and finds the arguments to be just as valid as socrates...but socrates was determined the victor by history. so what is truth? truth is written into history by the victors.....those that lose are lost in the space outside of "truth"
I don't think Tschumi's observation is particulary original or profound.
Corb used context to shape his ideology and generated built 'facts' shaped by that ideology such as the brise-soliel.
Mies used context to shape his ideology, albeit a very different context than Corb's.
So what is context? Site conditions, the epoch? It just depends on what value system you sign up for...
'i find it intersting that you equate context with reality.'
Some of the philosophers i read do that - they see context as being reality - context as a big picture thing, a total, a whole, context v. fragment, although i do know context can also mean a fragment.
But by defintion of the context as total - ideology would be a fragmentation of the whole and so according to these thinkers not such a good thing but the point here is see that there is no avoiding this fragmentation - context is ideological, it is fragment, not a whole.
domestic, why do you think context is about a totalising view? Don't we commonly use context to mean local conditions.
Perhaps instead of 'reality', you could use the word particularity. A context is a set of particulars. 'Reality' (if we insisted on the term) would be the set of everything particular (and nothing in general).
I think as others are saying, context is what you want it to be, or what you want to see. In other words its the reading, reaction and agenda from the surroundings of the site.
For example, I have a project in a small town. I could see my context as quaint, human scaled and charming-- something I may want to emulate. Or I may see it as a rundown, cramped slum-- something I need to clear out and recreate or react against.
Things that or even more 'factual' are also up for interpretation: my site gets direct sun- I may want the sun, or I may want to block the sun. And not due to the program, but because of my attitudes about the sun...
Its all relative...
Each action has a separate and equally opposite reaction....
Love the one your with...
When life gives you lemons make.... what you make is how you read the context.
Its all contextual. Which is arbitrary.
It totally comes down to your values, culture, agenda, whatever you want to call it, and how those things color your view of the surroundings.
Ideology is neither arbitrary, nor does it have anything to do with opinion. In my opinion.
I am staying off that slippery slope.
Although some may not think its slippery at all...
Not all contexts are created equal.
Most of the time context boils down to orientation, height controls, setbacks, whether the neighbours might approve, fitting in, topography etc.
When Libeskind started dragging in lines marking out prominent Jewish places into the Berlin project, it was pure ideology.
When Eisenman references flight paths and distant "arbitrary' points in various early 1990's projects, it was pure ideology.
When Gianni Botsford starts creating voumes and voids based on an analysis of how and where light hits a particualr site, it is not arbitrary.
There are choices in what informs the design in terms of context, and they are not arbitrary. The choices might be lazy, irrational, or far-reaching, but they have their effect which can be judged.
In a way, architecture is pure context.
I think you may have misunderstood me, jbirl (not that I gave you much to go on). Subjectivity is not about opinion. Your constitution as a subject is not simply a matter of your wants and desires.
Ideology occurs at a much more fundamental level. Althusser discusses the role ideology plays in subject-formation.
Back to the original post- I think context is ideological, or, ones reading of the context is ideological.
Everyone lives their life within some ideology, or some set of principles that one views/ experinces the world they live in.
That fact that more than one ideology exists, in my opinion, makes none absolute. If they are not absolute, are they not opinions? Or, neither are facts, and both are open to interpretation, criticism and discussion.
My use of the word arbitary was off perhaps, because if context is ideological, and ideology is not really arbitrary, then context cannot really be arbitary.
But, I agree with others that say that context is a collection of things you want to see that are then used to inform your design in the larger 'context' you are placing it in.
okay imagine a ray of light. imagine the a prism. imagine that ray of light passing through that prism. imagine the spectrum breaking the light up into its spectral colors. that's analogous to what we're talking about. subjectivity is one of the spectral colors of the truth. drop some acid. be the prism.
are you talking about the hdtv commercial where the lil girl talks about the "millions of tiny mirrors that makes the picture amazing"
that girl freaks me out.
i would rather imagine that ray of light being absorbed into a black hole.
I never said anything about ideology being absolute. Absolutism/relativism is beside the point. I'm questioning your idea that what I see what I want in a context. Ideology and desire don't always align. Ideology may force me to see in a way that I might never have chosen if desire had any part in it. Subjectivity is rarely something I choose.
can somebody redefine context form me?
"subjectivity is one of the spectral colors of the truth. drop some acid. be the prism."
Then remember how the "prism" in a rainbow work ; two spectators a distance apart, will newer see the rainbow the same place, due to how prism's work.
"domestic, why do you think context is about a totalising view? Don't we commonly use context to mean local conditions."
absolutely:
"although i do know context can also mean a fragment" (something particular)
I think what i was trying to understand was that you can't avoid being ideological and it has to do partly with something Gaston Bachelard said and it refers to what i've been saying earlier.
Gaston Bachelard said ideology is an obstacle to the production of knowledge, which implies there is a state of acting which is not ideologically based and that basis is to consider a wider constellation of facts that is reality. What Bachelard maybe doesn't consider is that reality is unknowable in this sense because this prism effect will always happen as people by a combo of bio-genetics and cultural experience think differently.
"Ideology and desire don't always align. Ideology may force me to see in a way that I might never have chosen if desire had any part in it. Subjectivity is rarely something I choose."
A good example of this are the Russians right now. Russians where recently asked if the wanted freedom or order and choose order. They may desire freedom but order is a natural prediliction of their shared historical experience of Communism. A concept political-sociologist Martin Lipset mentioned: a shared historical experience determines common values or ideology and this subliminally informs ones decisions or choices in acting. There is also Foucault's concept of discipline, where peoples choices to act rationality and orderly is caused by the modern enlightened man's imprisonment of the soul by reason.
this conversation needs alcohol...
Yeah, can somebody just say 'yes', and let everyone move on?
Thanks for your example of subjectivity and desire, domestic. That's what I was trying to get at. If Bachelard says that (I don't recognise the idea from him), then he's wrong. The decision to treat something as a fundamental fact (like biogenetics or cultural perspective or sun angles) is a symptom of ideology, not a way to avoid it.
765, if you're not interested, perhaps you could go read another thread.
freedom is overrated.
No, I wasn't trying to be rude, agfa, just making more dumb jokes and idiocy :]
Carry on.
inspired by a vado comment on another thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology
judging from the first paragraph, i'd say ideology is most definitely contextual and context is ideological. yes.
context is a mother
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