Scale is central to what you're proposing (though I'm finding your meaning a bit opaque). I think global trade makes materials both more and less symbolic: they are so easily accessible that one can have bits of the entire planet in their building, but we are also thinking more these days about what it means to have African slate vs. Indiana limestone and all that is involved in processing and moving that material. For one thing, we know that the Indiana stone was produced in safer, more humane conditions than the exotics coming from countries with less concern with workers' and environmental conditions. The difference isn't symbolic, it's materially-of-the-material (to fall back on the too-easy tool of stringing a bunch of words together instead of finding the appropriate one).

And, again to scale: a bunch of "theory" to determine the form of a private home is a far different exercise from using the same process to determine the form of a large public building.

What I don't understand is: how is pragmatism, neo- or not, unpragmatic? Are you talking about processes that appear efficient but aren't when one examines their impact further?

my undergrad theory professor used to say that we all had a theoretical framework within which we pursued architecture.

we could choose to deny it, which is one theoretical position, allowing it to operate, ahem, "intuitively".

we could choose to ignore it, which also allows it to operate in the background unexamined.

we could choose to name it and move on, allowing it to be only a citation but one not rigorously pursued, resulting in inconsistent work.

or we could try to understand it and pursue it to the point that we knew what we were actually doing, and we therefore could redirect as necessary if what we were doing was not what we meant to be doing.

studying and talking about theory is maybe just studying and talking about the work you're doing and what you hope to achieve with it.

theory is a process of developing and understanding how your architectural work fits into its time, place, and culture. it doesn't have to be metaphorical or 'unpragmatic' or philosophical.

I think I need some stronger coffee

as long as you dont talk down to people who dont agree with your theory, there is nothing wrong with it


but it doesnt necessarily make you a better architect because you think about the theory behind it

thats the trap i think some people fall in to
they tend to get all high and mighty because they have some "brilliant" theory behind their work

someone who doesnt talk about the theory of his work does not produce inferior work

liberty bell: ": how is pragmatism, neo- or not, unpragmatic?"

by that I mean the school of thought that pits, say, the 'projective' against modes that have been interpreted as being, (and by 'being',i mean rhetorically presented. Archtiecture is after all silent, we are not) resistant. i'm using those generalizations, even if they don't stand up to consistency and uniformity, as they have been used many times previously. the idea that the 'pragmatic' reaping of the world (media-centred, military metaphors, capitalist kinship...) against, what is deemed as being, 'unpragmatic' modes be that due to leftist resistance, cultural idiosyncracy...etc.a s such, its about discourse revolving around architecture rather than architecture itself. "materiality" is not synonymous with material, pragmat-ism with the possible (perhaps it sees itself as more aligned with the probable than the possible).

stephen ward: how would you define when "theory" begins or ends? when is a reason for/driving factor in design exclusively bound by the cause-consequence of constructability/ program and not to the preconceptions regarding constructability/program not to mention aesthetics. i only differ with you on the account that theory is always 'there': i think "theory" is a byproduct of the incessant propensity to taxonomize and then to buy-into the created taxonomy as inherently apriori. i think that it is a matter of how aware one is to one's imagination and the place of knowledge within that imagination...than how aware they are of this externalized exorcised flatland called "theory". this is especially the case in a creative practice.


stephen lauf: i would like to read through that book, but I can't secure it here because the devil might be in it (i live in ksa). i don't know-what, please elaborate. thanks

by that, i meant to ask quelle est la chose que vous avez déjà vu

thanks for the google excerpts, i find the idea of nothing as the kernel quite sweet, but i suspect that the concept of nothingness at the core of his philosophy (of contemporary language)
is perhaps paradoxically essentialist. there is also mythos of essences and forces at work. regardless, its an interestingly phenomenological way of looking at the lack of a phenomenology. the all-encompassing world as God is a funny thought sitting on its side...this author has a melodramatic streak (that not to say its bad)

but i also wonder how architecture could be profaned in this author's manner; if language reveals only language...then architecture can only reveal architecture. perhaps, linking it to the high above, in spite of the veiling rhetoric of theory and the gossipy nature of intelligent minds, architecture can only truly confront someone with its own mineral lifelessness in a life-vacuum of light and dark. a tautological obviousness of stone, glass, concrete.

that is to say, the only irrevocable truth about architecture is that it contains its own rubble, contains the promise, no ... the necessity, of its own ruin. much like us.

i enjoyed much of what you wrote up there and especially in the very fact that symbolic is not dead. on the side, i feel, more than just think, that it fills a ghostly slot in "theorising" ... a palpable near-absence of the role of symbolic thought (which has a lot to do with one's pedigree of course) in the mind of "theorisers". perhaps, this is due to an integrated degree of symbolism, one that has ingested an ironical stance apropos itself. or perhaps because symbolism reeks of death (between the death of the individual prescribed by any sort of religiosity and the death of the masses prescribed by cultural temporality), and the quicker the pace of culture is, the more people are phobic of what reminds them of death.

that higher education is now more accessible to the "masses" and yet less accessible to the "poor" is a profanation = absurdly folding the two legends of capitalism onto each other ie the inclusivity of the promise ("american dream") onto the exclusivity of economic eventuality (rich/poor). and it only is profaned because its built on a history of a related exclusivity (aristocrats, church in the christian cultures, royalty).

but if the memory of the primary object of profanation dissipates, so does profanation itself. a kuhnian paradigmatic shift that builds on the initial ironical rush of profanity a sombre religion. so in a way, your addiction to profanation can only be intermittent, obtrusive moments...very much like drug addiction.

i think this also lends a hand to your proposition of a metabolic & assimilating (religion) relative to an osmotic and electromagnatic (drugs)

well, drugs were/are used for evocations of the spiritual/the symbolic.
and for every sporadic Joan of arc there is a systematic Job.