how about chance_architecture? Start with a modular diagram and a pair of dice.connect the dots: plans and elevations.process would only be the damage control over the product. How about cloning another building: the product precedes and produces
the process...so more precisely preduct produces process precessionly.
dice are not "random". when einstein said "god does not play dice" he was being lazy about calculating the exact forces exerted upon the dice at launch and throughout its path, which in turn would determine the end product of the roll.
compositions by chance bear no difference from willful ones besides the fact that in willful compositions one is discretely aware of the role of a larger (at least cognitively), more salient group of variables.
the term willful is also way off base. any discussion about chance, choice, and design always leads to a fight between faith and reason.. and i dont feel like taking out my spaghetti monster death-ray today.
furthermore, "damage control" imposes a full set of structures that bounds chance encounters. it's just like drawing a line by hand, except the you get to see your pulse a bit more clearly.
finally, "last tango in grammar"... sorry dude, wrong word. you aren't talking about grammar, you are talking about morphology. you're also making stuff up.
addiction, nice, i never really considered that "chance" was just another way of saying "lazy." that's interesting. i like john cage, but this intrigues me...
discretely aware? how so, discrete from what or whom...itself? the mind knows it knows; it doesn't shelve discrete bits of knowledge unless it does so discreetly (as a result of trauma in the classical psychological sense). and if you meant ‘discreetly aware’...then i'd say awareness is not subject to discretion; awareness is inert.
compositions by chance bear no difference from willful ones besides the fact that in willful compositions one is discretely aware of the role of a larger (at least cognitively), more salient group of variables. in that case, as a designer, we can substutite you for a larger, more salient group of pencil-bearing monkeys. perhaps one of them, or in tandem, they can come up with something you're likely to design. after all, the only difference between you and them is "besides the fact". in fact, you are, from all viewpoints except the logistically "besides the fact", you are a billion monkeys. SOM should start setting up cages instead of cubicles in their offices. then again, you are far more intelligent than einstein who might be only a mere million monkeys?
furthermore, "damage control" imposes a full set of structures that bounds chance encounters." not bounding, but overlaying a separate editing rationale that does not detract from the chance-ness itself. of course, its obvious that there is an element of deliberation and rationality....but it doesn't really make chance any less...it simply edits it after the fact. you collapse time indiscriminately. perhaps because you are more intelligent than einsten (because he was wrong and you are right) and maybe you are that non-dice-playing smug god?
finally, "last tango in grammar"... sorry dude, wrong word. you aren't talking about grammar, you are talking about morphology.
don't call me dude or i'll start calling you something you are. and yes, i was talking about language: subject, verb and object.
wall of text incoming (i'm feeling bored/thinky tonight):
this is the crap that bothers me most about architecture as a discipline.
a person like fondue comes in, makes up 10 things and is never told to crack open a book and read and research until there's enough understanding. he's bound to get one right, but the other 9 wreck my perception of architecture as an intellectual endeavor.
so imma take out a dictionary as step 1:
discrete
adj : constituting a separate entity or part; "a government with
three discrete divisions"; "on two distinct occasions"
i am aware of the color of my pen, discretely, because it's black.
if it varied in color in a manner in which i could not predict the variance, then my awareness would not be discrete. it wouldn't be black, it wouldn't be white, it would be in between. floating. take a programming course sometime.
--"then i'd say awareness is not subject to discretion; awareness is inert."--
wrong wrong wrong. pay attention to the tv while singing the star spangled banner, while dribbling a basketball, and typing me a response, all at the same time. pay attention to everything simultaneously. if your awareness was inert (ie, not responding to stimuli), you'd be easily aware of everything you are doing at the same time, your attention/awareness would be equally split among all those tasks. and sir, that's cognitively impossible. stop throwing words together and pretending to make sense.
and if you meant that awareness isn't subject to discreteness, i suggest you google "whorf-sapir hypothesis" and "linguistic relativity".
-- in that case, as a designer, we can substutite you for a larger, more salient group of pencil-bearing monkeys. perhaps one of them, or in tandem, they can come up with something you're likely to design. after all, the only difference between you and them is "besides the fact". in fact, you are, from all viewpoints except the logistically "besides the fact", you are a billion monkeys. SOM should start setting up cages instead of cubicles in their offices. then again, you are far more intelligent than einstein who might be only a mere million monkeys?--
are you a creationist by any chance? chance builds upon chance, it's the nature of emergent systems. go read a bit before making stupid arguments like this one. monkeys lack the ability to compound chance encounters as well as humans... it's one of those awesome sentience-related-sort-of-things. it's part of what creates the illusion of choice and all that stuff.
making arguments against things i haven't said is lolzy. what do you think i am? one of those linguistic textbooks that you're supposed to read, misunderstand, and then theorize from?
--not bounding, but overlaying a separate editing rationale that does not detract from the chance-ness itself. --
in a modular system like you suggested it does. it makes the gradient of possible outputs from a random function more discrete, therefore forcing "artificial" patterns into the work.
think of it as one of those trading card holograms where you see 3D as you rotate your point of view from one side to the other.
this is why true design through chance will never exist; so in the end the most you're gonna get is chance interactions with convention and discrete variables.
--of course, its obvious that there is an element of deliberation and rationality....--
deliberation is not an issue. deliberation is a deterministic process. just like flip of a coin or tossing of the dice. in the end, it plays no role except that of a variable that interacts with other variables.
-- but it doesn't really make chance any less...it simply edits it after the fact. you collapse time indiscriminately. perhaps because you are more intelligent than einsten (because he was wrong and you are right) and maybe you are that non-dice-playing smug god?--
first off, im paraphrasing stephen hawking and a crapload of other quantum physicists when i make the einstein comment. you seriously should stop dwelling on that and go with the a more content centered approach.
also, read more.
and im not talking about those pretty poems by kolhaas or kwinter's uninformed rants about emergence.
addictionbomb thanks for the breakdown but you're giving Fondue far to much attention...from what I can tell Fondue knows what Eisenman know, what any philosopher knows...the impossible exchange for nothing(ness). as you slowly build up a real arguement Fondue will just counter with logic that ultimately leads to nothing, in other words, absense of any sense.
in Academia 'process' is a 'product', one that is oversold and just dumbs everyone down a couple notches.
by your final year you should be able to design architecture nightly, a product for breakfast, but what often happens is professors bog you down with philosophical questions about your product founded on principles of process, which is bull shit.
if you're talented and have vision, then process often becomes just procedure for producing representation of your product.
if you're not talented, like many starachitects, your process, your wandering without vision, you quest for talent (hence the demeanor of some) ends up in a monograph and is sold as a product.
OMA/Rem Koolhaas - by far the least talented architect to grace this planet. But who cares, his eye candy books are like crack, that's one product his/their process is good at creating.
There's a pertinent bit about chance in 'Novel Tectonics' by R+U when they say that even buildings that are made to like they were designed by chance, or a self-emergent system, cannot truly be constructed by chance. They say that even if you take Gehry's house, it is still made with contruction units, to a budget, in a time schedule, it still insulates and keeps out water, etc.
Likewise if you take the Denver Art Museum, or Bilbao, the forms look to be random, but the tectonic intelligence has to be much more sophiscated to achieve that.
Therefore, I think you are correct, there is no such thing as real chance in architecture. The difference between what is percieved as 'rational' and what is percieved as 'chance' is simply a higher level of geometrical and organizational sopistication.
Yes but...emergence, which is not chance, is the emerging of new physical logics, not ideological. Nothing can truely emerge rationally ideologically other
At best the emergence o ideological rational thoughts are either clear representations of complex never understood before physical systems or are deep seeded subconcious intuitive logics yet to be clarified in some language.
Now can two physical systems that interact and create emerging new physical systems be considered chance? I would argue not exactly. Emerging physical systems are a result of genetic algorithms in evolutionary formula, in other words the most likely and most suitable will happen but there are many most likelies and most suitables up until the point of occurance, or emergence of the new physical system.
Chance defined as what happened did happen and all other possibities didn't won't happen in the design process but rather in the building process.
It is human guessing, illusion to assume there are multiple possibilties for any situation, there is always only one but we don't understand it until after the fact. Therefore with the preconception of reality it is obvious to seee why people think random chance shit happens a lot.
metababble, not sure exactly what you are trying to say, but I think [im guessing, and therefore taking a chance! albeit an educated guess lollerskates] you actually agree with me.
yeah, i kinda thought addiction, jp and meta were all saying the same thing; what people chalk up to chance is really the lack of a rigorous explanation, plain laziness or an inability to construct "laws" or "rules" that are explicative enough to render chance into a more metaphysical construct...
i can think of a scenario where someone would have asked Pollock if his paintings were "chance" and watching Pollock jam a beer bottle down their throat.
i was watching a trisha brown video at the walker this past weekend, where she was performing a drawing. trisha brown for those that don't know is a postmodern choreographer and dancer, collaborated with cage, rauschenberg, and laurie anderson and a contemporary of merce cunningham - i thought she did some work with merce as well? anywho, what at first looked like chance, at least my initial reaction, it dawned on me how little chance had to do with the performance. it almost certainly had structure. you may perhaps suggest that the initial impulse, the first mark, may have been chance, but i would argue against that as well. it was a remarkable 20 minute video, made even more interesting as the work that she produced, was hanging on the wall 20 feet away, allowing me to confirm mark for mark her performance....chance? hardly.
Beta what you speak of is a 20 minute parallel scenario of what I would mean by performance for architecture. The performance of an architect can years for a single project. I am not just talking production and process performance, but all the social dancing and politcal meandering required for allowing certain processes in a project to take place so that the product is the intended although actually slightly emerging differently design.
i fully agree with the last two posts. for people like me (an angry computer nerd), a 3-point shot in basketball is perceived as a chance occurrence. if i took the time to develop my 3 point shot, i would be able to explain most of my failures and most of my points.
but i'm an architect, so i just say everything i don't understand is magical. i make up words. i misunderstand the physics of a 3 point shot, and get on with my day. blargh. (/sarcasm.)
i do like the idea of the whole performance of the architect as being a lengthy endeavor. i generally focus on the specifics of the creation act when thinking about these things; seeing the whole choreography of building a building as a deterministic dance is at worst amusing and at best, deeply interesting.
Addictionbomb your last post makes me want to further expand on something.
Chance is of little interest or importance here as we can read.
So...I would like to divide Emergence into two types.
Virtual Emergence
Real Emergence
Virtual Emergence - Conceptual frameworks, ideological values, and rational systems of thought that appear to develop and present themselves to all who speak the language as new or without memory.
-this happens in the beginning of any design process a lot. Academia's push for process is an attempt at developing processes that lead quickly and efficiently to virtual emergences.
Real Emergence
Matter, energy, and frequency interacting in such a way as to form new matter and energy and frequencies that have not existed before. This occurs with or without our perception.
Performance and both Emergences in Architecture
Virtual Emergence is the first act of any architectural performance. The architect and client meet with pre concieved notions of beautiful creative design, and from this collision of thought a hyrbrid compromised idea is usually agreed upon This idea becomes the foundation from where the design proceeds to develop and it further determines the important acts and decisions of the design process.
When the virtual emergence of the idea is finalized, whether a sketch or eye candy renderings, this virtual emergence then enters the world of construction halfway.
Construction drawings are.a halfway point between virtual and real emergence. Details develop based on past real scenarios. Past real scenarios are systems of thought that developed as reflections of material reality and therefor are virtual all can be proven as real as well.
The construction drawings are given to the builder and moments of real emergence occurs for many reasons, many.
Throughtout the construction the architects performance involves maintaing the virtual idea of the building but usually comprises here and there which leads to real emergences, or previously unintended or imagined results.
The architect performs in both types of emergences, because the architect is real and can give directives that cause real things to happen, he can be the individual who makes a virtual emergence become part of the real world and therefore forever altering the real world through what begin as virtual emergence.
Frank gehry studied the scales of a fish conceptually. Combined the motion of a fish with buildings in the mathematical technique of dividing form into scale to ultimately arrive at Bilboa, and there my friends is the genius of gehrys architecutural performance.
I may say koolhaas has no talent, but he is one hell of an architectural performer, clearly one of the best.
See the problem I have with this whole emergence bullshit is that architecture does not perform.
While some buildings do move and carry out specific actions, architecture itself is a construct. It is a facilitator of performance.
I suppose architects can perform but I find nothing interesting about modern, contemporary or postmodern architectural performances. I think the contemporary architectural performance is in a whole a shallow passing of contempt that architects seem to have. Essentially no matter how well-designed or integrated they are, the buildings themselves cannot do anything but harbor others to do actions within them.
I suppose it becomes a gray area when buildings move into self-sufficiency, artificial intelligence and advance robots... but I think those things stop becoming buildings when they can breathe, move and think by themselves. I'd liken them more to titans or demigods than I would architecture.
So, really, there's architecture, Architecture and architecture.
Emerge all it wants but only 3% of the population can afford. Describing it as a performance or as some grand gesture only makes the price tag go up, not down.
Orochi you clearly misunderstood everything I said, so badly did you misunderstand if you're not a foreigner and you didn't read what I wrote you're either completely retarded and a CAD monkey/renderer/student somewhere. - I mean this in the nicest way.
Next time you pull in a job and get it built, let me know about how you performed and if anything emerged in the design process or the building of the project - keep me posted.
Oh, i'm not an architect... I'm a planner... you're little fuckwit [I mean that in the nicest way] "performance" is completely undermined by what I decide to do when I decide to do it and if it like it.
If anything. I'd be the performer on this stage.
You make a design-- you do not assemble the parts of the greater whole. A whole team does that.
I didn't understand it. Becuase there was nothing to understand. Because the concept you speak of linguistically impossible with the words you chose.
I really despair at the disparaging comments from designer/architects on process-based design.
It doesnt matter what the process is, it only matters what the result is. And any designer worth their salt understands the difference between creating and controlling a process, and blindly setting up something and letting it runs it course without discretion and intervention.
The principles of emergence are just one basis for process driven design, but like most things it is a trend and a therefore a newly discovered tool to use. It has its issues - as mentioned above, it applies to self-organising groups, which implies feedback and movement which when applied literally to a static object is hard to justify or make work.
However, any Calatravaesque building with some structural expression signifying or alluding to movement is guilty of the same fallacy.
It is dangerous to have this impulse to completely nullify something because it is a result of an experimental approach. Most of the people doing this neglect the fact that the profession has always developed this way.
The anti-experimentalist, anti-processor is on a one way track to banality. Do you just want to be code monkeys? Last time I looked, every building was different - why is that?
diabase, a breath of fresh air in this thread.
I mind the manners as well, but I equally take offense at muddy thinking/language to which I prefer "reenactments".
drink up orochi! if we were in a bar i'd just punch ya, that's what i do when my friends are too drunk to understand.
when I heard that Charles Moore said "Architecture is a performing art" I pretty much went bonkers like Orochi above, but not until I started doing my own work did it make sense.
let's be clear i am not talking about buildings performing, nor was anybody else above, a drunk planner interepreted that, must be drinking scotch. we're talking about process vs. product and I threw in performance. the architect does all three, get it?
Emergence is a trend of theory in architecture, but taken on it's own philosohpical and logical level is frankly the way this universe works. The cutting edge physics, economists, and mathematicians know this. Now how it relates to architecture, was what I was trying to explain.
I understand it. I don't like the language used to describe it.
I, also, don't believe in it.
If I was a working planner, I'd more than likely dealing with two groups of people-- people who make "inappropriate decisions" because their wealth allows them to and people who have a hard time paying $500 (adjust to what ever cost-of-living index you might have) a month in rent.
Planning is a soft science-- you could consider it bullshit science-- but it is a science. Some parts of planning are pretty hard science type stuff. Architecture is a technical art.
This where the problems come in-- an obscured academic B.S. paper about slime molds and some completely intangible physics theory are not the statistical standard deviation I need to open the flood gates of public funding [or in the case of a private-public partnership... convincing city managers to write blanks checks to get my blank check].
Then the expense part... I refuse to pay 90102398123 dollars for some tree wrapped in solar panels that vacuums farts out of my butt when 14% of the city I'm suppose to be managing is in total poverty.
Especially, when this hypothetical city I probably will never work for, can't even afford garbage service or the trash cans that are suppose to be getting emptied by said non-existent garbage service. Hell, if I don't appease whatever waste management subcontractor and they go on strike, a sizable city will fill up with trash almost instantaneously. I then have about 12 weeks to solve that problem before rats start shooting babies out of their little disease wombs or I'll be hit with a plague of rats.
Emergence is fantastical not practical. Nor even affordable. Not to mention, half the stuff seems to be blatantly ripped off from Star Trek.
Planners have many more responsibilities than site design, urban design or making things pretty. We have to make sure people aren't dumping stuff from their garages into lakes. We have to make sure people are going to the bathroom in the actual bathroom. We have to make sure poo goes where it is suppose to go. We have to do things like find places where farms can throw their corpses, where people can bury grandma and other weird things campaigns to sterilize cats because there is tuberculosis everywhere and our trash dumps are filled to the brim with kitty litter.
So, maybe when we can make sure people stop pooping everywhere, people make a commitment to stop powering everything with liquefied dinosaur juice (that one part of my hypothetical job duty is to clean up) and people make more informed choices... I'll sit down and listen to a discussion about "emergence in architecture."
The other main issue is that emergence is a property of chaos. While humans thrive of chaos, we do not make decisions based off chance-- well most of the time. We make decisions that purposely make things efficient, ineffective and problematic.
We're not some pretty looking bacteria colony that produces fractals and aligns itself toward some sort of drone like state. We like polyester, bitches/dude-bros, beer and hitting animals with cars.
So, I don't see how you can utilize chaos theory and the idea of ingrained natural complexity stemming from survival into a group of beings that like their cheese to be shot out of metal cans by compressed nitrous oxide.
I have things to solve from 400 years ago. People are probably all up on this as some ploy to sell a bunch of shit we don't need that will end up in the dump (that I have to manage) in 50 years.
"Especially, when this hypothetical city I probably will never work for, can't even afford garbage service or the trash cans that are suppose to be getting emptied by said non-existent garbage service. Hell, if I don't appease whatever waste management subcontractor and they go on strike, a sizable city will fill up with trash almost instantaneously. I then have about 12 weeks to solve that problem before rats start shooting babies out of their little disease wombs or I'll be hit with a plague of rats."
emergence in a nutshell, well kind of, you just don't know it....
"The other main issue is that emergence is a property of chaos."
- yeah you really didn't read or understand anything I wrote, so I'm drinking now to make it clear- I'm drinkin a Ukranian beer, not bad actually "Obolon"
no we are a bacteria cology that spreads out in a fractal way, but we spread before we can understand how we spread. See, Process as intent of design and Virtual Emergence are somewhat of a joke, because this human bacteria/virus as Mr. Smith puts it in the Matrix spreads chaoticly beyond a consious understanding of our subconsious will. (Schelling touched in this way back in the days of Hegel). See Hegel said there was like this total human unified spirit all leading up to one Kantian like unified categorical idea - booyaa he was wrong....then everyone gave up and started writing about deconstruction, about tearing our language apart to determine why we constantly mis-determine things...
i reference my old school blog found on architect -
The original question here is of course loaded... it lures the discussion into a process vs. product choice which of course the things cannot be either / or...
I think there is a point though about the difference between architectural education and architectural practice. Education sometimes is more focused on the development of tools, of developing creativity and critical thinking, about methods, etc. But practice is about executing with those tools.
Of course you can't execute without any tools. We are on one level an ideas profession. Part of being an ideas profession is about creativity. And about having a method for producing creative ideas.
But there is another part of being an ideas profession that is about *communication*, and maybe another part that is about *making* that idea into something that is understandable to the person to whom we are delivering our ideas profession services (the clients, the end users, the stakeholders). So ideas creation is essential, but so are *communication* and *making*. We could evaluate the success of a project in each of these three parts maybe the ideas and method was good, but the communication and making were bad, but then they get 1 out of 3... In the real world, if you stop at the ideas part and you cannot communicate the idea in a useful way, or make it into something that a normal person can look at and immediately *get* and see value in, then you're falling short someplace in what our profession typically gets paid for...
The work itself needs to speak for itself. Even if that end result *is* a book, or a diagram or a competition poster or graphic model... If nobody gets it, it lacks usefulness and is maybe missing a piece of the follow through... There *is* a last communication and making step needed, and that's hard work, but that proves your process for you, without which nobody sees the point you are making... Maybe the work's end result is a book about construction or about economics of a space, or about urban flows, or a series of diagrams, but that's *still* product. I think we need to stop letting students off the hook with not following through. Force em to take the extra steps, because that's part of what we do... Let's not let people just "talk" about what they've done, show us, *step up and prove it*... :P
Sep 13, 09 5:10 pm ·
·
perhaps some food for thought:
(It seems) digital data is never really an end-product because it so easily generates more and more digital data. Computer models facilitate the production of more and more digital data. Architecturally, perhaps only an actual building is an end-product (of the model/drawing).
[Yet, for me, the 'end-product' architecture became a virtual building, specifically a virtual museum of architecture.] 11/24/04 8:45
Like saying shit is the end product of eating due to visual overtness. In determining whether process is more important than product or not, perception is more important than product or process. But not for dice playing monkey gods. Emergence is conceptually a matryoshka: an explanation of a larger mystery through the multiplication of a smaller one. One can use it to overwhelm one's argument or underwhelm others'.
there's a lot that could be gained in this discussion through an a review of agent-based software models.
they clear up a lot of the misconceptions about emergence present in this thread.
-- "perception is more important than product or process" --
to each their own, and there's nothing wrong with that. i prefer to keep knowledge on a pedestal, but i'm fully aware that other care more about effect.
-- "Emergence is conceptually a matryoshka: an explanation of a larger mystery through the multiplication of a smaller one. One can use it to overwhelm one's argument or underwhelm others" --
everything is fractal. everything.
that is the reason why the chance discussion leads to a dead end in which nothing is truly "random" and the notion of "chance" just labels those things distant to the viewer's understanding.
--
anyways, i just wanted to mention agent-based software models just in case anyone wanted to dig up some info and clear up those little emergence quabbles that have come up in this thread.
John conways game of life, so simple so simple...stephan wolframs book is good to.
Process and product are almost interchangeable in architecture. A product informs the process and therefore becomes part of the process, and the process can often be the product.
Let's look at the age old art of brewing for instance
The product beer is actually an important part to the universal process of brewing. One brewers process leads to a distinct taste. Another brewer likes part of that taste and therefore asks the other brewer about their process. The different types and styles are all results of process and ingrediants. Some steps in the process are due to current technologies available or necessary needs. For instance the storing of fermenting beer in mountain caves as opposed to barrels in a barn that heats up in the summer. Carbonating Kegs versus condition beer bottles. Even the process's processor, that is a self organizing agent, yeast can come in many different strains causing same ingredients to taste differently. The temperature during fermentation and the length of time that hops are introduced or even just left in changes the product. All these things add up to a final cold refreshing drink. Some get you drunk faster, some give you a hangover. Beer is very much a product of process, as most things are.
But telling a student what their process should be or creating a theory on process as ideology is a waste of time and a major cause of frustration. Educators should supply the ingredients and recommend the tools, let the student decide how they will create their product, let them decide on their process and if the student is interested about certain results of another architecture they will inquire about the process.
Both classical architecure and peter eisenman are not what a student should be learning unless of course they are interested in the results of such processes for doing architecture.
Study process as a suggestion not a mantra for anything.
The problem with your beer analogy is that the beer (product) is based off a rather basic chemical reaction.
There's different tolls you can use (copper-lined or silver-lined or stainless steel tanks, wooden/rubber/metal tools, variety of bottling and storage (wooden casks, glass bottles aluminum) that change various properties of the beer.
However, even beer and wine tasting can be quantitative. The reason? Because taste is a biochemical reaction. Mostly everyone has taste buds and a variety of compounds present within a beer activate those taste receptors and other olfactory receptors.
Given the right kind of instrumentation, you can document what chemicals fire what nerves, to what extent and how.
Architecture, outside of the business side, have no definitive quantitative measure. Like I said earlier in this thread, the only real quantitative measure would be profitability. Profitability doesn't necessarily mean cheap or cost-effective, it simply means what people are willing to pay for whatever product is being produced.
Outside of that, there's been maybe a handful of studies and the broken window theory that evaluate the "effectiveness" of architecture. And these studies typically look at "window treatments" and "maintained property" as indicators. It doesn't really matter about the style, per se, but that it is freshly painted, in working order, not leaking water and not visually distracting.
So, it is very hard to translate "creating space" to any tangible value. That is unless you establish a perfect control group and a perfect experimental group and walk them through buildings with a MRI machine strapped to their head.
Process is more important than product
how about chance_architecture? Start with a modular diagram and a pair of dice.connect the dots: plans and elevations.process would only be the damage control over the product. How about cloning another building: the product precedes and produces
the process...so more precisely preduct produces process precessionly.
dice are not "random". when einstein said "god does not play dice" he was being lazy about calculating the exact forces exerted upon the dice at launch and throughout its path, which in turn would determine the end product of the roll.
compositions by chance bear no difference from willful ones besides the fact that in willful compositions one is discretely aware of the role of a larger (at least cognitively), more salient group of variables.
the term willful is also way off base. any discussion about chance, choice, and design always leads to a fight between faith and reason.. and i dont feel like taking out my spaghetti monster death-ray today.
furthermore, "damage control" imposes a full set of structures that bounds chance encounters. it's just like drawing a line by hand, except the you get to see your pulse a bit more clearly.
finally, "last tango in grammar"... sorry dude, wrong word. you aren't talking about grammar, you are talking about morphology. you're also making stuff up.
addiction, nice, i never really considered that "chance" was just another way of saying "lazy." that's interesting. i like john cage, but this intrigues me...
discretely aware? how so, discrete from what or whom...itself? the mind knows it knows; it doesn't shelve discrete bits of knowledge unless it does so discreetly (as a result of trauma in the classical psychological sense). and if you meant ‘discreetly aware’...then i'd say awareness is not subject to discretion; awareness is inert.
compositions by chance bear no difference from willful ones besides the fact that in willful compositions one is discretely aware of the role of a larger (at least cognitively), more salient group of variables. in that case, as a designer, we can substutite you for a larger, more salient group of pencil-bearing monkeys. perhaps one of them, or in tandem, they can come up with something you're likely to design. after all, the only difference between you and them is "besides the fact". in fact, you are, from all viewpoints except the logistically "besides the fact", you are a billion monkeys. SOM should start setting up cages instead of cubicles in their offices. then again, you are far more intelligent than einstein who might be only a mere million monkeys?
furthermore, "damage control" imposes a full set of structures that bounds chance encounters." not bounding, but overlaying a separate editing rationale that does not detract from the chance-ness itself. of course, its obvious that there is an element of deliberation and rationality....but it doesn't really make chance any less...it simply edits it after the fact. you collapse time indiscriminately. perhaps because you are more intelligent than einsten (because he was wrong and you are right) and maybe you are that non-dice-playing smug god?
finally, "last tango in grammar"... sorry dude, wrong word. you aren't talking about grammar, you are talking about morphology.
don't call me dude or i'll start calling you something you are. and yes, i was talking about language: subject, verb and object.
you're also making stuff up. and?
?
wall of text incoming (i'm feeling bored/thinky tonight):
this is the crap that bothers me most about architecture as a discipline.
a person like fondue comes in, makes up 10 things and is never told to crack open a book and read and research until there's enough understanding. he's bound to get one right, but the other 9 wreck my perception of architecture as an intellectual endeavor.
so imma take out a dictionary as step 1:
discrete
adj : constituting a separate entity or part; "a government with
three discrete divisions"; "on two distinct occasions"
i am aware of the color of my pen, discretely, because it's black.
if it varied in color in a manner in which i could not predict the variance, then my awareness would not be discrete. it wouldn't be black, it wouldn't be white, it would be in between. floating. take a programming course sometime.
--"then i'd say awareness is not subject to discretion; awareness is inert."--
wrong wrong wrong. pay attention to the tv while singing the star spangled banner, while dribbling a basketball, and typing me a response, all at the same time. pay attention to everything simultaneously. if your awareness was inert (ie, not responding to stimuli), you'd be easily aware of everything you are doing at the same time, your attention/awareness would be equally split among all those tasks. and sir, that's cognitively impossible. stop throwing words together and pretending to make sense.
and if you meant that awareness isn't subject to discreteness, i suggest you google "whorf-sapir hypothesis" and "linguistic relativity".
-- in that case, as a designer, we can substutite you for a larger, more salient group of pencil-bearing monkeys. perhaps one of them, or in tandem, they can come up with something you're likely to design. after all, the only difference between you and them is "besides the fact". in fact, you are, from all viewpoints except the logistically "besides the fact", you are a billion monkeys. SOM should start setting up cages instead of cubicles in their offices. then again, you are far more intelligent than einstein who might be only a mere million monkeys?--
are you a creationist by any chance? chance builds upon chance, it's the nature of emergent systems. go read a bit before making stupid arguments like this one. monkeys lack the ability to compound chance encounters as well as humans... it's one of those awesome sentience-related-sort-of-things. it's part of what creates the illusion of choice and all that stuff.
making arguments against things i haven't said is lolzy. what do you think i am? one of those linguistic textbooks that you're supposed to read, misunderstand, and then theorize from?
--not bounding, but overlaying a separate editing rationale that does not detract from the chance-ness itself. --
in a modular system like you suggested it does. it makes the gradient of possible outputs from a random function more discrete, therefore forcing "artificial" patterns into the work.
think of it as one of those trading card holograms where you see 3D as you rotate your point of view from one side to the other.
this is why true design through chance will never exist; so in the end the most you're gonna get is chance interactions with convention and discrete variables.
--of course, its obvious that there is an element of deliberation and rationality....--
deliberation is not an issue. deliberation is a deterministic process. just like flip of a coin or tossing of the dice. in the end, it plays no role except that of a variable that interacts with other variables.
-- but it doesn't really make chance any less...it simply edits it after the fact. you collapse time indiscriminately. perhaps because you are more intelligent than einsten (because he was wrong and you are right) and maybe you are that non-dice-playing smug god?--
first off, im paraphrasing stephen hawking and a crapload of other quantum physicists when i make the einstein comment. you seriously should stop dwelling on that and go with the a more content centered approach.
also, read more.
and im not talking about those pretty poems by kolhaas or kwinter's uninformed rants about emergence.
?
if we design a building to deteriorate in certain manner over the decades/centuries, then process does matters...
otherwise, the only time the general public give a fuck how u do it is when ur building fails n u are sent to court.
?
this whole freakin' thread is a process...
addictionbomb thanks for the breakdown but you're giving Fondue far to much attention...from what I can tell Fondue knows what Eisenman know, what any philosopher knows...the impossible exchange for nothing(ness). as you slowly build up a real arguement Fondue will just counter with logic that ultimately leads to nothing, in other words, absense of any sense.
in Academia 'process' is a 'product', one that is oversold and just dumbs everyone down a couple notches.
by your final year you should be able to design architecture nightly, a product for breakfast, but what often happens is professors bog you down with philosophical questions about your product founded on principles of process, which is bull shit.
if you're talented and have vision, then process often becomes just procedure for producing representation of your product.
if you're not talented, like many starachitects, your process, your wandering without vision, you quest for talent (hence the demeanor of some) ends up in a monograph and is sold as a product.
OMA/Rem Koolhaas - by far the least talented architect to grace this planet. But who cares, his eye candy books are like crack, that's one product his/their process is good at creating.
addiction -
There's a pertinent bit about chance in 'Novel Tectonics' by R+U when they say that even buildings that are made to like they were designed by chance, or a self-emergent system, cannot truly be constructed by chance. They say that even if you take Gehry's house, it is still made with contruction units, to a budget, in a time schedule, it still insulates and keeps out water, etc.
Likewise if you take the Denver Art Museum, or Bilbao, the forms look to be random, but the tectonic intelligence has to be much more sophiscated to achieve that.
Therefore, I think you are correct, there is no such thing as real chance in architecture. The difference between what is percieved as 'rational' and what is percieved as 'chance' is simply a higher level of geometrical and organizational sopistication.
Yes but...emergence, which is not chance, is the emerging of new physical logics, not ideological. Nothing can truely emerge rationally ideologically other
At best the emergence o ideological rational thoughts are either clear representations of complex never understood before physical systems or are deep seeded subconcious intuitive logics yet to be clarified in some language.
Now can two physical systems that interact and create emerging new physical systems be considered chance? I would argue not exactly. Emerging physical systems are a result of genetic algorithms in evolutionary formula, in other words the most likely and most suitable will happen but there are many most likelies and most suitables up until the point of occurance, or emergence of the new physical system.
Chance defined as what happened did happen and all other possibities didn't won't happen in the design process but rather in the building process.
It is human guessing, illusion to assume there are multiple possibilties for any situation, there is always only one but we don't understand it until after the fact. Therefore with the preconception of reality it is obvious to seee why people think random chance shit happens a lot.
Rambling rambling on my blackberry
Ramble on..
metababble, not sure exactly what you are trying to say, but I think [im guessing, and therefore taking a chance! albeit an educated guess lollerskates] you actually agree with me.
yeah, i kinda thought addiction, jp and meta were all saying the same thing; what people chalk up to chance is really the lack of a rigorous explanation, plain laziness or an inability to construct "laws" or "rules" that are explicative enough to render chance into a more metaphysical construct...
yup.
it's either laziness or just the selfish desire to separate the author and the authoring system; it depends on how i'm feeling, really.
i can think of a scenario where someone would have asked Pollock if his paintings were "chance" and watching Pollock jam a beer bottle down their throat.
i was watching a trisha brown video at the walker this past weekend, where she was performing a drawing. trisha brown for those that don't know is a postmodern choreographer and dancer, collaborated with cage, rauschenberg, and laurie anderson and a contemporary of merce cunningham - i thought she did some work with merce as well? anywho, what at first looked like chance, at least my initial reaction, it dawned on me how little chance had to do with the performance. it almost certainly had structure. you may perhaps suggest that the initial impulse, the first mark, may have been chance, but i would argue against that as well. it was a remarkable 20 minute video, made even more interesting as the work that she produced, was hanging on the wall 20 feet away, allowing me to confirm mark for mark her performance....chance? hardly.
Youtube?
Yes we were all saying the same thing.
Beta what you speak of is a 20 minute parallel scenario of what I would mean by performance for architecture. The performance of an architect can years for a single project. I am not just talking production and process performance, but all the social dancing and politcal meandering required for allowing certain processes in a project to take place so that the product is the intended although actually slightly emerging differently design.
beta, meta;
i fully agree with the last two posts. for people like me (an angry computer nerd), a 3-point shot in basketball is perceived as a chance occurrence. if i took the time to develop my 3 point shot, i would be able to explain most of my failures and most of my points.
but i'm an architect, so i just say everything i don't understand is magical. i make up words. i misunderstand the physics of a 3 point shot, and get on with my day. blargh. (/sarcasm.)
i do like the idea of the whole performance of the architect as being a lengthy endeavor. i generally focus on the specifics of the creation act when thinking about these things; seeing the whole choreography of building a building as a deterministic dance is at worst amusing and at best, deeply interesting.
gg.
Addictionbomb your last post makes me want to further expand on something.
Chance is of little interest or importance here as we can read.
So...I would like to divide Emergence into two types.
Virtual Emergence
Real Emergence
Virtual Emergence - Conceptual frameworks, ideological values, and rational systems of thought that appear to develop and present themselves to all who speak the language as new or without memory.
-this happens in the beginning of any design process a lot. Academia's push for process is an attempt at developing processes that lead quickly and efficiently to virtual emergences.
Real Emergence
Matter, energy, and frequency interacting in such a way as to form new matter and energy and frequencies that have not existed before. This occurs with or without our perception.
Performance and both Emergences in Architecture
Virtual Emergence is the first act of any architectural performance. The architect and client meet with pre concieved notions of beautiful creative design, and from this collision of thought a hyrbrid compromised idea is usually agreed upon This idea becomes the foundation from where the design proceeds to develop and it further determines the important acts and decisions of the design process.
When the virtual emergence of the idea is finalized, whether a sketch or eye candy renderings, this virtual emergence then enters the world of construction halfway.
Construction drawings are.a halfway point between virtual and real emergence. Details develop based on past real scenarios. Past real scenarios are systems of thought that developed as reflections of material reality and therefor are virtual all can be proven as real as well.
The construction drawings are given to the builder and moments of real emergence occurs for many reasons, many.
Throughtout the construction the architects performance involves maintaing the virtual idea of the building but usually comprises here and there which leads to real emergences, or previously unintended or imagined results.
The architect performs in both types of emergences, because the architect is real and can give directives that cause real things to happen, he can be the individual who makes a virtual emergence become part of the real world and therefore forever altering the real world through what begin as virtual emergence.
Frank gehry studied the scales of a fish conceptually. Combined the motion of a fish with buildings in the mathematical technique of dividing form into scale to ultimately arrive at Bilboa, and there my friends is the genius of gehrys architecutural performance.
I may say koolhaas has no talent, but he is one hell of an architectural performer, clearly one of the best.
Let me remember things I don't know. - Creedence Clearwater Revival
See the problem I have with this whole emergence bullshit is that architecture does not perform.
While some buildings do move and carry out specific actions, architecture itself is a construct. It is a facilitator of performance.
I suppose architects can perform but I find nothing interesting about modern, contemporary or postmodern architectural performances. I think the contemporary architectural performance is in a whole a shallow passing of contempt that architects seem to have. Essentially no matter how well-designed or integrated they are, the buildings themselves cannot do anything but harbor others to do actions within them.
I suppose it becomes a gray area when buildings move into self-sufficiency, artificial intelligence and advance robots... but I think those things stop becoming buildings when they can breathe, move and think by themselves. I'd liken them more to titans or demigods than I would architecture.
So, really, there's architecture, Architecture and architecture.
Emerge all it wants but only 3% of the population can afford. Describing it as a performance or as some grand gesture only makes the price tag go up, not down.
architecture performs by keeping the sun off my head.
Orochi you clearly misunderstood everything I said, so badly did you misunderstand if you're not a foreigner and you didn't read what I wrote you're either completely retarded and a CAD monkey/renderer/student somewhere. - I mean this in the nicest way.
Next time you pull in a job and get it built, let me know about how you performed and if anything emerged in the design process or the building of the project - keep me posted.
Oh, i'm not an architect... I'm a planner... you're little fuckwit [I mean that in the nicest way] "performance" is completely undermined by what I decide to do when I decide to do it and if it like it.
If anything. I'd be the performer on this stage.
You make a design-- you do not assemble the parts of the greater whole. A whole team does that.
I didn't understand it. Becuase there was nothing to understand. Because the concept you speak of linguistically impossible with the words you chose.
Oh man, I should not operate the internet drunk.
I really despair at the disparaging comments from designer/architects on process-based design.
It doesnt matter what the process is, it only matters what the result is. And any designer worth their salt understands the difference between creating and controlling a process, and blindly setting up something and letting it runs it course without discretion and intervention.
The principles of emergence are just one basis for process driven design, but like most things it is a trend and a therefore a newly discovered tool to use. It has its issues - as mentioned above, it applies to self-organising groups, which implies feedback and movement which when applied literally to a static object is hard to justify or make work.
However, any Calatravaesque building with some structural expression signifying or alluding to movement is guilty of the same fallacy.
It is dangerous to have this impulse to completely nullify something because it is a result of an experimental approach. Most of the people doing this neglect the fact that the profession has always developed this way.
The anti-experimentalist, anti-processor is on a one way track to banality. Do you just want to be code monkeys? Last time I looked, every building was different - why is that?
diabase, a breath of fresh air in this thread.
I mind the manners as well, but I equally take offense at muddy thinking/language to which I prefer "reenactments".
ckl - you and I have always seen eye to eye methinks...
we should have a beer.
drink up orochi! if we were in a bar i'd just punch ya, that's what i do when my friends are too drunk to understand.
when I heard that Charles Moore said "Architecture is a performing art" I pretty much went bonkers like Orochi above, but not until I started doing my own work did it make sense.
let's be clear i am not talking about buildings performing, nor was anybody else above, a drunk planner interepreted that, must be drinking scotch. we're talking about process vs. product and I threw in performance. the architect does all three, get it?
Emergence is a trend of theory in architecture, but taken on it's own philosohpical and logical level is frankly the way this universe works. The cutting edge physics, economists, and mathematicians know this. Now how it relates to architecture, was what I was trying to explain.
Orochi, now that I think about it....a planner who doesn't understand Emergence is pretty naive, you get out much?
come on i was processing the emerging knowledge in my grey matter...
emergence/self-organization is based on the selfish genes, the financial crisis is a great example^^
self-organization is only one aspect of nature, not a must^^
nature is a construct created by those not capable of explaining processes or assigning definitive values.
I understand it. I don't like the language used to describe it.
I, also, don't believe in it.
If I was a working planner, I'd more than likely dealing with two groups of people-- people who make "inappropriate decisions" because their wealth allows them to and people who have a hard time paying $500 (adjust to what ever cost-of-living index you might have) a month in rent.
Planning is a soft science-- you could consider it bullshit science-- but it is a science. Some parts of planning are pretty hard science type stuff. Architecture is a technical art.
This where the problems come in-- an obscured academic B.S. paper about slime molds and some completely intangible physics theory are not the statistical standard deviation I need to open the flood gates of public funding [or in the case of a private-public partnership... convincing city managers to write blanks checks to get my blank check].
Then the expense part... I refuse to pay 90102398123 dollars for some tree wrapped in solar panels that vacuums farts out of my butt when 14% of the city I'm suppose to be managing is in total poverty.
Especially, when this hypothetical city I probably will never work for, can't even afford garbage service or the trash cans that are suppose to be getting emptied by said non-existent garbage service. Hell, if I don't appease whatever waste management subcontractor and they go on strike, a sizable city will fill up with trash almost instantaneously. I then have about 12 weeks to solve that problem before rats start shooting babies out of their little disease wombs or I'll be hit with a plague of rats.
Emergence is fantastical not practical. Nor even affordable. Not to mention, half the stuff seems to be blatantly ripped off from Star Trek.
Planners have many more responsibilities than site design, urban design or making things pretty. We have to make sure people aren't dumping stuff from their garages into lakes. We have to make sure people are going to the bathroom in the actual bathroom. We have to make sure poo goes where it is suppose to go. We have to do things like find places where farms can throw their corpses, where people can bury grandma and other weird things campaigns to sterilize cats because there is tuberculosis everywhere and our trash dumps are filled to the brim with kitty litter.
So, maybe when we can make sure people stop pooping everywhere, people make a commitment to stop powering everything with liquefied dinosaur juice (that one part of my hypothetical job duty is to clean up) and people make more informed choices... I'll sit down and listen to a discussion about "emergence in architecture."
The other main issue is that emergence is a property of chaos. While humans thrive of chaos, we do not make decisions based off chance-- well most of the time. We make decisions that purposely make things efficient, ineffective and problematic.
We're not some pretty looking bacteria colony that produces fractals and aligns itself toward some sort of drone like state. We like polyester, bitches/dude-bros, beer and hitting animals with cars.
So, I don't see how you can utilize chaos theory and the idea of ingrained natural complexity stemming from survival into a group of beings that like their cheese to be shot out of metal cans by compressed nitrous oxide.
I have things to solve from 400 years ago. People are probably all up on this as some ploy to sell a bunch of shit we don't need that will end up in the dump (that I have to manage) in 50 years.
commie.
"Especially, when this hypothetical city I probably will never work for, can't even afford garbage service or the trash cans that are suppose to be getting emptied by said non-existent garbage service. Hell, if I don't appease whatever waste management subcontractor and they go on strike, a sizable city will fill up with trash almost instantaneously. I then have about 12 weeks to solve that problem before rats start shooting babies out of their little disease wombs or I'll be hit with a plague of rats."
emergence in a nutshell, well kind of, you just don't know it....
"The other main issue is that emergence is a property of chaos."
- yeah you really didn't read or understand anything I wrote, so I'm drinking now to make it clear- I'm drinkin a Ukranian beer, not bad actually "Obolon"
no we are a bacteria cology that spreads out in a fractal way, but we spread before we can understand how we spread. See, Process as intent of design and Virtual Emergence are somewhat of a joke, because this human bacteria/virus as Mr. Smith puts it in the Matrix spreads chaoticly beyond a consious understanding of our subconsious will. (Schelling touched in this way back in the days of Hegel). See Hegel said there was like this total human unified spirit all leading up to one Kantian like unified categorical idea - booyaa he was wrong....then everyone gave up and started writing about deconstruction, about tearing our language apart to determine why we constantly mis-determine things...
i reference my old school blog found on architect -
see seciton "confusion!"
i gots to get back to drinking.
The original question here is of course loaded... it lures the discussion into a process vs. product choice which of course the things cannot be either / or...
I think there is a point though about the difference between architectural education and architectural practice. Education sometimes is more focused on the development of tools, of developing creativity and critical thinking, about methods, etc. But practice is about executing with those tools.
Of course you can't execute without any tools. We are on one level an ideas profession. Part of being an ideas profession is about creativity. And about having a method for producing creative ideas.
But there is another part of being an ideas profession that is about *communication*, and maybe another part that is about *making* that idea into something that is understandable to the person to whom we are delivering our ideas profession services (the clients, the end users, the stakeholders). So ideas creation is essential, but so are *communication* and *making*. We could evaluate the success of a project in each of these three parts maybe the ideas and method was good, but the communication and making were bad, but then they get 1 out of 3... In the real world, if you stop at the ideas part and you cannot communicate the idea in a useful way, or make it into something that a normal person can look at and immediately *get* and see value in, then you're falling short someplace in what our profession typically gets paid for...
The work itself needs to speak for itself. Even if that end result *is* a book, or a diagram or a competition poster or graphic model... If nobody gets it, it lacks usefulness and is maybe missing a piece of the follow through... There *is* a last communication and making step needed, and that's hard work, but that proves your process for you, without which nobody sees the point you are making... Maybe the work's end result is a book about construction or about economics of a space, or about urban flows, or a series of diagrams, but that's *still* product. I think we need to stop letting students off the hook with not following through. Force em to take the extra steps, because that's part of what we do... Let's not let people just "talk" about what they've done, show us, *step up and prove it*... :P
perhaps some food for thought:
(It seems) digital data is never really an end-product because it so easily generates more and more digital data. Computer models facilitate the production of more and more digital data. Architecturally, perhaps only an actual building is an end-product (of the model/drawing).
[Yet, for me, the 'end-product' architecture became a virtual building, specifically a virtual museum of architecture.]
11/24/04 8:45
Like saying shit is the end product of eating due to visual overtness. In determining whether process is more important than product or not, perception is more important than product or process. But not for dice playing monkey gods. Emergence is conceptually a matryoshka: an explanation of a larger mystery through the multiplication of a smaller one. One can use it to overwhelm one's argument or underwhelm others'.
there's a lot that could be gained in this discussion through an a review of agent-based software models.
they clear up a lot of the misconceptions about emergence present in this thread.
-- "perception is more important than product or process" --
to each their own, and there's nothing wrong with that. i prefer to keep knowledge on a pedestal, but i'm fully aware that other care more about effect.
-- "Emergence is conceptually a matryoshka: an explanation of a larger mystery through the multiplication of a smaller one. One can use it to overwhelm one's argument or underwhelm others" --
everything is fractal. everything.
that is the reason why the chance discussion leads to a dead end in which nothing is truly "random" and the notion of "chance" just labels those things distant to the viewer's understanding.
--
anyways, i just wanted to mention agent-based software models just in case anyone wanted to dig up some info and clear up those little emergence quabbles that have come up in this thread.
John conways game of life, so simple so simple...stephan wolframs book is good to.
Process and product are almost interchangeable in architecture. A product informs the process and therefore becomes part of the process, and the process can often be the product.
Let's look at the age old art of brewing for instance
The product beer is actually an important part to the universal process of brewing. One brewers process leads to a distinct taste. Another brewer likes part of that taste and therefore asks the other brewer about their process. The different types and styles are all results of process and ingrediants. Some steps in the process are due to current technologies available or necessary needs. For instance the storing of fermenting beer in mountain caves as opposed to barrels in a barn that heats up in the summer. Carbonating Kegs versus condition beer bottles. Even the process's processor, that is a self organizing agent, yeast can come in many different strains causing same ingredients to taste differently. The temperature during fermentation and the length of time that hops are introduced or even just left in changes the product. All these things add up to a final cold refreshing drink. Some get you drunk faster, some give you a hangover. Beer is very much a product of process, as most things are.
But telling a student what their process should be or creating a theory on process as ideology is a waste of time and a major cause of frustration. Educators should supply the ingredients and recommend the tools, let the student decide how they will create their product, let them decide on their process and if the student is interested about certain results of another architecture they will inquire about the process.
Both classical architecure and peter eisenman are not what a student should be learning unless of course they are interested in the results of such processes for doing architecture.
Study process as a suggestion not a mantra for anything.
The problem with your beer analogy is that the beer (product) is based off a rather basic chemical reaction.
There's different tolls you can use (copper-lined or silver-lined or stainless steel tanks, wooden/rubber/metal tools, variety of bottling and storage (wooden casks, glass bottles aluminum) that change various properties of the beer.
However, even beer and wine tasting can be quantitative. The reason? Because taste is a biochemical reaction. Mostly everyone has taste buds and a variety of compounds present within a beer activate those taste receptors and other olfactory receptors.
Given the right kind of instrumentation, you can document what chemicals fire what nerves, to what extent and how.
Architecture, outside of the business side, have no definitive quantitative measure. Like I said earlier in this thread, the only real quantitative measure would be profitability. Profitability doesn't necessarily mean cheap or cost-effective, it simply means what people are willing to pay for whatever product is being produced.
Outside of that, there's been maybe a handful of studies and the broken window theory that evaluate the "effectiveness" of architecture. And these studies typically look at "window treatments" and "maintained property" as indicators. It doesn't really matter about the style, per se, but that it is freshly painted, in working order, not leaking water and not visually distracting.
So, it is very hard to translate "creating space" to any tangible value. That is unless you establish a perfect control group and a perfect experimental group and walk them through buildings with a MRI machine strapped to their head.
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