Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was born today July 12, 1895.
R. Buckminster Fuller, ca. 1917.
Lesson / Koan : Do more with less.
CUPtopia has always been a fan of Bucky’s spirit and his environmental attitude.
BTW,
At 116 years old, Bucky is as fresh as ever…as so is his utopia of ideas.
NOTE :
Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth“, ephemeralization, and synergetics.
Our current model of architecture is too slow.
Scaffolding City; Architectural Utopia of the Future Past by Edward Dodington.
Lesson / Koan : Be quick & hasten slowly.
Architecture ( a completely overused & mis-defined word ), is too slow to respond to global ecological and economic crisis alike. We need a faster system. One that can quickly adapt, bend, strategically buckle, and not only build, but rebuild.
BTW,
Imagine a new city based on rebuilding principles; a city open to local ecology, flexibly planned, easily maintained and self-perpetuating. This is a city looking toward future models of synthetic anthropological and zoological urbanism and is yet rooted in the history of human development. It is strangely familiar. This is Scaffolding city—an architectural utopia of the future past.
NOTE :
Scaffolding city—an architectural utopia of the future past is the brain child of Edward (Ned) Dodington.
Dodington received a B.A. in Art History from Carleton College in 2003 and an M.Arch from Rice university in 2009. While at Rice Ned devoted his graduate career to studying potential points of architectural design intervention in biological systems. His work has/will be soon published in Architectural Design Magazine, Brkt Magazine, Humanimaila, and the Columbia University GSAP yearly student review. He has written for The Architetureal Society in New York, Manifold Magazine, and the Houstonist.
Ned Dodington is also the author & creator of a little known site…Animal Architecture.
Animal Architecture is an ongoing investigation into the performative role of biology in design. The project operates on the edge between humans and our surrounding “others” — illuminating alternative ways of living with nonhuman animals, discussing cross-species collaborations, and defining new frameworks through which to discuss biologic design.
Animal Architecture imagines a state of architecture no longer separate from the world around us.
For more information on hasten slowly…refer to CUPtopia post : by things…of September 25, 2010.
Last,
Italo Calvino would have approved of the model introduced by Scaffolding city—an architectural utopia of the future past.
Just a few ideas about the last week of posts referring to the subjects of travel, movement(s) and going places.
Festina lente or Σπεῦδε βραδέως is a classical adage meaning “hasten slowly“. It has been used as the motto of many people such as the Emperors Augustus and Vespasian. The meaning of the phrase is that activities should be performed with a proper balance of urgency and diligence. If tasks are rushed too quickly then mistakes are made and good long-term results are not achieved. Work is best done in a state of flow in which one is fully engaged by the task and there is no sense of time passing.
Lesson / Koan : One wishes for success, but our definition of success must be our own.
Two individuals can help greatly with this wish.
Aldus Pius Manutius (1449/1450 – February 6, 1515), was an Italian humanist who became a printer and publisher when he founded the Aldine Press in Venice. His publishing legacy includes the distinctions of inventing italic type, establishing the modern use of the semicolon, and introducing inexpensive books in small formats bound in vellum that were read much like modern paperbacks. The publishing logo imprint of Aldus was the dolphin around an anchor, today used by Doubleday. It is derived from the symbol of the ancient city of Beirut, Lebanon and text from the proverb “Festina lente” (Hasten slowly). Aldus had taken as a motto as early as 1499, and regularly expounded to his friends.
One who listened to Aldus was Italo Calvino. “From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, Festina lente, hurry slowly.” The quote is from his series of lectures called Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of lectures written by Italo Calvino for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, but never delivered as Calvino died before leaving Italy. The lectures were to be given in the fall of 1985, and Memos was published in 1988. The memos are lectures on the values of literature which Calvino felt were important for the coming millennium. At the time of his death Calvino had finished all but the last lecture.
Italian cover of the Six memos for the next millennium.
Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium contains five memos, or personal testaments. The sixth was never written on paper. Each memo on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity acts as a guideline for life and creativity. Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book one should all read to endure a more satisfying life of clarity and simplicity.
The Symbol of Festina lente was critical to Italo Calvino as in a rebus. His early & life-long love of fairy tales represented his desire or wish to have his readers travel into the types of similar imagery.
The values which Calvino highlights are:
All that is known of the sixth lecture is that it was to be on consistency.
BTW,
One should really spend time with the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Below is but a few of who were invited to speak.
T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Sigfried Giedion, Thornton Wilder, E.E. Cummings, Ben Shahn, Pier Luigi Nervi, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Eames, Octavio Paz, Frank Stella, Umberto Eco, John Cage, John Cage.
A rebus (Latin: “by things”) is a kind of word puzzle that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words.
The term rebus also refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound. This adapts pictograms into phonograms. A precursor to the development of the alphabet, this process represents one of the most important developments of writing. Fully developed hieroglyphs read in rebus fashion were in use at Abydos in Egypt as early as 3400 BC.
The writing of correspondence in rebus form became popular in the 18th century and continued into the 19th century. Lewis Carroll wrote the children he befriended picture-puzzle rebus letters, nonsense letters, and looking-glass letters, which had to be held in front of a mirror to be read. Rebus letters served either as a sort of code or simply as a pastime.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
Taking a look at the symbol of the dolphin around the anchor, and how it relates to Beirut and Calvino…
The dolphin symbolizes quickness and/or lightness, and the anchor stands for firmness (or perhaps exactitude and/or consistency via Calvino). According to Wikipedia, this symbol appeared on a Roman coin in Beirut during the mid-first century. As the saying goes, there are two sides to every coin, and the reverse of this one depicted Tyche, the goddess of the fortune of a city. As a whole, is this coin telling us that our ability to be successful has two faces? – the things within our control, per Calvino’s Six Memos, and the things which are dictated by fate or fortune?
“…and so, beginning with your death, you should [bring]; your life’s work to completion…” an excerpt from the Tibetan Book of the Dead… most who know my interests are informed enough to realize that excerpts such as this are not a morbid fascination with death, rather a rigorous fascination with life. to bring this full circle and tie with the discussion ill just say that that which is done with the care and precision of a “life’s” work often becomes realized in a posthumous way. Calvino’s body may have left us but his mind knew the ephemeral and open ended nature of idea. In this perspective one sees the unfinished memo not as a short fall but as a grand gesture to humanity?
Yesterday’s post was a piece from the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. SANAA invited the film director Wim Wenders to do a short video.
As a follow up, and continuation, the installation ”Architecture as Air” by Junya Ishigami is a manifesto to inhabit. Junya Ishigami worked for SANAA from 2000-2004. The project received the Golden Lion award for best project at the Biennale.
The “essence of Architecture” is a Pedagogical approach in Japan. This approach is embodied by vision & emotion. The ”Architecture as Air” is a re-interpretation of the 1912 Kroller-Muller house by Mies Van der Rohe…without the canvas. Both projects, nearly a century apart, have the same lasting power. BUT, imagine what would the “Architecture as Air” be, without the existing building as its’ canvas? Also, the “Architecture as Air” learned one of Mies’s best lesson…in a project, always look for what can be taken out. Junya Ishigami’s subtraction is potentially his biggest design move. The “essence of Architecture” is invisible for a reason…it has history. Please read the text below the image for a historical connection.
below is Jonathan Glancey’s text drawing a wonderful connection between the “Architecture as Air” project and Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Inside the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.
They were, they said, “thinking of architecture in the air”, whereby “even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike”. As the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.
The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami’s installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a cell of our own making. The house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres (about 46 feet by 13 feet) – as if it might be built for real, and it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing.
another parallel could be drawn between this project and fred sandback’s studies with acrylic yarn. the void creates the spatial arrangement?
joker are discussing. 
meredith is discussing. 
unfortunately architecture is on the threshold of becoming a geometry driven practice (here the term geometry makes no reference to mathematics, simply to oganically driven formal expressions and an act of biomimicry) rather than biocompatinility or tempting. it is refreshingly to see proposals in which the scaffold and template approach that has been adopted by many biomedical fields where the organic and inorganic act as scaffolds of collaborative development is being transliterated into the design conversation.