Windows Without Buildings Notes, 2
1. Messes
1.1. Messes are always manmade, or they are the natural effect of time or destructive phenomena on something manmade.
1.1.1. The same effects of these phenomena on natural settings do not produce the same reactions or connotations, they are landscapes, in any state
1.2. Messes have scale, relatively
1.3. On a Food Network Challenge a ‘food stylist’ was critiquing others of her trade for not making things appear ‘random’ enough, cherries in a cherry pie were “too perfect,” I found myself wondering why someone didn’t just make the food, make a pie and slice it, if they had made the food and showed it, it would be what it was without any illusions
1.3.1. you can’t intentionally make something look as if it fit the criteria for a happenstance occurrence, or intentionally create a mess, the mess has to come out of a confluence of naturally conflicting components and forces, like a train wreck or a child’s bedroom
1.3.2. if you create the mess then it is just theater, it is wedging a classical façade into a contemporary scene merely to deploy its contrast, its pose, which in some approaches might be an appropriate response, but in the emulation of nature’s gestation of solutions, the manufactured is contrary, such is the conundrum of the architect whose solutions can be nothing but theater, but never a mess
1.4. Do messes have time dependency; do they have to be ‘built up’?
1.4.1. No, they can happen instantaneously, but only with great force.
1.5. There is a distinction between things or situations that are ‘messy’ and something that is a mess, I think a mess is something more irreversible
1.6. Messes in art
1.6.1. I would typically gravitate more towards sculptural work, 2-dimensional work, no matter how sloppy or ad hoc tends to always yield to its format
1.6.1.1. Perhaps except frescos, graffiti, peeling paint in run-down rooms
1.6.2. Installation work like Barry Le Va et al has a meditative homogeneity to it, it is indexical of the material properties and effects of the forces exerted on it.
1.6.2.1. A mess is more inscrutable.
1.6.2.2. It requires more heterogeneity, maybe not of substance but of effect, it lacks a control
2. Wasted efforts
2.1. Material patterns
2.1.1. How far outside the normative do you have to stray to register
2.2. Alignments
2.2.1. How many people would walk by the Kukulcan Serpent at Chichen Itza on the equinox, but the siting and geometry are established by its invocation
2.2.2. Similarly, for intra alignments I often close one of my eyes to attempt to draw relationships between lines in space
2.2.2.1. Enfilade
2.2.2.2. English landscape gardens
2.2.2.3. Framed views
2.2.2.4. Recreation of iconic images as tourism
2.2.2.4.1. Fallingwater
2.2.3. Felice Varini
2.2.3.1. These more abstract instances often need external clues or instructions or prompts
2.2.4. Anamorphosis, “The Ambassadors”
2.2.5. Trompe l’oeils with fixed station points
2.2.5.1. These have the goal implicit to their initial intake, things that have slight and obvious dislocations from the norm invite us to complete them,
2.2.5.2. However, the further we move away from that the harder it is to embed the implicit prompt
2.2.5.2.1. Especially post-abstraction, where these arrays have grown to be understood ‘for themselves’, as fragmentation is accepted without keys to its reassembly, not as vehicles toward something else
