Ritual? Cultural norm?
I believe that humans, in order to function in the world, have this inate need to constantly strive to order and categorize our surroundings.To gain a sense of familiarity, to become familiar. This is an exersion of control we need to have so that decisions may be made regarding the world around us, how to operate within it.
If we place ourselves in a situation where we are removed from a condition of familiarity, we allow ourselves to be exposed to potentials of infinite dimensions. How are we traditionally accustomed to space and its ideas on solidity, materiality, and this constant engagement with architecture as complying with these notions?, can the experience of space somehow take precedence over its traditional ideals? somehow, affective architecture become more recognized. definitely, the virtual is the way to go...supportive reasons why this is so? technological emphasis, the emergence of virtuality, media implications so on so forth.
The world around us , and the way everything within it is contained IS anthropocentric, thus, the spatial relation is always referenced back to the human scale.This is what our bodies are familiar with, and accustomed to. It enables us to digest scalar information in relation to ourselves.
can we begin to envision space as not composed of flat floors, levels, series of stacked levels? a way of removing ourselves from the familiar? a move away from modernism has already begun, but yet to fully accept forms other than the cube still poses a problem. Take for example the mixed opinions on Federation Square. I would say that a larger percentage of Melbourne's population find it difficult to accept its architecture. (see AsymptotE for example)
Another way of breaking the boundaries of the familiar may be not to remove oneself from it. Rather another way to succesfully be exposed to the unfaliliar is through a rigorous and thorough re-examination of what is already familar, and by bringing that to its extremes, boundaries may be broken. In this way, the constant struggle of what defines a real architecture becomes easier because we can despite stable and familiar environments which we are accustomed to, we may somehow find a way to express beyond the familiar. To stretch it to its limits? ( see DillerScofidio)let's pose ourselves the challenge of re-experiencing the real, allowing the virtual to be present through the experience, or the consequence it triggers. A new order, new organizations, new interactions, new relationships.
virtual reality...."we may never be able to full comprehend that which we perceive" richard brown.....it is not our eyes that fool us at times, it is our inability to think outside the square. To be out of the familiar.
Why do we order space? Can the theory of self-organization apply here? (see EmergencE)
"microbehaviour" versus " overall behaviour" "emergent, self-organizing systems" "bottom-up" "non-existent pacemakers" "inter-connected web"
hierachical organization vs Self Organization ( EmergencE )
HIEARCHIES & FAMILIARITY
why do hierachies exist almost on every level? pacemakers? Because we like to see hierarchies. One reason we see hierarchies everywhere is because they are a tractable way of carving up the world for human beings. They introduce an order which unites a number of different (physical or computational) objects (those at one level) under a common descriptor. Thus even in situations in which the actual ('God's eye') complexity of a (computational or structural) phenomenon may not admit of a genuinely hierarchical description, we may fruitfully impose a hierarchical description which captures some aspects of the phenomenon.
The grammar that describes the behavior at a high level of a specified hierarchy need not have any application at all at a lower level of the same hierarchy. That is to say we do not treat everything under the same order, to understand that the virtual lies in a separate realm?not sure!
is this nescessarily successful though?, to impose upon an enity a relationship which may or may not be fit it.....its like the constant congruencing of relationships. the perfectness of the two opposing poles! does everything fit in together so neatly?can it?
Mark Rakatansky, in Strategies in Architectural Thinking : we are tempted to conclude that what is uncanny is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. In the course of his essay what is revealed is another meaning of heimlich: concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it...to behave heimlich: as though there were something to conceal...heimlich places (which good manners oblige to conceal). Thus, the uncanny in reality is nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind which has been estranged only by the process of repression.
Concrete Is As Concrete Doesn't brian massumi
Pception & Light: Formgivers for Architecture , Wlliam M. C Lam, McGraw??-Hill Book Company, 1988, USA
When we see something that is unfamiliar, unclassifiable, it arouses curiosity. Partly because it is unfamiliar, a novelty, and partly because the unfamiliar may be dangerous. “When one encounters the unfamiliar, biological defense mechanisms are set off which heighten awareness until the new element has been classified.” P.32
Now moment Importantly, these moments of meeting emerge through the falling apart of familiar procedures. Something happens that disrupts standard action-reaction circuits; the habitual is wiped aside. The conversation was just moving along and then suddenly, that path of action is thrown into suspension. In the falling away of certain conventions and structures that scaffold the interchange between patient and therapist, an affective tone looms large. Otherwise humming along in the background, affect now overflows and fills the foreground, making the atmosphere "hot". Space becomes dense and deep. This is what they call a "now moment".
They write that "these moments are unfamiliar, unexpected in their exact form and timing, unsettling or weird. They are often confusing as to what is happening or what to do. …The present becomes very dense subjectively as in a moment of truth. These now moments are often accompanied by expectancy or anxiety because the necessity of choice is pressing, yet there is no immediately available prior plan of action or explanation." (The Process of Change Study Group, Non-Interpretative Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy. The "something more" than interpretation., International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1998)79, 903 (http://www.ijpa.org))