WHENTHINGSARE WHATEVERCAN BE THE CASE

Ludger Hovestadt,Vera Bühlmann

APPLIED VIRTUALITY BOOK SERIES

AUTHORS :

PROF. DR. LUDGER HOVESTADT : Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Institute for Technology in Architecture ITA, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.

DR. PHIL. VERA BÜHLMANN : Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Institute for Technol-ogy in Architecture ITA, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.

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© 2013 AMBRA | VAMBRA | V is part of Medecco Holding GmbH, ViennaPrinted in Germany

In some cases, despite efforts to do so, the obtaining of copyright permissions and usage of excerpts of text was not always successful.

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN : onlab, Thibaud Tissot, Matthieu HuegiCOPYEDITING : Leah Whitman-Salkin IMAGE RESEARCH : David SchildbergerPRINTING AND BINDING : Strauss GmbH, D-MörlenbachTYPEFACE : ITC Weidemann Std

Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper

With 275 figures

ISSN 2196-3118

ISBN 978-3-99043-557-1 AMBRA | V

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much 10, exuberance 12, curiosity 15, reference 20, inver-sion 27, sophistication 33, insertion 40, eternal 44, narra-tion 48, symbolization 54, imagine 60, fear 70, sourcing 72, calculating 77, grounding 80, balancing 84, correctness 88, symbolic reality 92, symbolically-declared identity 101, exis-tence 108, empowerment 118, insistence 122, generaliza-tion 128, truth 133, devotion 138, difference 148, enclosure 152, sun 156, good morning 157, turbulences 165, capsules 170, sediments 180, plateaus 184, breath 190, engendering 191, delight 198, decadence 202, ability 205, concentration 208, eagerness 212, urban architectonics 217, partition and paradoxes 219, existence 222, the symbolic nature of quan-tity 225, the evocative reality of numerosity 228, engender-ing. data opens up quantum actuality. thinking within the amphibolic polynominality of series. 231, like tales at the foot of the pyramids 235, posology of symbolic data 237, doping 240, learning to consider the motoricities proper to live forms as viewed from within a zoology of genera 243, fertility 245, magic 246, shadow 250, writings 253, ani-mation 260, ratio 268, subject 276, absolute 287, politics 295, population 302, symbolization 310, identification 320, logistics 325, supply 334, stimulation 342, incentive 347, embodiment 352, abstraction 356, ability 361, entropy 374, logical analysis 375, complexity 380, probability 384, control 390, aesthetics 397, surrender 400, negligence 406, amazing 407, confidence 410, self-confidence 415, delicacy 420, intelligence 424, fantastic 428, eagerness 438, delight 442, relaxation 449, affair 460, doping 468, any 470, narrative 478, inversion 487, activity 496, sym-bolic habitat 503, species 508, application 517, dating 524

5TABLE OF CONTENTS

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PS. Remember the first daguer- reotypes ? They are beautiful and they are not perfect. We suggest to regard the poor technical quality of some of the images as a phenomenon of 2012. What could we do about it ? If we were to seek out only high-quality images, work would get expensive and slow. If we want to be fast and sense the pulse of devel-opments, this must happen at the expense of technical quality. We hold that today, technology is simply no lon-ger the primary issue. Within some five years or so, such a book will be able to appear in much better technical quality without any additional effort.

Index. This book does not describe anything. It does not judge. It inspires. You will find no continuous texts. But you will find a wide range of topics. This book is a sheaf of indexes. An index again is a sheaf of indexes. So how to read this book ? Take the notions seri-ously. Search the Internet and they loose their generalness. They will begin to speak to you vividly. They will become richer and richer. Bundle these riches with the riches of other notions and they will activate each other. Give them a mark, a label, an index of your own. Treat them as strange identities and learn to get famil-iar with them. Also, take the pictures seri-ously. Photograph or scan them. Use them as an index, just like the notions, while searching the Internet. Again, you will find rich stories. Bundle those riches, con-centrate them into new identities that are interesting to you. The more accu-rate you can address them, in terms of your interest, the richer and livelier they get. Let yourself be inspired by the intel-lectual wealth of our world. This is the way in which this book has been created. And you can continue it. It is an exciting adventure. Demanding and optimistic.

Inception. What is the core of global politics ? Fanned out by worldwide logistics, the familiar axiomatic sys-tems are losing their stabil-ity. Many have been describ-ing this process as a process of erosion and decay, they warn and summon irreduc-

ible “elements” instead. In this book we would like to present an ode to our world in the moment when it looses its analyt-ical sterility. And we find fertilities and engenderings everywhere. We no longer expect the constitution of things in logical forms ; we begin to find them in the sym-bolics of algebra, in its theory of abstract symmetries, with its structural concepts of groups, fields, rings, domains, and categories.

The systematic form of phi- losophy was elaborated to answer the ontological question posed by the advent of axiomatics when it jolted the unified world of myth, moulded as it was, by natural language.

— Jules Vuillemin, What Are Philosophical Systems

a novel, an album, a travelogue, an essay, a constitution, an atlas, a report, a fiction, a definition, a manifesto, an appeal, a compo-sition, a compilation, a buildup, a research, an analysis, an entry, a declaration, a state-ment, an excursion, a meditation, a reflection, a projection, a design, an illustration, a concept, an abstract, an outline, a choice, a list

INCEPTION / INDEX

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Existentialism is the chilly cultural cli-mate where people become aware that their capacities have gotten out of rational or natural proportion. The existentialist feels like Gulliver the Giant in the Land of Fragility : the real-ity of existence is marked by an incred-ible asymmetry and incommensurabil-ity between the idea of Being as primitive and existing as the product of the complex ways in which we reason about Being — insofar as Being is meant as being part of meaningful civilizations.

Sheaves. A bundle of indexes to that which we hold in great esteem. The celebration of sym-bolic fertilities. Very simple, and yet so difficult. For within the symbolic, the general is no lon-ger without sex and gender. It starts to familiar-

ize itself with its own kind. The empty forms, the abstract schemata, classes, and types reveal themselves according to their different generations. Because each of these generations allows for different operable conceptualizations. Hence we start to learn about the capacity that is proper to the general-as-a-kind, namely that of engender-ing through abstraction. This capac-

ity starts to figure in different modalities : finitely and infinitary methods of abstraction. While we are rather familiar, meanwhile, with the finite modal-ities of the general’s capacity for demonstrative definition and delimitation, we only begin to learn about its powers in the modality of infinitary meth-ods. The infinitary methods we know today follow the genetic methods of root extraction and factorization, and those of generic transformations. As a kind, the general now seeks to populate and maintain itself qua formulaic identities that can be named, which takes place in a grammar where nouns extend into the symbolic formality of polynomials. By applying those meth-ods we are flirting with the spiritual on the grounds of explicit communi-cability, and we experience something like the coming out of the general. Their quickening, their vivacity, within a queer culture of conceptual math-ematization. Is this book to be read as an encyclopedia then, in continuation of Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot ? Or as a collection of eccentricities, as a budget of paradoxes à la Augustus De Morgan ? Their problem had been how to possibly orientate thought between two opposed orders : the analytic order that proceeds from the complex to the simple, try-ing to sort confusion into distinction, and that of the synthetic, which reverses the directions. The problem as we understand it today concerns the articu-late-ability of both order’s teamwork. Welcome to the symbolic ! Welcome to the reality of conceptual mathematics, which seeks no longer to be uni-formly and universally applicable, but which instead grants its categories to comprehend entire universes. Conceptions for which qualities can be extracted and grasped by an open interplay between formulation and reso-lution. Mathematics for which quantities are organized within the abstract into fields and domains, providing the support to reason rigorously yet fan-tastically about the conceivable qualities. Certainly there is something awful about this situation, in the literal yet doubled sense of that word — meaning, on the one hand, something which respects awe and inspires reverence, but, on the other, something that feels dreadful and unbearable. We don’t think

Economy means gain, thrift, less burden, daring ; it is defined as the rule for the good administration of a house, derived from the Greek “oikos,” which means house, and “nomos” (going back to “nemein”), which means to deliver, to distribute.

SHEAVES

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there is any absolute necessity to face this situation. Precisely because we don’t think so we would like to suggest viewing it as a secular party, a reign, or festivity we would be happy to attend. With this book we wish to mark a domain of artifactuality for learning to formulate questions related to this situation. We think it is adequate to do so as a declaration of love for the life, the reasoning, and the learning possible on planet earth. This domain of arti-factuality conceives of things neither as objects or essences, nor as singular-ities, but in all grammatical openness and expressivity as that which can be the case. This domain of artifactuality extends on a level which we call pre- specific. Each artifact encapsulates certain dramatizations of voice, time, place, relation. This pre-specificity manifests itself in the stories and narratives, in the oeuvres, the products, and the articles that populate our everyday lives as much as the space of intellectuality as a whole. All the images in this book are gathered from the diverse worldwide media networks to which more and more people have access. Instead of controlling our search by choos-ing keywords, we have searched the data networks by using our own pho-tographs, texts, and drawings as indexes. We have sent these indexes to the data networks with a quest for returning images, texts, and drawings similar to those we use as indexes. Thus there is an individual as well as a generic story behind every image contained in this book. And the reader will cer-tainly have her or his own story to tell about it. There is nothing extraordi-nary about the images we have selected. We were not interested in staging drastic phenomena in an exemplary manner. Rather, we wanted to encoun-ter all the clichés, those apparently empty forms, at casual occasions. What would they be telling us, if we met them — with casual interest and curi-osity, yet without binding obligations — at a Friday night cocktail party ?

SHEAVES

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The many words. Chirping, whistling, singing, gloomy, crying, telling, relaxing, soothing, reciting, chattering, daffing, bleating, guiding,instructive, summarizing, descriptive, whis-pering, caressing, puzzling, careful, questioning, searching, inquisitive, interrogatory, skeptical, discussing, joyful, excited, determined, com-manding, passionate, distancing, defensive, threatening, devastating. The speeches, epics, poems, aphorisms, collections, manuals, constitutions, encyclopedia, narratives, plays, and stories. The little words, the big notions, the powerful concepts. The elements, the characters, the logical forms of inference, the numbers, the counting, the accounting, cal-culating, exponentiation, integration, differen-tiation, factorization, root extraction, exponen- tiating, integrating, differentiating. The artful riding on the zero. The taming of the infinite. The craft, the tools, the calculating, the writing, the machines. Our bodies, the houses, the cities, the books, the machinery, the infrastruc-ture, the networks, the media. The water, the earth, the plants, the fruits, the fields, the fruits of the sea, arranging, nurturing, harves-ting. The hunger, housekeeping, partying, eating, drinking, sleeping. The movements, the ideas, the dreams, the plans, the construction, the doing, the understanding, the agreements, the regulations, the puzzles, the meetings,

MU

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the relaxation, saving, protecting. We are capa- ble of so much. We can do so much. We have so much. We have experienced so much. There are so many of us.

12 MUCH

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Masks. Venice carnival.

13EXUBERANCE

14 MUCH

Folding the masks. Becoming individual. Jan van Huysum, Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, ca. 1721.

15CURIOSITY

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The remaining. What can only be shown. The mystical. The myrical. The scary. The obscure. Curiosity Cham-ber at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

16 MUCH

17CURIOSITY

What can be said. The concepts. The attributes. The con-templation. Without an end. About the language. About the elements. Abbey library of Saint Gall, St. Gallen.

18 MUCH

19CURIOSITY

Ubiquity. Energy. Electricity. Abstraction. What can be done. The phantastic. London.

20 MUCH

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21REFERENCE

Green. Wet. Full. Rich. The Amazon River presented by Greenpeace.

22 MUCH

23REFERENCE

Immersing. Searching. Encapsulating. Iceland.

24 MUCH

25REFERENCE

Hot. Dry. Out there. California.

26 MUCH

27INVERSION

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28 MUCH

Collecting. Encapsuling. Dramatizing. All you’ve got. Palm Garden, Franfurt am Main.

29INVERSION

Achieving. Alluring. Ecuador.

30 MUCH

31INVERSION

32 MUCH

“The selection of pastries included a variety of bread rolls : viennois, campagne, et complet, as well as traditional pas-tries including brioche au chocolat, pain aux chocolat et éclats de noisettes, pain aux chocolat et amandes de

Sicile, croissant noise-citron (sweet, country, and whole-wheat), (filled with almond cream and covered in lemon frosting), and a croissant plaza réalisé au beurre noisette et vrai miel d’acacia.” Alain Ducasse, A Life Worth Eating.

33SOPHISTICATION

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34 MUCH

Silk. China.

35SOPHISTICATION

36 MUCH

Cargo loaders and other equipment. Antonov 124 in the distance.

37SOPHISTICATION

Modeling. Handling. Acquainting. Sounding. Acquiring. Car manufacturing, the production of doors, Germany.

38 MUCH

39SOPHISTICATION

Architectural school, Chicago.

40 MUCH

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41INSERTION

Electronics. Cairo.

42 MUCH

43INSERTION

Coney Island, New York.

44 MUCH

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45ETERNAL

Depending. Relying. Joining. Negotiating. Balancing. Old Town in Delhi, 2011.

46 MUCH

47ETERNAL

The animistic order. A “One” machine. Isphahan, 2011.

48 MUCH

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49NARRATIVE

The algebraic order. An “Any” machine. 88W8686-Chip of the 90 nm WLAN-Single Chip Solution by Marvell, 2007.