Points and Lines

Here is the min-philosophy as it stands (I’m still working on the next version of this and of the dots diagram):

Design is finite transcendence from limitations. As distinguished from art it is situated by utility, and must neither capitulate to nor overwhelm its use. Its uses are in placemaking and sheltering.
Design is a form of indirect communication; its development reflects this aspect of its nature. Metaphor is a means of indirect linguistic communication. Therefore, metaphor is the tool of communicating design development.
Method:
Select a limited situation. Recognize the depth and complexity of its parameters. (!)
Develop a provocative metaphor for transcendence of its parameters.
Represent the metaphor archi-graphically.
Discuss and evaluate the limited situation of the design that the graphic demonstrates.
Develop a provocative metaphor for the transcendence of the design’s limiting condition.
Thereby:
Transform the limiting condition into possibility, through metaphor.

This week has not been about designing a building in so much as it has been about designing a process. I have been working on a series of diagrams to describe my design process, trying to enumerate the rules for the generation of forms. How does design happen? There is a jump from on thing to the next that seems indescribable.

I told Hajo that I had a revelation about what I needed to be learning (see the last entry for a taste of what this is all about), and he seemed to tell me that it was too late for me to learn all of these things, and that it takes many years to understand design theory etc. But I argued that I wanted to do this anyway, that I needed to at least explore the topic. He agreed to help me, and told me that I need to come up with a generative rule to describe how things are made, using this dot as a beginning and transforming it through steps.
The way that I work is where I have to start. I think that it is a push and pull, a nonlinear meandering that is sometimes fast and sometimes slow. So the first set of things I brought him was a rule about adding and subtracting. He said that is not generative, and it could only be additive. Furthermore, I need to describe how the judgment/evaluation occurs. This is the especially hard part, and I am not sure how to describe it.

When I was working on the design build project in Eugene with Steven Duff we practiced this “evaluation” by building mock-ups of connections and chamfers, etc., and selected the proper one based upon visual evaluation of the “feely quality” to determine which one was the best. What Hajo has asked me to do is to give words to the process of selecting what looks right. This is a huge and difficult task, and I am not sure it can be done. But I will try, because if nothing else my desire to design and desire to do anything and everything else is driven by a desire to transcend limitations.

That brings me to the other area of exploration I have been pursuing this week: philosophical criticism. I have picked back up a book I read as an undergrad called Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues by Drew Highland (http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=53222). As I read the introduction over again I almost cried, the way he described his view of what Plato is saying in the dialogues (Highland has a very different take than most throughout history) is incredibly similar to the way I approach design.

As for the exersize of describing the process of generation with dots, I am not entirely sure where it is going right now but perhaps I am not supposed to. It kind of feels like solving a Koan, so perhaps I am on the road to some kind of enloghtenment...