A Dream From The Air Conditioned Nightmare

There is nothing worse than waking aggravated from a well deserved rest exhausted because you had a nightmare about the Job and Place you're exhausted from day after day. Yes. I had dreamt of work. I've had these "nightmares" as of late and it's very annoying knowing that in a few hours, I have to go back there for better or worse! The "nightmare" in question was about a telephone call I received at work ( I get these annoying customers calling our Job from time to time. It's part of the ecology of the business) about an item in our store. I stutter once from frustration and the customer turns t a complete asshole, mocking my handicap the entire conversation! You see, this is a constant issue I have to deal with every waking hour and working in a place where you have to communicate to people has a devastating effect upon me psychologically and I assume I will never be rid of it: that fear which hits you when you see the words that will eventually breakdown mid way between thought and verbalization. What's more interesting, and oddly comforting, is that birds also stutter (I saw this on the Discovery Channel)!
I get teased enough at work about it, now I have "nightmares" about it too..... It's late. I still have a few hours before work. I'll try to get some sleep.

Remembering, Now

I'm not sure about many things in Life. I suppose as one gets older some things about human nature become 'expected' while others seem to encourage mystery. I managed to survive the dawn of the 21st century and I have seen people die in car accidents, suicides, racism, wars and war mongering, a first ever Black President and on the same token a regressive Black culture. Music has hailed to the masters of old, originality and the "Cool" are things of the past, fashion is nothing more than resurgence and Architecture is now the playground of computer aestheticists. My youth has distanced itself enough for me to look at it, to relive the mistakes and paths I took, the promises broken and the dreams that have faded away. I think about my childhood friends (I wonder what they are doing now?), our house, our neighborhood in the four seasons---the best was at Christmas time, the clear winter nights where the moon made the snow look like diamonds; and the Christmas lights, and the promise of all those toys my brother and I have gotten. I realize I do not want to die. I want to see the future. I want to live to find out my true potential. There are so many questions I have. Now I just read that astronomers in Europe discovered 32 planets outside our solar system!!!

I'm not sure about many things in Life. I don't have answers... "Questions are evolutionary. Answers are History." a Rabbi once told me. "Knowledge is its own path. It has its own rules and many of us are never prepared for the destination. What happens if Man Knows? Where would His desire be?"

Observations On Architecture Pt. II

Los Angeles is a plague. A City of such poetic catastrophe and virus, such beautiful decay, such a powerful evocation of Forgetfulness, but a plague nonetheless; a city that struggles to thrive though the Post-Future Dream Machines its connected to desperately strums the threads of Fate. There is very little density to this city and I'm always amazed at how moderately anti-pedestrian its streets and public places are; how non-intuitive our urban planning and architecture, in reality, is. We fight against this public density, pushing it away, scorning it in favor of beautification (which really means the strategy of "sub-urban-izing" the City by eliminating diversity).

We tend to forget that Cities are a mass human effort that involves everyone: poor, working poor, homeless, mentally insane, working class, middle class and upper class. The more we attempt to "purify" our Cities (via implementation of wider streets for public transportation, usually at the expense of pedestrians or forcing though design, renovation and planning, the "undesirables" from its stable environments to the outskirts) we get outstanding vistas of empty streets and city views and little to no social interaction. Los Angeles doesn't know how to survive after 6pm

Its streets become hazardous and empty and viral and beautiful. Abandoned. Pockets of life will persist but the plague still slowly ravishes the body of my City. Instead of architects masturbating in digital space with design that affront the senses or catering to the ego-centric industrialist/co-operation, brand-monopoly or well-to-do, maybe we can start by re-examining our methodology and the various ways we think about the human body and its need for shelter;

starting from the psycho-economics of shelter to the social need of the built environment, to understand the various forces involved in how strangers use the built environment and the political processes that cater to institutionalizing the systems that we use to orchestrate our daily lives. Instead of endless sprawl, fenced communities and the inefficient use of transportation, maybe a programme of Proto-Urbanism---a candid view of how are Cities really function and strategies to enhance those functions through design: parking, walking, entertainment, shops, etc.,). Flaws will exist as the shift from old to young and the shift of ideologies ensue, but that's part of human nature and since Cities are fundamentally a product of human nature, it must be allowed to fail and succeed, to experiment and stabilize or disrupt and displace. If these elements are not in play, the City becomes a ghost town.

Los Angeles is a plague. A beautiful catastrophe that needs to be understood.

Seeds Of A New Urban Ecology

This is the genesis of the "Protocaust" research: a hetero-Urbanism. It's a project that will, no doubt, involve Architecture, social theory, photography and writing. I hope to make installments in the near future.

This:That

What are the romances of Humanity? What drives us to become the Beings that we are? We evolved on this great but fragile planet--Man. Woman. And the verisimilitudes that exist in-between--strive, and striving further still, to reach the heights of myth and legend; to surpass the natural boundaries of the Body itself; to become Mind.

Maybe the social systems we initiated to dictate ourselves is the "flaw" of the human condition. Maybe to understand the system is to understand the concept and praxis of Power and Predestination. In other words: authority over the masses and control over its destiny. If this is the case, then the system is a network of control to predict and modulate human behavior. Dreams, Hope, Romance, Song and Love would be anarchy to the social system's inhuman determination to modulate the human will [Once the system learns to be irrational, i.e., human, it is the End for Humanity].

Everyday I see people waiting at bus stops, hurrying to their next appointment, huddled in corners, standing in lengthy lines for food and temporary shelter, slaving away in lousy retail establishments or counting beans in air-conditioned bee hives.

How did Humanity get this way?

OBSERVATIONS ON ARCHITECTURE pt.1

It is time that Architecture realizes its position.
(1) The want of space. The need/lust for expansion is not, holistically, the venue of architecture. 'Space' is an inherent psychological state (desires, creative expressions, ego, ideology, etc.) of human nature. Space in its practical form is engineered by the virtues and vices of territorrialization: politics, economics, consumerism, commercialization, militarism, etc,.

(2) Architecture is a small but necessary part of human culture and how said culture acquires its "physicality"---Cities---which goes through a constant state of culmination, expansion and regression through the function, malfunction and mutation of human use. Cities don't function because of logic, planning and design, at least not solely on those terms, but by the imagination and circumvention of the various systems perpetrated by its pedestrians due to complexities of inclusion and exclusion and secrets; opportunities exterior to the planning process.

(3) Buildings, as a physical entity of architecture, can't solve those conditions of the 'Human State' in and of itself (I personally consider this a grave educational flaw in the study of architecture). A collaboration between the disciplines and social consensus must be met beforehand. In other words, human culture must be ready for the next step to its environmental shifts...

(4) Housing has yet to resolve homelessness.. Communities has yet to surpass Class. Urban planning has yet to resolve the conflict between ethics and politics/ economics and the human will. World views are Utopian views. Architectural design, no matter how abstract, practical or ideological. is predicated on a world view and can never account for the unpredictability of human nature. Purposes lose their meaning as different states of of culture evolves and shifts through various consequences of growth; places become abandoned or disappear from urban memory or mutates into a different function.

When confronted with a changing and challenging human world, architects need to have a grasp of multidisciplinary activities, though this position doesn't default to a plausible "End" but an understanding of the various ways humans make use of places and space.

To me, the idea of 'Public Space' does not exist in physical terms (program-form) but as an "experience". Most of what we consider public space is in reality "transitory Space" which allows for "cells" to gather, mobilize and dissipate. Corners become way-stations as well as opportunities beyond its geometries. Does the above image represent 'public space'?

As I move through the City I always ask myself: "What criteria can architecture offer towards the argument of the human condition? What are its strengths and how can we address its weaknesses? Is functionality and determinism an ethic of design or a state of enforcement?