I’ve been puzzling recently over the connection between progress in architecture and technology and how the architecture of the future is going to be connected with the technology of the future. I am not one who puts much faith in prince Charles who has jettisoned the present to return to the technologies of the past. But I wonder how technology will develop in the future and, so, how this impacts upon the way our future buildings will look.
Before the development of modern science in the 17th century by Newton and others we were mired in magic, alchemy, numerology etc. These give me the creeps (as does Gothic architecture) but they all led to modern science as we know it and hence modern architecture.
I guess war has always been - at least in part - behind the evolution of architecture, in that it presses with great urgency upon minds to push technologies further, faster.
Most of you (I know) are much cleverer than I, so I hope that you can suggest further readings on these topics.
I just took a seminar here called "Magic, Machines and Architecture." We read everything from Vitruvius, Archmiedes, articles about the Rhine Bridge, printing presses, reading machines, atmospheric pumps, etc. The class had a definite Ancient and Antiquarian bent (nothing we read was really older than from the early 19th century). The bulk of readings were from Antiquity, the Renaissance, and Early Modern period.
thanks for that Smokety: I think I shd go back to school!
Jul 5, 08 9:36 am ·
·
It is indeed fortunate that white magic as a viable operating system is so denegrated today. True to form, however, white magic can be nothing but rare. As rare even as the human who admits the source of their own moments of white magic receivership.
Look at what architectures are globally coeval with Gothic while researching the 2nd and 3rd months of embryonic development to get a fuller picture of that time.
Black magic is a forever abundant fabrication.
Many "technologies of the past" are still in use today, especially in architecture.
There are not much magic in re writing how things allway's been done, into fast computer code -- it is only when the robot at the assenbly line don't just mimic the worker who shuld tigh a nut, things will start to happen.
Right from the start CAD was made to mimic the rutines at the drawing board, -- make sure the account was more reliable, that the parts could be accounted for and the logistics was in order, and basicly this was done so clumpsy, that even parts and numbers was drawn in the drawing ,in fact the measure are, that the more the digital drawing is like the paper drawing the better.
But that is not how production will progress, not by mimic the worker or enslaved by oldfasion perceptions, --- still that ask a paragime shift, that the computer are allowed on the computers terms, and the computer are realy better calculating and by a bit AI , allowed to put together the building parts it design and calculate from rules -- computers are realy better doing that, tham being used as storeing facility for outdated logistic systems.
Try understand 3dh , it show the direction as there the computer is used in a compleatly different way.
Jul 5, 08 10:38 am ·
·
How did they build those great pyramids? Perhaps the (only natural?) 'flipping' of the planet's electro-magnetic field resulting in a brief lessening of gravitational force opened a magical window of architectural opportunity.
Is it true that the smallest of the four great pyramids is composed entirely of brick?
Just kill the brick -- unless pyramides make any sense for you, unless pyramides is what we need , -- think about it , the pyramide is the most silli construction you can emagine , -- what need can that make today and then it is a good thing that it is made from bricks ?
Again if you want to use computers, then make them a challance , don't make them mimic how things was allway's done just faster, and if you want robots, don't make them micic a worker find a more clever to use them.
Jul 5, 08 11:04 am ·
·
The point of the great pyramids today is exactly that they make no sense; we don't even know how thy were built. And, unless you believe in magic, the pyramid builders used a 'technology' that is somehow beyond us right now.
Just kill the notion of "how things were always done" because that's the real myth of your argument. "How things are done" has always been a very non-homogeneous set of situations. If you look closely, computers have (already) greatly enabled an even more vast proliferation of non-homogeneous ways of doing things.
There is a detectable magic is true non-homgeneous visionariness.
Historiography is now paradoxically caught up with writing predictions of the future, and that's because a true (magical) historian actually can simultaneously write about past, present and future events.
So why is our modern Icons only images of what we emagine of the future. A lookalike with an structuraly aincient core, -- don't you think exactly architecture has to realise that visionary has to do with more than the looks of things. Beside it looks like the vision of most modern highrise structures, are to deliver a structure to hang some curtain walls on, , but that still mean profiles as allway's, rigid profile and lattrice box systems --- where will you continue that skelleton core that is now left, into a paagime shift ; it's as square dependant as ever, it's a dead-end, and the reson is, that nothing realy new came into it , there are simply very little options to develob today's systems, -- that is what call upon a paragime shift, a compleatly different way to realise the build works.
Jul 5, 08 11:53 am ·
·
Almost all built architecture today is manifest within a regulated industry. And the regulations deal mostly with issues of safety and with issues of money (not necessarily in that order).
Visionary architecture is first manifest virtually, and sometimes, rarely even, passes through the regulations into built form.
Design/build a robot that will manifest a paradigm shift?
A building structure consist of many different bits and pieces, each one asking their own production line, various materials and often they just carry a function to allow other parts of the structure work. One god place to start before beginning to talk about a paragime shift, is to minimise the number of things and pieces you need to put a building structure together. This is hundreds or thousands of different things -- just emagine what it help, to minimise the need of "bits and pieces" into just one thing just one material -- instead of dusins of various profiles, dusins of various fittings, rivits assembly pieces bolts screws ,whatever , -- first step towerds allowing the computer calculate a building is to minimise the number of thingsfor that, even better -- as how 3dh work -- make a different building system that do not need hundred or thousands of various things , -- make the computer figure out the individual part, how and where it attach other parts the program also calculate . Both the old projecting is jettisoned as now you don't order the pieces but make each part that is put together, from the one and same type of material, while you N.C. cut the parts on site from sheet.
--- Logistics ; the part that is missing is produced here and now it even carry informations about itself laser cut on it's surface, Is it difficult t find use for that ?
Sound like some Paul Virilio is the perfect place to start reading, including his earlier works with Claude Parent (:"Function of the Oblique") and the book "Bunker Archeology" which begins to study the relationship of speed, technology, war, and built form through a study of the German WWII bunker in northern France. Also, Virilio's "Speed and Politics" may be a necessary read to get the gist of his arguments about the phases of modernity and the shift from an infrastructure built around the flow of bodies to an infrastructure built around the flow of data.
Virilio's ultimate assertion is that all technological advance leads to unavoidable calamity ("accident," as he calls it). 2 man buggy wrecks gave way to dozens of deaths in train wrecks gave way to thousands of dead in car wrecks, etc, or the appropriation of the discover of nuclear fission for the expressed purpose of decimating a population.
***
Found the following quote on a website while looking for some of Virilio's images from "Unknown Quantity," I can't verify it's accuracy but it certainly speaks to your original question
.mm
***
In fact, the accident has suddenly become inhabitable, to the detriment of the substance of the shared world... This is what is meant by the "integral accident", the accident which integrates us globally, and which sometimes even disintegrates us physically. So, in a world which is now foreclosed, where all is explained by mathematics or psychoanalysis, the accident is what remains unexpected, truly suprising, the unknown quantity in a totally discovered planetary habitat, a habitat over-exposed to everyone`s gaze, from which the "exotic" has suddenly disappeared in favour of that "endotic" Victor Hugo called upon when he explained to us that, "It is inside of ourselves that we have to see the outside - a terrible admission of asphyxia."
Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity, Thames & Hudson, 2003, page 128
of course H.P.Blavatsky and A.Bailey would tell you all you ever needed and more , but you most likely wouldn't understand it...so just read the European White Males..until then.
"I am not one who puts much faith in prince Charles who has jettisoned the present to return to the technologies of the past. But I wonder how technology will develop in the future and, so, how this impacts upon the way our future buildings will look."
What !!! "returned to the technologies of the past" ; try look closer and under the surface skin of what you think represent the future in architectur --- what you think is cutting edge and visionary, you will find are fiddled hands-on work by skilled metal workers --- hasn't it allway's been like that, today it just has other forms , that or something made to sell Curtain Walls is what define today's architectural icons more than newthinking. Newthinking what would that realy be -----
just going back for a bit: I think we actually have a fairly clear idea of how the pyramids were built. There's no great mystery: the Egyptians were good engineers and had a lot of slave-power at their disposal.
farmer, you might also look at Sanford Kwinter's recent book of essays Far from Equilibrium. He writes energetically. But the best thing i've read about theories of technology recently is Bruno Latour's essay on the sociology of a door-closer. He argues that the sociological and the technological are not actually separate things.
Jul 6, 08 3:21 pm ·
·
"Few texts concerning Egyptian engineering methods have survived the centuries, and in recent years experimental archaeology has been the main means for discovering the methods used for building the structure. Despite this, there are still many questions concerning the quarrying, dressing and transportation of the stone building blocks, let alone the methods by which they were placed meticulously in position. And there are further questions still about how the gigantic edifice was erected on a totally horizontal base, and aligned precisely with the stars.
"As the recent robotic explorations of the so-called air-shafts in the Great Pyramid have demonstrated, there is still a great deal that remains mysterious about the basic structure of pyramids, and the technology that created them.
There's lots we don't know about exactly how and why the various elements of the pyramids were built. But it seems to be going a bit far to say that the pyramids make no sense, and are technologically beyond us.
I just don't think we need buildings with an impossible design, useless for living in, even impossible as an office building no one, seem to be able to find the entrance, and when they do, they write Graffiti saying "I build this for my father"
Reaky what we need is cheap to build houses promoting a new production. A way to transform different materials into N.C. manufactored building parts -- we need new way's to use the computer in a direct link for production of cheap safe houses. Can pyramides build with bricks make that then Ok ; just tell their builders that next station is the moon, and they better prepare for sending the bricklayers there .
agfa8x, you're misquoting me and taking what I said out of context.
You know, there actually were such things as "trade secrets". And maybe that's what the Great Pyramid really is, the world's largest manifestation of trade secrets.
Shock Me: as Per comes from the happiest country in the world - Denmark - I will definitely be buying land in Greenland. Our melancholy Dane is both Prince and Fool, but this is not a tragedy, but High Comedy.
(Sorry if I offended you in any way.)
agfa8x: thanks very much for your suggested readings - much appreciated - which is what this thread is all about.
no one invented the wheel. The first time someone walked by a fallen tree...presto they had the wheel. Also the pre-columbian inhabitants of the Americas did have the wheel, they just didn't utilize it in the same as Europeans and other cultures.
Must have been just as difficult to promote newthinkng back then as now. Difficult to emagine someone who just invented the wheel from a fallen tree could promote it over the horse.
"Look here this fallen tree is the cutting edge in transport , much better than your horses" .
And then --- the wheel did replace the horse , who would think that, looking at a fallen tree.
well I don't believe they had horses in the America's back then, I could be mistaken, but I think they were re introduced to the Americas by Europeans after they had died out thousands of years prior.
I believe the different lifestyle limited the need for the wheel and also the lay of the land and natural resources made it less functional. In the Inca's case, they lived in extremely hilly, mountainous regions, which I don't believe were suited for wagons, carts etc, so items were instead carried by hand over the uneven terrain.
the fact is they didn't have "the Wheel" (capital W) as we typically think of it- as augmenting transportation...
also the link is a little misleading by only associating the wheel with pack animals... since it is possible that the wheel came before the widespread domestication of large animals suitable for pulling a cart...
something like the wheel-burrow or riskshaw would logically seem like an early use of the wheel under human power...before the invention of all the apparatus necessary to attach a cart to an animal
also the wheel has other significant uses other than transportation...such as a water wheel or a pulley...2 things that obviously the pre-colombian peoples of america could have found useful...
the concept of the wheel killing culture remains intersting none the less
I was simply trying to dispell the overall concept of someone inventing the wheel. I think some people honestly envision some caveman carving a large block into a stone wheel as the first ever occurrence of something round or wheel like, when it is clear that curves and roundness occur in abundance throughout nature. All Wheels beyond this are simple refinements of something already provided by nature.
Pulley's and water wheels are offshoots of the wheel, but again they rely on many different factors to be useful. I'm certainly no historian, but it seems reasonable that the cultures and geography were different enough that they would have different priorities and concerns; and thus different measures for useful and success should be applied when considering each culture.
So, by saying the wheel killed culture slightly, are you saying the wheel, as a technological innovation, was responsible for ruining the character of humans because of the evolution of ideas? If this is your argument, it seems likely ridiculous to speculate that the wheel is the first great technological advance. Proof seems to arise out of necessity, where it was more valid for nomads, or any other early version of the human, to eat first vs. thinking of ways to haul things around easier, since eating will allow one to survive without the luxury of such things. Do you not think something such as a spear point would be imagined long before something like a wheel? To a monkey, a stick is technology. Nature is technology. In some way, are you saying culture never existed? Saying the wheel destroyed human culture seems a little silly and topical if you ask me.
"Do you not think something such as a spear point would be imagined long before something like a wheel? "
Then is the pointed thing something they found , or was it manufactored. If it was made it proberly was rotated to be grined poinded , -- doing that indicate some reference to wheel technology so do twisting fibers into treads. So culture proberly was not destroyed with the invention of the wheel, rather continued. Inventing seem for me closer to culture as such, culture mean for me something you cultivate, refining technology is sort of that, inventing the wheel that make the paragime shifts that make it accelerate.
Maybe rather than being formed from 'right to light' regulations, the pyramids were formed from 'the right of light'.
OK, that's a bit corny but alchemy and many other pre-scientific modes of understanding still have much to teach us. Of course, so does science. And/both, I say.
I second those suggestions for Virilio and Kwinter ( agfa8x - can i swap libraries with you ? you have consistenly super bibliog. recs)
The thread also brings to mind :
coop himmelb(l)au - early work , eg , Blazing Wing
raimund abraham 's work , which i think deals very much with the body in relation to the tech. of a built space , and that tech. seems saturated with historical associations both w/in the cannon of arch , and outside of it .
Lebbeus Woods - war and architecture ( pamphlet architecture series) . he;s got a blog too , it;d beinteresting to ask him about the magic bit .
Outside of the arch scene , it makes me think of Pychon - mason + dixon in particular is chock full of the magic in science , and the magic of the earth .
c.1960 , one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Durrell, writes re. his Alexandria Quartet ;
"I tried to suggest that the new science ( the new middle ages) was going to have to revalue the old obsolete ones . Hartman contends that the modern scientist is a near-mystic and has thrown aristotle overboard for Hericlitus. I also bet you have seen Jung's work on alchemy and psychoanalysis..[..].. I'm trying to use these things like crude symbolism."
architecture, technology, magic & war
I’ve been puzzling recently over the connection between progress in architecture and technology and how the architecture of the future is going to be connected with the technology of the future. I am not one who puts much faith in prince Charles who has jettisoned the present to return to the technologies of the past. But I wonder how technology will develop in the future and, so, how this impacts upon the way our future buildings will look.
Before the development of modern science in the 17th century by Newton and others we were mired in magic, alchemy, numerology etc. These give me the creeps (as does Gothic architecture) but they all led to modern science as we know it and hence modern architecture.
I guess war has always been - at least in part - behind the evolution of architecture, in that it presses with great urgency upon minds to push technologies further, faster.
Most of you (I know) are much cleverer than I, so I hope that you can suggest further readings on these topics.
I just took a seminar here called "Magic, Machines and Architecture." We read everything from Vitruvius, Archmiedes, articles about the Rhine Bridge, printing presses, reading machines, atmospheric pumps, etc. The class had a definite Ancient and Antiquarian bent (nothing we read was really older than from the early 19th century). The bulk of readings were from Antiquity, the Renaissance, and Early Modern period.
thanks for that Smokety: I think I shd go back to school!
It is indeed fortunate that white magic as a viable operating system is so denegrated today. True to form, however, white magic can be nothing but rare. As rare even as the human who admits the source of their own moments of white magic receivership.
Look at what architectures are globally coeval with Gothic while researching the 2nd and 3rd months of embryonic development to get a fuller picture of that time.
Black magic is a forever abundant fabrication.
Many "technologies of the past" are still in use today, especially in architecture.
There are not much magic in re writing how things allway's been done, into fast computer code -- it is only when the robot at the assenbly line don't just mimic the worker who shuld tigh a nut, things will start to happen.
Right from the start CAD was made to mimic the rutines at the drawing board, -- make sure the account was more reliable, that the parts could be accounted for and the logistics was in order, and basicly this was done so clumpsy, that even parts and numbers was drawn in the drawing ,in fact the measure are, that the more the digital drawing is like the paper drawing the better.
But that is not how production will progress, not by mimic the worker or enslaved by oldfasion perceptions, --- still that ask a paragime shift, that the computer are allowed on the computers terms, and the computer are realy better calculating and by a bit AI , allowed to put together the building parts it design and calculate from rules -- computers are realy better doing that, tham being used as storeing facility for outdated logistic systems.
Try understand 3dh , it show the direction as there the computer is used in a compleatly different way.
How did they build those great pyramids? Perhaps the (only natural?) 'flipping' of the planet's electro-magnetic field resulting in a brief lessening of gravitational force opened a magical window of architectural opportunity.
Is it true that the smallest of the four great pyramids is composed entirely of brick?
Have you bought land in Greenland yet?
Just kill the brick -- unless pyramides make any sense for you, unless pyramides is what we need , -- think about it , the pyramide is the most silli construction you can emagine , -- what need can that make today and then it is a good thing that it is made from bricks ?
Again if you want to use computers, then make them a challance , don't make them mimic how things was allway's done just faster, and if you want robots, don't make them micic a worker find a more clever to use them.
The point of the great pyramids today is exactly that they make no sense; we don't even know how thy were built. And, unless you believe in magic, the pyramid builders used a 'technology' that is somehow beyond us right now.
Just kill the notion of "how things were always done" because that's the real myth of your argument. "How things are done" has always been a very non-homogeneous set of situations. If you look closely, computers have (already) greatly enabled an even more vast proliferation of non-homogeneous ways of doing things.
There is a detectable magic is true non-homgeneous visionariness.
Historiography is now paradoxically caught up with writing predictions of the future, and that's because a true (magical) historian actually can simultaneously write about past, present and future events.
So why is our modern Icons only images of what we emagine of the future. A lookalike with an structuraly aincient core, -- don't you think exactly architecture has to realise that visionary has to do with more than the looks of things. Beside it looks like the vision of most modern highrise structures, are to deliver a structure to hang some curtain walls on, , but that still mean profiles as allway's, rigid profile and lattrice box systems --- where will you continue that skelleton core that is now left, into a paagime shift ; it's as square dependant as ever, it's a dead-end, and the reson is, that nothing realy new came into it , there are simply very little options to develob today's systems, -- that is what call upon a paragime shift, a compleatly different way to realise the build works.
Almost all built architecture today is manifest within a regulated industry. And the regulations deal mostly with issues of safety and with issues of money (not necessarily in that order).
Visionary architecture is first manifest virtually, and sometimes, rarely even, passes through the regulations into built form.
Design/build a robot that will manifest a paradigm shift?
dont talk shit about pyramids........ there's codes and :other: systems in there..... one day man
ya deep inside some pyramid is the 3dh-code....."I know it because I have seen it." quoting Bob Dobbs
"All hail Slack!"
A building structure consist of many different bits and pieces, each one asking their own production line, various materials and often they just carry a function to allow other parts of the structure work. One god place to start before beginning to talk about a paragime shift, is to minimise the number of things and pieces you need to put a building structure together. This is hundreds or thousands of different things -- just emagine what it help, to minimise the need of "bits and pieces" into just one thing just one material -- instead of dusins of various profiles, dusins of various fittings, rivits assembly pieces bolts screws ,whatever , -- first step towerds allowing the computer calculate a building is to minimise the number of thingsfor that, even better -- as how 3dh work -- make a different building system that do not need hundred or thousands of various things , -- make the computer figure out the individual part, how and where it attach other parts the program also calculate . Both the old projecting is jettisoned as now you don't order the pieces but make each part that is put together, from the one and same type of material, while you N.C. cut the parts on site from sheet.
--- Logistics ; the part that is missing is produced here and now it even carry informations about itself laser cut on it's surface, Is it difficult t find use for that ?
Farmer,
Sound like some Paul Virilio is the perfect place to start reading, including his earlier works with Claude Parent (:"Function of the Oblique") and the book "Bunker Archeology" which begins to study the relationship of speed, technology, war, and built form through a study of the German WWII bunker in northern France. Also, Virilio's "Speed and Politics" may be a necessary read to get the gist of his arguments about the phases of modernity and the shift from an infrastructure built around the flow of bodies to an infrastructure built around the flow of data.
Virilio's ultimate assertion is that all technological advance leads to unavoidable calamity ("accident," as he calls it). 2 man buggy wrecks gave way to dozens of deaths in train wrecks gave way to thousands of dead in car wrecks, etc, or the appropriation of the discover of nuclear fission for the expressed purpose of decimating a population.
***
Found the following quote on a website while looking for some of Virilio's images from "Unknown Quantity," I can't verify it's accuracy but it certainly speaks to your original question
.mm
***
In fact, the accident has suddenly become inhabitable, to the detriment of the substance of the shared world... This is what is meant by the "integral accident", the accident which integrates us globally, and which sometimes even disintegrates us physically. So, in a world which is now foreclosed, where all is explained by mathematics or psychoanalysis, the accident is what remains unexpected, truly suprising, the unknown quantity in a totally discovered planetary habitat, a habitat over-exposed to everyone`s gaze, from which the "exotic" has suddenly disappeared in favour of that "endotic" Victor Hugo called upon when he explained to us that, "It is inside of ourselves that we have to see the outside - a terrible admission of asphyxia."
Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity, Thames & Hudson, 2003, page 128
http://transit.sonance.net/blog/2006/03/unkown-quantity.html
MMatt:
many many thanks for this!
Thanks again, Per.
Read:
Deleuze,McKenna,DeLanda,Heidegger,Kurzweil
(for a survey an alternative ontologies of terrestrial battles, the mythic meaning of circuitry, and the evolution the neocortex)
of course H.P.Blavatsky and A.Bailey would tell you all you ever needed and more , but you most likely wouldn't understand it...so just read the European White Males..until then.
"I am not one who puts much faith in prince Charles who has jettisoned the present to return to the technologies of the past. But I wonder how technology will develop in the future and, so, how this impacts upon the way our future buildings will look."
What !!! "returned to the technologies of the past" ; try look closer and under the surface skin of what you think represent the future in architectur --- what you think is cutting edge and visionary, you will find are fiddled hands-on work by skilled metal workers --- hasn't it allway's been like that, today it just has other forms , that or something made to sell Curtain Walls is what define today's architectural icons more than newthinking. Newthinking what would that realy be -----
Per: is 3dh white magic?
All magic works more at the synaptical level.
e.g.
"Does farmer honestly think Stephen Lauf is a genius?
Farmer 3dh will kill the brick !
let's call Per & Stephen practitioners of grey magic
and let's call farmer a cop-out
or just plain, old vado retro.
just going back for a bit: I think we actually have a fairly clear idea of how the pyramids were built. There's no great mystery: the Egyptians were good engineers and had a lot of slave-power at their disposal.
farmer, you might also look at Sanford Kwinter's recent book of essays Far from Equilibrium. He writes energetically. But the best thing i've read about theories of technology recently is Bruno Latour's essay on the sociology of a door-closer. He argues that the sociological and the technological are not actually separate things.
"Few texts concerning Egyptian engineering methods have survived the centuries, and in recent years experimental archaeology has been the main means for discovering the methods used for building the structure. Despite this, there are still many questions concerning the quarrying, dressing and transportation of the stone building blocks, let alone the methods by which they were placed meticulously in position. And there are further questions still about how the gigantic edifice was erected on a totally horizontal base, and aligned precisely with the stars.
"As the recent robotic explorations of the so-called air-shafts in the Great Pyramid have demonstrated, there is still a great deal that remains mysterious about the basic structure of pyramids, and the technology that created them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/great_pyramid_01.shtml
There's lots we don't know about exactly how and why the various elements of the pyramids were built. But it seems to be going a bit far to say that the pyramids make no sense, and are technologically beyond us.
I just don't think we need buildings with an impossible design, useless for living in, even impossible as an office building no one, seem to be able to find the entrance, and when they do, they write Graffiti saying "I build this for my father"
Reaky what we need is cheap to build houses promoting a new production. A way to transform different materials into N.C. manufactored building parts -- we need new way's to use the computer in a direct link for production of cheap safe houses. Can pyramides build with bricks make that then Ok ; just tell their builders that next station is the moon, and they better prepare for sending the bricklayers there .
do you not believe culture will become slightly lost
It was lost when they invented the wheel.
that most likely is not a very thoughtful reply
agfa8x, you're misquoting me and taking what I said out of context.
You know, there actually were such things as "trade secrets". And maybe that's what the Great Pyramid really is, the world's largest manifestation of trade secrets.
i must have misunderstood.
The pyramids were built the exact way we would build them today. No secrets there.
i still cant believe per is a real person.......... that dude consistently blows my mind with his unintelligible ramblings....
wow.........
at this point i can only think that he is truly some sort of demented genius... he is just like scoring a 0 on your ACT's...
I have to say this is deep, "It was lost when they invented the wheel"
talking about the wheel is like talking about sex...just ask davinci or john fire lame deer....
I just want to chime in to say I really like the title of this thread:
'architecture, technology, magic & war'
I'll take four bad-ass concepts for a thousand, Alex!
Shock Me: as Per comes from the happiest country in the world - Denmark - I will definitely be buying land in Greenland. Our melancholy Dane is both Prince and Fool, but this is not a tragedy, but High Comedy.
(Sorry if I offended you in any way.)
agfa8x: thanks very much for your suggested readings - much appreciated - which is what this thread is all about.
i like the idea of the wheel killing culture... although obviously it would have had to have been a product of culture itself...
so since the pre-columbian inhabitants of the americas never had the wheel did they have more culture in hand than the europeans?
no one invented the wheel. The first time someone walked by a fallen tree...presto they had the wheel. Also the pre-columbian inhabitants of the Americas did have the wheel, they just didn't utilize it in the same as Europeans and other cultures.
Must have been just as difficult to promote newthinkng back then as now. Difficult to emagine someone who just invented the wheel from a fallen tree could promote it over the horse.
"Look here this fallen tree is the cutting edge in transport , much better than your horses" .
And then --- the wheel did replace the horse , who would think that, looking at a fallen tree.
well I don't believe they had horses in the America's back then, I could be mistaken, but I think they were re introduced to the Americas by Europeans after they had died out thousands of years prior.
I believe the different lifestyle limited the need for the wheel and also the lay of the land and natural resources made it less functional. In the Inca's case, they lived in extremely hilly, mountainous regions, which I don't believe were suited for wagons, carts etc, so items were instead carried by hand over the uneven terrain.
the fact is they didn't have "the Wheel" (capital W) as we typically think of it- as augmenting transportation...
also the link is a little misleading by only associating the wheel with pack animals... since it is possible that the wheel came before the widespread domestication of large animals suitable for pulling a cart...
something like the wheel-burrow or riskshaw would logically seem like an early use of the wheel under human power...before the invention of all the apparatus necessary to attach a cart to an animal
also the wheel has other significant uses other than transportation...such as a water wheel or a pulley...2 things that obviously the pre-colombian peoples of america could have found useful...
the concept of the wheel killing culture remains intersting none the less
architorture,
I was simply trying to dispell the overall concept of someone inventing the wheel. I think some people honestly envision some caveman carving a large block into a stone wheel as the first ever occurrence of something round or wheel like, when it is clear that curves and roundness occur in abundance throughout nature. All Wheels beyond this are simple refinements of something already provided by nature.
Pulley's and water wheels are offshoots of the wheel, but again they rely on many different factors to be useful. I'm certainly no historian, but it seems reasonable that the cultures and geography were different enough that they would have different priorities and concerns; and thus different measures for useful and success should be applied when considering each culture.
So, by saying the wheel killed culture slightly, are you saying the wheel, as a technological innovation, was responsible for ruining the character of humans because of the evolution of ideas? If this is your argument, it seems likely ridiculous to speculate that the wheel is the first great technological advance. Proof seems to arise out of necessity, where it was more valid for nomads, or any other early version of the human, to eat first vs. thinking of ways to haul things around easier, since eating will allow one to survive without the luxury of such things. Do you not think something such as a spear point would be imagined long before something like a wheel? To a monkey, a stick is technology. Nature is technology. In some way, are you saying culture never existed? Saying the wheel destroyed human culture seems a little silly and topical if you ask me.
"Do you not think something such as a spear point would be imagined long before something like a wheel? "
Then is the pointed thing something they found , or was it manufactored. If it was made it proberly was rotated to be grined poinded , -- doing that indicate some reference to wheel technology so do twisting fibers into treads. So culture proberly was not destroyed with the invention of the wheel, rather continued. Inventing seem for me closer to culture as such, culture mean for me something you cultivate, refining technology is sort of that, inventing the wheel that make the paragime shifts that make it accelerate.
,
Maybe rather than being formed from 'right to light' regulations, the pyramids were formed from 'the right of light'.
OK, that's a bit corny but alchemy and many other pre-scientific modes of understanding still have much to teach us. Of course, so does science. And/both, I say.
I second those suggestions for Virilio and Kwinter ( agfa8x - can i swap libraries with you ? you have consistenly super bibliog. recs)
The thread also brings to mind :
coop himmelb(l)au - early work , eg , Blazing Wing
raimund abraham 's work , which i think deals very much with the body in relation to the tech. of a built space , and that tech. seems saturated with historical associations both w/in the cannon of arch , and outside of it .
Lebbeus Woods - war and architecture ( pamphlet architecture series) . he;s got a blog too , it;d beinteresting to ask him about the magic bit .
Outside of the arch scene , it makes me think of Pychon - mason + dixon in particular is chock full of the magic in science , and the magic of the earth .
c.1960 , one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Durrell, writes re. his Alexandria Quartet ;
"I tried to suggest that the new science ( the new middle ages) was going to have to revalue the old obsolete ones . Hartman contends that the modern scientist is a near-mystic and has thrown aristotle overboard for Hericlitus. I also bet you have seen Jung's work on alchemy and psychoanalysis..[..].. I'm trying to use these things like crude symbolism."
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