#production – @nickkahler on Tumblr

Celebrated works of architecture were built through displacement. If these histories are forgotten or obscured, it is in part due to the willful production of certain narratives over others. History is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering, and we—that is to say, the architectural community—tend to recall stories of design heroism over horror.

Nicholas Korody, “The Amnesias of Make New History,” 2017

#nicholas korody #quote #architecture #amnesia #history #design #displacement #forgotten #obscure #narrative #production #forgetting #memory #community #heroism #horror #story #legacy #city

nickkahler

In warfare the strategic configurations of power (shih) do not exceed the unorthodox (ch'i) and orthodox (cheng), but the changes of the unorthodox and orthodox can never be completely exhausted. The unorthodox and orthodox mutually produce each other, just like an endless cycle. Who can exhaust them?

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE

nickkahler

As destruction became a form of production, war expanded, not only to the limits of space but to all of reality. The conflict had become limitless and therefore endless. It would not come to an end, and, in 1945, the atomic situation would perpetuate it: the state had become suicidal.

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975

nickkahler

Thus the new farm reproduces many of the characteristics of the new house: labor saving devices, efficient and simplified layout, adaptability to and anticipation of change, and dependence on the proximity of a complex economy; on markets, super or otherwise. Like every other new house in rural America, the Tinkhams’, in materials, method of construction, and location, has no organic relationship to its environment — weather or topography or soil.

J.B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” 1953

nickkahler

Work and time and money are interchangeable, and [method of production] serves only to transform each of these several kinds of energy into another.

J.B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” 1953

#j.b. jackson #quote #production #farming #work #working #transform #change #energy #money #time #interchangable

nickkahler

[The 1950s house] is the one place where certain experiences, certain external energies are collected and transformed for the benefit of a group. This is clear in the design of the house itself: it is consciously planned to “capture” the sun, the breezes, the view, to filter the air, the heat, the light — even the distances, through the picture window, transforming them and making them acceptable to every one. The kitchen is essentially a marvelous electric range which transforms raw or semi-raw materials into food; the living room is the radio (and some day the television set) which transforms electronic impulses into entertainment; the dressing room transforms Ray from a workingman into a different person. The whole house exists not to create something new but to transform four separate individuals into a group — though only for a few hours at a time.

J.B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” 1953

nickkahler

The flexible plan of the farm paralleled the flexible plan of the house. From the beginning Pliny had never seen the wisdom of having a diversity of land; he had naturally wanted as much of the best as he could afford to buy, and a uniform topography was certainly most practical for a uniform crop. He never had any of Nehemiah’s feeling that even the worst and least productive patch of land served some inscrutable purpose in an overall scheme. He spent much time and thought trying to modify the farm and increase its yield, thus making it impersonal and efficient, and easier to sell to another corn farmer.

J.B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” 1953

#j.b. jackson #quote #house #plan #farm #farmhouse #architecture #pliny tinkham #topography #uniform #best #nature #land #diversity #nehemiah tinkham #crop #production #overall #scheme #time #thought #yield #corn #farming

nickkahler

He thinks of how he himself is radically changing the composition of the soil, how he is changing the face of the earth on a small scale. He thinks of the new house, not yet completed, ready to change its form, its owners, its function at a day’s notice.

J.B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” 1953

#j.b. jackson #radical #production #farming #farm #quote #house #change #difference #face #earth #scale #thinking #making

nickkahler

The author is now a producer of diverse content (clearly text is a wildly inadequate term) in diverse media and formats, distributed across diverse platforms. To find all this rapidly proliferating content has become an ever more complex task, and for those of us who also produce content in order to generate knowledge, the task is even more fraught as we use our multiple devices to sift through tens of thousands of results that may or may not be authoritative, verifiable or even remotely useful, much less organized according to our own research interests or priorities.

Gabrielle Esperdy, “Building Data: Field Notes on the Future of the Past,” 2013

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praxismakesperfect

class-struggle-anarchism

Whatever the pace of mechanical progress; though machines should be invented a hundred times more marvellous than the mule-jenny, the knitting-machine, or the cylinder press; though forces should be discovered a hundred times more powerful than steam, — very far from freeing humanity, securing its leisure, and making the production of everything gratuitous, these things would have no other effect than to multiply labour, induce an increase of population, make the chains of serfdom heavier, render life more and more expensive, and deepen the abyss which separates the class that commands and enjoys from the class that obeys and suffers.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “On the Worker and the Industrial Revolution,” 1847 (via sambwmn)

nickkahler

Text to me is the manipulation of words to produce something other than a narrative. I want to stop any narrative.

Peter Eisenman, “On Architecture,” 2016

#text #manipulation #production #peter eisenman #narrative #story #quote #architecture #design

nickkahler

Naturalisation can no longer signify the return to an Arcadia, a mythical status of nature in accordance with the immanence of the biological context of life. The world, turned to an anthropocene, has imposed the technologies of human activities over all other natural or geological forces. Nature is no longer a resource open to mechanical and technological regulation. A profound transformation of the very concept of nature has been set in motion; it is now inseparable from artificiality, technological and digital production. Moving far beyond the discipline's borders, architecture and urbanism are currently developing a praxis at the intersection of design, computer science, engineering and biology. As in biotechnology, physics, economics, social control, politics, the systematisation of computational simulation has opened new fields of research. Between nature and technology, the material condition of the 'artefact' is henceforth transferable to other materials and other scales. Architects and urbanists can generate complex models resting on self-generation processes of matter and integrating computational, social, material, political and environmental variables. Architecture imposed itself on to other production scales, from the nano to the macro, intersecting other disciplinary fields and initiating new professional skills. Architecture redefines itself as an 'ecophysics' of heterogeneous domains, a condition that is as much architectural as it is political and cultural.

Frédéric Migayrou, “Naturalising Architecture,“ 2015

nickkahler

It is futile to try and solve the harms being inflicted upon the environment using the same mechanisms that produced the problem in the first place. Environmental degradation is the concrete form of late capitalism.

Adrian Parr, “Our Crime Against the Planet, and Ourselves,” 2016

#adrian parr #quote #futile #solve #capitalism #late capitalism #neoliberalism #degradation #environment #environmentalism #problem #mechanism #harm #less bad #production #nature

nickkahler

To keep silent in the face of the destruction of these grand works means to subject ourselves and the coming generations to the production and consumption of an environment of futile objects.

Leon Krier, “On Creative Destruction,” c. 2010

#leon krier #architecture #silent #face #destruction #work #subject #generation #production #consumption #environment #futile #object

nickkahler

The reasons for the sculpture park's progressive decline are perhaps not too surprising: its negligence was not so much the product of ignorance as it was of conceptions of land and business development that viewed—and in Atlanta, as elsewhere, continue to view—art and artists as unnecessary expenses or liabilities. Yet what is particularly striking is that hardly anyone remembers this cultural endeavor in the first place. The past, however eroded it may be, is not the jurisdiction of historians alone: its preservation is necessary to help communities understand the conditions and responsibilities of cultural production in the present, and going forward.

Chris Fite-Wassilak, “Dead Ends: The Atlanta Gateway Park,” 2015

#chris fite-wassilak #dead end #sculpture #progressive #decline #atlanta #georgia #gateway park #park #liability #art #development #culture #endeavor #preservation #community #time #understand #production #quote