Tropic of Charlie
“The world of images controls the world of matter.”
- Christopher Alexander
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Working Bibliography
It’s not that I feel my bibliography is anything particularly special, rather for me this is the vice-like memory I don’t have upstairs. Listening to Ezra Koening’s two part appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton has me absolutely convinced that a home for the little pieces of subject matter that might become precedents for future work, blog content, etc. needs to make its way to a list where it can accumulate, cross-fertilize, and maybe reach out and inspire you too. It’s the digital and public version of dog earing a page, underlining a special quote, and plundered endnotes-a trail left in broken binding and narrow margins-for that moment of frustration when you hear something truly profound and it’s just you and your ear buds...
Ezra Koening’s two part appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton | A beautiful articulation of the creative process in word and well placed soundbytes.
Bjark Ingel’s two part appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton | In addition to Rick Rubin’s finesse as an interviewer, this chronicle of Bjark’s career reveals much about how architects work , that is rarely so bluntly articulated by architects. Highlights include his comments about the creative process and comparison to Bjork’s discography and how architects work.
Joe Day’s 2009 Foreword to Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies titled “After Ecologies” | In this foreword, Joe Day elucidates much about the way architecture has been practiced in Los Angeles, but even more fascinating he identifies a dichotomy in how architects work between those who work in two dimensions and those who work in three. See quote from the above idenitifying the Recombinant and the Recursive:
“American design culture has been split since the mid-1990s between the continued development of the collage based approaches that Rowe and Banham’s gneration pioneered, and the rise of the strictly digital methods, driven by three dimensional modeling and animation software. Recombinant designers crop and reassemble parts, fragments, or overlays to generate design solutions, whether at the scale of the drawing, the building, of the urban plan. Recursive designers build up complexity through the modulation of “primitive,” self-similar parts through techniques of cyclical iteration. At its extremes, this opposition pits compositional artistry against computational rigor in contemporary vanguard architecture.”