Core Design Studio 2 | Arch 102.06 | Ezio Blasetti | ta: Brad Rothenberg

“Everything then, must happen as if an independent memory gathered images as they successively occur along the course of time; and as if our body, together with its surroundings, was never more than one among those images, the last is that which we obtain at any moment by making an instantaneous section in the general stream of becoming”

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

‘Metastratum’ describes the architectural production as part of a larger, self-organizing, material process. While engaging on the production of proto-architectural environments through the generative capacities of algorithmic / diagrammatic logics, our primary focus was the relationship between landscape and roofscape. We find the constitutive difference between the two in time more so than in form. ‘Metastratum’ was an investigation on the processes of becoming, and as such, it fused the two –scapes into a unified phase space. It extracted concepts from a variety of references from texts of Johnson, Ball, Hofstadter, DeLanda, Kwinter, Lynn, Reiser, Allen, Borges, Serres, Bergson…; and films of Antonioni (Zabriskie Point), Godard (Weekend), Tarkovsky (Solyaris), Herzog (The Wild Blue Yonder)… One of the challenges was the re-invention of the means of assessment, the development of notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of ‘difference’ in the spatial manifestations of our systems. With the introduction of a secondary scale of time in the design process, borrowing a concept from biology, symbiogenesis was the primary force in the evolution of the models. In some projects, the thesis was constructed around the design process itself and around the attitude towards algorithmic processes. In others, the emerging narration or affects from the organizational patterns of the models suggested a different kind of ‘thesis’. Finally, some investigations embodied a novel approach in the relationship between the two modes of time; landscape/architecture.

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• 1000 years of non-linear history
• Agent Intellects: Pattern as a Form of Thought
• Animate Form
• Atlas of Novel Tectonics
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
• From Object to Field
• Funes The Memorious
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Introduction from Genesis (the object of this book)
• Landscapes Of Change
• Library of Babel
• Matter and Memory
• Sans Soleil / Sunless
• Self-made Tapestry
• The Garden of Folking Paths
• The Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture
• The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory & Thermodynamics
• Tlon, Uqbar Orbis Tertius

by Manuel Delanda by Ed Keller & Carla Leitao by Greg Lynn by Jessie Reiser by Steven Johnson by Stan Allen by Jorge Luis Borges by Douglas Hofstadter by Michel Serres by Sanford Kwinter by Jorge Luis Borges by Henri Bergson by Chris Marker by Phillip Ball by Jorge Luis Borges by Karl Chu by Michel Serres by Jorge Luis Borges