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Things take on meaning or are given meaning or are loaded from the start. All seem possible ways of describing encounters with things that have importance in our lives. The correct formulation is as yet unclear. Perhaps they are all correct. Whatever the case, it is clear that meaning is linguistic, temporal or historical, andContinue reading “Luminous and illuminated”

The issue of triadic experience deserves a little attention. This takes us back to meditations 11-17 and Charles Peirce’s notion of “thirdness.”[i] There, I discussed thirdness or triadic experience in terms of an object, a subject, and a name/concept – literally, a closed triangle with a perceiver occupying one node. The discussion, in this form, operatesContinue reading “Albeit differently to individuals and groups”

Naming and fictionalizing work together. Arguably, they might be the same process. At a minimum, both are part and parcel of conscious experience, or at least everything we humans are prone to dignify with that mysterious modifier. Fictionalizing and conscious experiencing might, in fact, be interchangeable verbs. Why this might be so might not be immediately apparent. Continue reading “Environments communicate”

The great benefit of thinking in terms of surfaces instead of the planes of abstract geometry is that the former provide us with a world we know or at least can know. The latter, on the other hand, offers only empty volumes, ephemeral lines, and coordinates in space. From surfaces, we gain corners and edges,Continue reading “Surfaces come with names”

Gibson expands on the ecological laws of surfaces by noting the range of grades or classifications into which every surface fits: luminous vs. illuminated, lighted vs. shaded, volumetric vs. flat, opaque vs. translucent or semitransparent, rough vs. smooth, glossy vs. matte, homogeneous vs. conglomerated, and hard vs. soft.[i] Everything an architect can do is circumscribed byContinue reading “These are the primary building blocks of experience”

I want to explain the provocative student drawing included in the previous meditation. I also want to introduce another. Before I do, however, it seems necessary to illuminate the value attributed to surfaces in this and the remaining meditations – especially in light of the attention given to materials, material science, and ‘materiality’ in muchContinue reading “Juxtapositions constituting surfaces”

Volumes are to substances what space is to air. They are inert, homogeneous, devoid of qualities, and conceivable only in quantitative terms of length, breadth and height. No magic occurs in volumes because they equally support and deny every possibility. They are cartesian abstractions. Architectural representations of ‘places’ created by the leading digital tools tendContinue reading “Substances, not volumes”

It would be fair to say that I have railed against architectural space or the “spatial turn” in architecture and architectural education quite enough elsewhere.[i] It would be unfair, however, to interpret the rejection of space-thinking as evidence of belief that architecture and architectural experience are simply matters of solid matter.  The world of architecture isContinue reading “Air, not space”

It is possible to misinterpret the argument so far as suggesting that the stuff of physics doesn’t matter when thinking about meaningful experience. Obviously, this is not the case. Fiction rests upon, or is recorded in, matter. What is resisted is the notion of a neat division between matter and our understanding of it. NaturalContinue reading “Environments are made of real stuff”

Events that rise to the level of meaning alter the world. Perhaps it is clearer to say that events are graded by meaning. Walking along a particular sidewalk that traverse daily is seldom an event. Walking along that same stretch immediately after a job offer or first kiss or learning of the death of lovedContinue reading “Altering the ecological world”