It is interesting t o o bserve things that are ru ptured, that a re sh eared, that are to rn apa rt and th en are left apart with the obvious yearning to bring them back together, but nonetheless are left a pa rt. I am interested in the fragmentary, the wrenching apart and seeing se ve ral sides of thing s s imultaneou sly because when they are left apart it invites participation.
Helico Bacter: Held
Because we love flow, our minds can't even stop to consider something that is different, to consider change, that we fill in the gaps to make it look like something we recognize already. So we don't have to think.
Reading the musings of intellectuals is so very interesting. I prescribe myself to read minimum two intellectual musings per day in order to stay enlightened.
More Stanley Tigerman, of course.
"So the whole business about practicing and teaching in this sort of interface specifically in Chicago is interesting because first of all when you teach, when you expose yourself to students the most significant thing that you do is that you make yourself vulnerable and vulnerability then is terribly important. That is to make yourself less than perfect by the proximity to a person who is probing, which is the normal domain of the young. They will probe and ask questions and would maybe become quite antagonistic because they are envious, because you are older, because your name is already more recognized than theirs and they thereby attack you. That attack and your capability or lack of it, of handling it makes yourself vulnerable and it’s very important in practice if you are to remain new and fresh in terms of ideas and keeping yourself open." (35)
"…the reportage of a time, its’ literature, the rules by which you analyze that, the philosophy of it, and then sort of underlying belief-systems; religion. That’s it. That’s what Life’s about." (36)
"Well but architecture has always been [seen through literature, philosophy and religion]. Plato himself once said that art is in the shadow of the truth; so I mean of course that architecture is the shadow of those things, so if you don’t’ know of those things, how can you fuck around with the shadow? The substance is the Literature, the Philosophy and the Religion of our culture, of our joint and several cultures going all the way back." (36)
"Can you not evaluate things without truth being brought into physical fact? For example in the last chapter of my book where the entire subject is the so called “unresolved dialectic” where building s that are ruptured, that are sheared, that are torn apart and then are left apart with the obvious yearning to bring them back together, but nonetheless are left apart... Normally buildings are platonic; that is to say, a building always has a holistic, it has a whole form, and when you look at it, it is together, and may deal with any number of things but it has an image which is called platonic; that is a cube, sphere, or something. And most buildings, lets’ even talk about houses, tend to be platonic in the sense that they have a wholeness. We are just finishing a house in a suburb in Chicago that is a vernacular fragment next to a classical fragment. It is a very small house and it looks huge because there are fragments... [My bias at the moment is] the study of opposites, so to speak, and in that sense brought architecturally, in other words brought into physical form at the same time. You can always study the truth; you can always go out and build the truth. I am interested in the fragmentary, the wrenching apart and seeing several sides of things simultaneously because when they are left apart it invites participation... I think that by building pieces that you think out, leave apart and allow people to bring back together; to participate however perceptually or vicariously or voyeuristically, has some meaning in a certain way. At another level entirely it allows you to study the several sides of the truth. You do that educationally in architecture all the time." (38)
JAE/Interview: Stanley Tigerman. Peter C. Papademetriou and Stanley Tigerman. JAE, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 34-43
