Pink Houses (Cont.)
I love any opportunity to go through a Frank Lloyd Wright building. I frequently tour the Home and Studio, and always see something interesting. Wright was a master at procession; there are interesting views everywhere you look: Hallways are transitions, windows are lookouts. Wright homes are meticulously orchestrated for moving through larger spaces, even though Wright's studio is an assemblage of "additions" (or "editions" or Shearing Layers). (Metaphors abound in a Wright structure.)
I did a thought experiment back in 2010 on whether an artist or musician could downsize and live in a tiny house. I like the idea of the shared public space, the communal (or rented) kitchen, but architecture does not exist in isolation of the lives that happen in them, unless the architecture is of less importance than the clustering, in which the activity of the internal space (studio) extends into common areas.
In the chapter in "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander on the House Cluster he states: "People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with public land between them jointly owned by all the householders."
But this definition of community through the lens of architecture (circa 1975), is completely different now with the extension of activities into the Net, and ultimately into VR realms. Communities are already mostly virtual, with the "clustering" almost completely managed by the Social Graph and other algorithms, not the spatial arrangements, or how the spaces are orchestrated.
If you take away the possibilities of building physical architectures, you remove all those kinds of possibilities. It makes perfect sense that people don't want large houses because the removal of all those possibilities resulted in a reduction to a tiny house, and perhaps tiny thoughts and small ideas.
The natural tendency (per Wright) is to build out and expand, which is what happened over the last century, but new ideas inherent in virtual communities is creating a different feedback loop. It will be interesting to see how it affects the ideas we have, and what results from having less architecture as we have known it.
I did a thought experiment back in 2010 on whether an artist or musician could downsize and live in a tiny house. I like the idea of the shared public space, the communal (or rented) kitchen, but architecture does not exist in isolation of the lives that happen in them, unless the architecture is of less importance than the clustering, in which the activity of the internal space (studio) extends into common areas.
In the chapter in "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander on the House Cluster he states: "People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with public land between them jointly owned by all the householders."
But this definition of community through the lens of architecture (circa 1975), is completely different now with the extension of activities into the Net, and ultimately into VR realms. Communities are already mostly virtual, with the "clustering" almost completely managed by the Social Graph and other algorithms, not the spatial arrangements, or how the spaces are orchestrated.
If you take away the possibilities of building physical architectures, you remove all those kinds of possibilities. It makes perfect sense that people don't want large houses because the removal of all those possibilities resulted in a reduction to a tiny house, and perhaps tiny thoughts and small ideas.
The natural tendency (per Wright) is to build out and expand, which is what happened over the last century, but new ideas inherent in virtual communities is creating a different feedback loop. It will be interesting to see how it affects the ideas we have, and what results from having less architecture as we have known it.
