Strange Measure

Abstract

To bring movement into architecture, that eluding fixity into that fixed. The thesis begins here, in paradox, a paradox continuing throughout, in the form of various oppositions -- movement and stasis, the impulsive and the graphic (the graph), measure and disorder (or measured disorder).

The very form of an 'opposition,' and its subtext of mutual exclusion restated as an entwined tension, an impossible one-within-the-other, thought if not realized, oblique if not overt.

To work with flight, architecturally, with the movement of people and objects, departure and arrival, and, as architecture, with enclosure and disclosure.

The experience of air travel, specifically the boundlessness of one's gaze when in flight paired with the aircraft's insularity, interested me initially as a metaphor. To inhabit the infinitude of the sky within a protective vessel, moving through, and suspended within, space, extending the boundaries of the subject.

Each scale -- the scale of expanse, and the human scale of the aircraft -- opposite yet enmeshed, the aircraft physically, sensorially, framing the boundless. Aside from scale, the earlier question of movement, transience, within this expanse.

Transience as flux, flux as that antithetical to architecture's fixing in time, even as time is expressed.

A way to think while working -- to 'think' expanse while working with enclosure, to 'think' the meander while outlining the static.

The struggle between impulse and order, between ordered impulse and harmonic proportion, symmetry and the meander.

Allowing a strange measure, indeed, cultivating this irregular growth, a graphing of impulse, an impulse to graph.