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SYSTEMIC ORDER

The studio is a fabrication studio, which merges ideas of gesture, systemic order, occupation, and material presence into the construction of an architectural surface. The surface will be constructed out of a mitigated duality that merges the logical and deductive approach with the emotional, and inductive approach. Looking backward and forward at the same time, the studio takes interest in two similar veins of thinking from the fields of psychology and physics in order to understand this mitigated duality.

Of particular interest using psychological working methods as a point of departure for this mitigated duality, is the shift in Freud's approach from early working methods to the later methods which accommodated the demands of the larger scientific community. His first approach, for which he used the term "love", was an approach founded in narrative and a particular understanding of the unconscious. Drawing a great deal of criticism for his unscientific approach, he began to shift his methods of analysis to a more logic driven and systematic "scientific rationality". What is of interest here is that in the now famous "Dora Case". Where he applied these methods, they completely failed. Analytic structure without the human dimension of empathy and emotion lacks a basis in and for humanity, Thus, in the face of this failure of science, the artistic nature of the psychological emerges ... merging the logical and deductive approach with the emotional and inductive approach.

Of particular interest from the field of physics are two principles which also allow for and employ mitigated understandings. The first in the "uncertainty principle" first conceived by Heisenberg: "Natural Science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning." In other words, the tool of investigation affects the outcome of the experiment. The second principle was conceived by Bohr as the "complementarity principle". Faced with the dilemma of two contradictory models of the atom, one starting from the assumption that the atom is comprised of matter, the other that the atom consists of waves of energy, he proposed the coexistence of both as the truth available from both descriptions was more complete than the truth either offered. Thus, they were complementary rather than contradictory. Bohr's principle of complementarity and Heissenberg's uncertainty principle described a universe more complex and less easily knowable than the world they had begun in.

Employing this logic of mitigating duality, the following set of terms will pulse beneath the studio surface creating the depth of substance, meaning, and the constructed experience of the architectural surface: inside/outside, public/private. Male/female, wall/window, figure/ground.

NOTES

Studio Critic: Kathryn Dean
Fall 2004