Architecture is not a polite discipline. According to architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi, “the ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act; where limits are perverted, and prohibitions are transgressed. The starting point of architecture is distortion” (91). Rem Koolhaas asserts something similar. Design is not “meticulous definition, the imposition…More
Author Archives: Richard Coyne
The cultural, social and spatial implications of computers and pervasive digital media spark my interest ... enjoy architecture, writing, designing, philosophy, coding and media mashups.
Humanities in the wild
The Scottish Forestry Commission has produced a series of reports outlining why it’s good to get out into forests and green space: “There is a strengthening body of evidence to support the view that greenspace and woodlands provide the ideal setting to promote health and physical activity.” In many respects it’s an easy message to…More
Turning the corner
“…a turn in the drive; and suddenly a new and secret landscape opened before us.” This is Evelyn Waugh’s account of arrival at the Brideshead estate in Brideshead Revisited. I recall something similar when I once approached Blenheim Palace from the narrow streets in the village of Woodstock. Turning the corner from the Market Square…More
Gathered round the hearth
Is this scenario familiar? You order your dinner online, wait for the home delivery, then eat it while multi-screening in front of the television and checking Facebook, while other members of the household work late, snack or play computer games in different rooms. For philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann that script signals the moral as…More
Genius headgear
Fans rated Spock’s Brain the second worst of the original Star Trek episodes. The story involves the unlikely removal and theft of Mr Spock’s highly logical brain for use as central controller for the complex systems and services of a planet run by women. While waiting for the brain’s return Dr McCoy manages to install an apparatus on Spock’s head…More
Showing off
As well as valuing their privacy, it seems that some people want to make spectacles of themselves. Include in this category conspicuous whistle blowers exposing secrets — about covert operations that uncover other people’s secrets. Amidst concerns about the interception of text messages, voice, and phone data by GCHQ (Guardian) and ubiquitous video surveillance, spare…More
What’s wrong with parametricism
NURBS (Non-uniform rational B-spline curves) and blobs (blobs) are big in architecture. We used to talk simply about parametric design, and some still do. Parameters are the constants in an equation, set of equations, or a computer program (script). They define and limit what the equation will produce, e.g. the shape of a curve. But you can…More
Architectural pragmatics
It’s important to get to the truth. Michael Gove, the current UK education secretary, thinks that we are selling short the truth about WWI: “Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part…More
Frequent feelings
In my research into emotions I’ve found it useful to look at Google search counts to gauge the relative popularity of terms like happiness, melancholy, and mood. Now Google provide n-grams, which show the occurrences of words (or any string of characters) during any year in the entire corpus of books that Google have scanned…More
Morphic fields
The kids at Hogwarts learn to move objects about at will without having to touch or grab them. According to philosopher David Ray Griffin, the mechanistic philosophy of Rene Descartes helped counteract the belief that minds can control objects over distances. This insight eventually reduced the persecution of people labelled as witches. For good or evil the…More