"The Hidden Dimension" HALL, E.T.

Published in 1966, "The Hidden Dimension" is one of the very few attempts in documenting psychological effects in correlations with our environment. The concept of PROXEMICS is introduced by the author to mean "interrelated observations and theories of man's use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture". While measurements of space often only means limitation of site and regulation by default, the author argued for a strong case that the effect social distances have on us is rooted in our biological past, and can be precisely measured into centimeters. Subject to a much greater degree of variation, however, is man's perception of space; which is filtered by our (cultural conditioned) senses, language, and even personality development.

"When approached too closely, these schizophrenics panic in much the same way as an animal recently locked up in a zoo. In describing their feelings, such patients refer to anything that happens within their "flight distance" as taking place literally inside themselves. That is, the boundaries of the self extend beyond the body. These experiences recorded by therapists working with schizophrenics indicate that the realization of the self as we know it is intimately associated with the process of making boundaries explicit." (p12)

Prolonged social intrusion beyond these defined distances (most likely due to overpopulation) would unleash biochemical defense mechanism, or simply put, crowding induces stress. Not only psychological distress but a BEHAVIORAL SINK results in observation of "gross distortions of behavior...(as) the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers." Such observations necessarily suggests city today as a collective sink, that perhaps deviant behaviors, suicides and crimes, roots in the idea of urbanization itself.

To complicate the matter further, perception of density, and space in general, is not objective, but subject to the alternation of kinesthetic experience:

"As he moves through space, man depends on the messages received from his body to stabilize his visual world. Without such body feedback, a great many people lose contact with reality and hallucinate. The importance of being able to integrate visual and kinesthetic experience has been demonstrated by two psychologists, Held and Heim, when they carried kittens through a maze along the same track on which other kittens were allowed to walk. The kittens that were carried failed to develop 'normal visual spatial capacities.'" (p66)

Living in the society of automobiles, sounds like we are born handicapped in visual-spatial capacities, and the "city" exists only in our hallucination.

Beijing - city on surface _2

The detrimental problem resides not in the pace of development, but its prioritizing of a distorted image that projects only directly outward. This results in architectural designs of disparate facades and its spatial interior, urban designs of segregated classifications causing further exclusion of the old city in current development.

Qianmen Street is an exemplary of the contemporary Chinese mentality in its desperate search external display of identity. The practice of counterfeit architecture not only targets at western architecture that symbolizes capitalism and technology, nor their own traditional representatives, but the double projection of our own imagination of Chinese glamour in the foreigner’s mind.

The value of Qianmen Street is solely dependent on the re-creation of its historical façade. As the above image suggests, even at the spot, some still chose to have their pictures taken in front of the Qianmen image printed on the construction partition, rather than the actual street. The functionality of Qianmen is perhaps no more than a same-size billboard, an undermined physical experience that is no different from the presentation of a rendered image. In the era of internet and information overflow, the mind only reacts to flashy images and the physical being is put into question. Archtiecturally speaking, the necessity of space is becoming less definite as technology surpasses physical distance. Skyscrapers will become excessive as people move work to home, as online shopping replaces malls, and renderings suggest reality. Do we accept space as replaceable, program interexchangeable?

[ prosthetic ] [ expendable ] [ image ]

PROSTHETIC

+ "Classical orthopaedics (in fact, like architecture in the traditional city) tends to reproduce - to evoke or recreate - the absent element; to regenerate damaged fabric or to extend its old characteristics. There was something of a redemptive, and at once reconstructive, formalism about it. Dissimulating distortions. Composing appearances. Recovering the past.
...architecture cannot limit itself to simply extending the body, or sustaining it, but rather it must be simultaneously a receptive and active supplement; a device which is singular (autonomous and artificial) and complicit (individual and interactive); estranged from, and at the same time sensitive to, the particular; capable of regulating itself and, at the same time, of resturcutirng, restimulating and strenthening the host in order to take it beyond its own limits: revealing that whcih was hidden. Architecture must work as an "antitype" which is in syntony with the host body so as not to provoke rejection, yet no longer in harmonious symbiosis with it." (Manuel Gausa, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)

EXPENDABLE

- (of an object) Designed to be used only once and then abandoned or destroyed
- of little significance when compared to an overall purpose, and therefore able to be abandoned

IMAGE

- a physical likeness or representation of a person, animal, or thing
- a mental representation; idea; concept
- the general or public perception
- to project on a surface

reading: "Recycling recycling", Mark Wigley

Beijing - city on surface_1

It is false to say the Olympics is all about the physical; in Beijing, it is all about the visual. Million-dollar decisions happen within split seconds of an image appeal. There is the common goal for instantaneous excitement, the dropped-out eyes on foreign faces, the wow-effect. The Olympics and the fast-paced development it brought about has led to ever more concerns that the Old Beijing is dying, thousand years of culture disappearing in thin air. Present discontent followed by nostalgia is common, but at the same time, questionable that the latter would be of remedy.

Take Qianmen Dajie ("front" "door" "street", in literal translation) in Beijing for instance, the re-creation of its historical facade has only attracted more criticism despite it being the discussed outcome of 30 experts in history, architecture and urban planning. Located along the central axis, south of Tian'anmen Square, this major avenue leads directly into one of the nine historical city gates. Once the most critical commecial district in the capital, all travellers arriving from the south would have passed by its storefronts, been to its theatres. Even emperors paraded through Qianmen to arrive at the Temple of Heaven in the south to pray for the country. The arrival of foreigners in the early 20th century only brought in more trades in the area, until the 1980's when Qianmen finally became obsolete and disassociated from the rest of the city development.

Amid controversies, the Olympics has restored its historical façade of the 1920’s, but along came a new identity – to relive the Old Beijing, and present to the world traditional Chinese culture. The by-product being that the street is no longer a street. Both north and south ends are fenced off to only allow underground crossing. Stores are spacious but lack occupants. The general wonder follows that the new identity of Qianmen is in no relations to its spatial design but all dependent on its historical facade. The new Qianmen will always be the new Qianmen as long as the façade stands.

Nostalgia is an oversimplification of the Chinese sentiment towards their capital. Exposing their own insecurity, hope for a better tomorrow is mis-attributed to the past. The new identity of Qianmen as an image projected to the outer world implied a default setting that ancient China equates Chinese culture, that nothing contemporary can define us as a nation. Further irony being that the "ancientness" on display is a distorted mutant of historical facade and foreign retail ownerships inside. The restoration of Qianmen was never about the uncanny replication of its historical facade, but how it represents our imagery of the glorious past. No matter how much it resembles the 20's, it does not belong to the city today, nor will it ever fit into our imagined past. As contemporaries, we will never be satisfied.

[ trigger ] [ flow ]

TRIGGER

- anything, as an act or event, that serves as a stimulus and initiates or precipitates a reaction or series of reactions
- to initiate or precipitate (a chain of events, scientific reaction, psychological process, etc.
- to fire or explode (a gun, missile, etc.) by pulling a trigger or releasing a triggering device

FLOW

- move along or out steadily and continuously in a current or stream
- circulate continuously within a particular system
- (of people or things) Go from one place to another in a steady stream, typically in large numbers
- result from; be caused by

+ "Flow refers to a multivalent series of notion and direction. This multivalent possibility of recipient information is coded and in certain cases subliminal - found in the city environment - and is our clue to the flow as a system of subjective criteria presented logically. The eidetic condition is revealed as object, a para-construct of the philosophical, political and cultural value of the taxonomy, where the arrangement is both one substance and time." (Yeoman, Andrew, "Movement, velocity, networks: backup infrastructures")

+ "As in Piranesi's engravings, the contemporary environment may be understood as an infinite interior of imprecise boundaries, where inhabitants are located in the form of a flow, converted into circulation. In this context, road infrastructure plays an important role in establishing an order that is not based upon formal criteria but upon abstract bits of information (on a motorway we can arrive at our destination without using geographical parameters, following only a discontinual set of messages) and immaterial properties such as the increase in the degree of connectivity within the territory that patches (or traces) of meaning provide, without which the order becomes more diffuse." (Valor, Jaume, "Interior Global")

+ "A trigger of one energy form sets off a flow in another which, in turn, triggers a release of a flow in the first; the insertion of more parties creates a chain of trigger-flow interactions that may go in series, in parallel or both...The trigger-flow interactions specifically create an interdependent reproduction among the participating dissipative structures." (De Landa)

reading: "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History", De Landa

[ interactivity ]

INTERACTIVITY

- capable of acting on or influencing each other
- synergistic: used especially of drugs or muscles that work together so the total effect is greater than the sum of the two (or more)
- providing output based on input from the user. This output feeds back into the user's decision process for subsequent interaction. Interactive websites, for instance, allow for more dynamic information browsing and applications such as shopping, banking, etc.

+"If objects think, react and take action beyond their material qualities, spaces and places have to react with them. Objects think because someone has thought about them. Someone has programmed and give them qualities so that they can be integrated into a new logic of the world in which everything is connected to everything." (Vincente Guallart, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)

reading: "INTRODUCTION" in Organization Space: landscapes, highways, and houses in America

[ indirectness ] [ urbanist ]

INDIRECTNESS

- lacking a true course toward a goal
- not resulting directly from a single action or cause
- involving intermediate or intervening parts or pathways. e.g. stimulation of one eye elicits narrowing of the pupil of the other eye by an indirect reaction

+ "...the secret to achieving a robust, adaptive, flexible, and evolving design."
+ out of control

+ the fear of architects, and the ineffective postulations between their design and proposed outcome.

URBANIST

- maximizing the effectiveness of a community's land use and infrastructure
- focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment

+ "...find ways to approximate these ecological forces and structures, aspects of wild nature, to invent artificial means of creating living artificial environments."

+ a person in attempt to simulate evolutionary processes through artificial means in the urban context.

reading: "WILDNESS (Prolegomena to a New Urbanism)"