Material for thought

Check out my conversation with Kati Blom on the website of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture. It follows a philosophical paper I published last year on the appropriation of space.

“The objective of I S P A is to promote rigorous philosophical engagement with the subject of architecture by providing an informal platform for parties interested in furthering the cause.” Excellent initiative indeed!

A letter that I wrote few months ago about local and mobile capital has been published in the issue 232 of the “Design, Architecture, Ideas” Ottagono magazine. The letter introduces very briefly the Marxist geography terms that I discovered during my philosophical investigations on the concept of place. The magazine is in Italian and English.

Japan is full of beautiful gardens, but none of them impressed me as much as the Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto. The best is to visit the Zen garden early in the morning before the other tourists come in, and to be alone in front of the masterpiece. The garden itself is small and very simple, but once you have seen it, all other gardens seem gimmicky and missing the essential. Many books have been published about this garden, but one specific aspect that struck me is its relation with the outside. The walled garden is actually within a bigger garden, and even though you cannot see it from the inside, you can hear it and see the branches of the trees. I would even say that the best way to enjoy the outside garden is from the Ryoan-ji garden. It is the essence of any garden, offering a window to the outside world, a meaningful perspective.

List of system theories as enumerated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in “General System Theory” (1968):

• Classical system theory, basically maths.
• Computerization and simulation using models.
• Compartment theory: “the system consists in subunits with certain boundary conditions between which transport process takes place”.
• Set theory, which studies general formal properties of systems.
• Graph theory concerned with topological space.
• Net theory, a generalisation of sequences (http://en.allexperts.com/e/n/ne/net_(mathematics).htm).
• Cybernetics: “A theory of control systems based on communication (transfer of information) between system and environment and within the system, and control (feedback) of the system’s function in regard to environment.”

According to the psychologist Jean Pieget, “young children do have a lot of fantasy in thought. They may imagine that they are magically affecting things. And they have to learn to distinguish certain ‘fantasies’ which are to be called ‘reality’, namely the ones that pass the tests of reality”:

• that stand up the experience of reality
• that everybody sees
• that resist being pushed
• that are not affected by how you think about them
• …

Read in “Thought as a System” by David Bohm – 1992.