Get Rid of It

Do you know why houses are houses? They are essentially a place to store stuff. There was a point in which you needed space to store things like farm grain and food stuffs to survive the winter. We have moved past that. Yet, we only want BIGGER houses and then proceed to fill it with things just so it can be full! But once this occurs the virus has already infected the inhabitant. We are now a certified consumer. Not only must we buy things, we must show it off. We stop caring for sheer quality and start caring for sheer social statement. Housing becomes all about market. Clothing becomes fashion.

We need to shake it off, like Taylor Swift teaches us. Get rid of houses! Get rid of fashion! Get rid of status! We use these things to provide for us a sense of worth when we are lacking. This inevitably bites us later on when we get addicted to chasing status for status' sake and we lose the things that made us before we needed fashion to make up the gap. All we have left is the Gap (nice). 

Do you ever wonder why Jordans are so highly prized in the hood? It's because they are perfectly positioned at a price level and a status level. The ability of a hood nigga to get a pair of shoes whilst living in squalor is at the perfect limit. What's $200 when to actually move out of the hood would cost so muchore and would be so alien with not readily available results. When the chips are reallllly down, that instant gratification is sooooo sweet. And I get that. But it's still wrong, especially wrong for the sharks that feed off it. Nike! And now it's gotten to the point that the hood throws itself at these sharks rather than the other way around. Companies don't have to market towards the hood. They simply market, "your valuable if you have this". And then the hot hip hop song features a line with a brand name in it, always in a "I have this and you can't afford it" type of way. It doesn't matter if the aesthetic sucks or the shoes don't perform. Status said that these have utmost status, so therefore get these to achieve status....nothing more, you still have to pay your electric bill, Gucci will not bankroll that. 

Is there anyway for us lower people to stop trying to be like the high ones? Is there a way to fundamentally understand that the dreams they're selling us aren't real? Can we make our own culture? But Hasheem we have rap! We sold that. We have fashion! Not anymore, fubu is gone, now we glamorize obscure European brands. We have graffiti! Banksy. We have sports! When is the last time we invented a game? Or ran the league? 

We have World Star! Well...... we do. And we should be proud of it. There is nothing like world star hip hop. There isn't a video site that so acutely captures an essence of culture anywhere else. World star shows us that there is a third option. We don't have to be sell outs to the 'man' or be crushed by his system. We can celebrate ourselves for the benefit of ourselves solely.

Can we expand back into design with this spirit? Can fubu rise again? Imagine the low overhead of a fashion company. A small office space, some sewing machines, and some fabric. Just imagine how desirable would it be to have a distinct 'hood' clothing company that isn't trying to be nation wide. A company where people from the community come in, try their hand at clothing and hey, if it's successful, people in your neighborhood would say, "yo I just copped this new shaniqua piece". And it wouldn't be about status, it would simply be a nice piece of clothing. Slowly we create local typologies. A Charlotte fashion will be inherently distinct from a Seattle fashion. 

Slowly we get our culture back, a culture that isn't in opposition or agreement with the 'man', but just 'is' independently. 

Fashion->Tools->Furniture->Architecture->Identity

The Camel Back Straw!

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/mercedes-making-self-driving-semi-change-future-shipping/?mbid=social_fb#slide-id-1584369

This is what will trigger the revolution folks. 2025, I fully expect this. All the truckers will be out of work, so many demographics this will cut through on a national/global level, we will be forced to rethink the idea of 'jobs'. They will fight efficiency, safety, for just the idea of having a job. And don't let there be a high profile truck accident anytime before 2025, this will trigger a quicker and easier push for the automation. It will be glorious. 

At Architecture

The human body can only do so much without the need for others. One cannot even write without the labor and energy of the universe around. One cannot eat, drink, love, without needing interaction. So what is there that solely affects our being?

Sleep. 

Sleep is how we spend 1/3 of our lives, it is how we rejuvenate and have the physical capacity to participate in our meta-physical endeavours. Can you have a thought without others? Does a thought exist if it is not enacted on another? Do you belong solely in your physical body, or are you scattered across the universe existing in the synapses of ideas that affect you?

Once the human capacity is reached, we are compelled to collaborate, for food, for shelter, for science, for comedy. This collaboration brings about innovation. 

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”
-Bill Hicks

What is the hindrance to this? Misunderstanding of the sense of self, which breeds oppression. We’re led to believe we own things, and this is because others claim this and we don’t want to be on the other end. We equate ownership with existence. And that is the one religion that unites us: existence. So we hoard, we do not share, we put up walls and only let people in when they figure out our ‘friend’ puzzle. Those on the outside are then denied this collaboration, this heightening of existence. They are oppressed. The result is, they retaliate with their own walls. They retaliate with art, they retaliate with religion. 

Home is the heart of architecture. The importance of architecture is tied to how we live. How we live is tied to where we sleep. Were we sleep is what we call home. 

Home is where the center of hoarding has evolved to be. It is the place where your ‘friends’ are allowed. It is the place where you’re most intimate self lies, and conversely it is the place where you most want to show off who you are. 

So what we are left with is an oppressed communal self, and we are left with an oppressed central self. 

The solution is a simultaneous expansion and contraction of the idea of home. Our living room is our community gym; our kitchen is our neighborhood diner. Everyone becomes your best friend simply by existing. Our sleep is solitary, that space is our own, and it is all we need, no unwanted sounds, light, ideas, the ultimate secure feeling, to be naked without shame. 

How does this idea bump into the contemporary? What becomes of the architecture of the home? And finally, can architecture of a single unit enable expression?

The price of rice in China

So I presented my work for the first time today. I'm terrible at words when it comes to this idea I have. The problem is that I don't want to misrepresent the whole  of the idea, but the problem is I don't think my idea fits words exactly. It's a feeling that encompasses many many things going on at the same time. You could say I'm studying the communal sense of self. You could say I'm studying special oppression. But there are so many layers and definitions within those topics that only I have defined and the words I used to define them are tailored just for me. This is where I trip up. When people hear things like selfish, or hoarding, or communism, they get triggered to go on a tangent on their own.

So, suffice to say I looked and felt crazy today. :/

But after thinking about it, I think there was a success. A professor that I had always respected was talking to me about my project today and I was able to find her point where she started to push back. We are always told to think and let all the possibilities flow. But I was able to successfully peel back her layers and see where she drew her lines. Just a secret thesis study.

She gave me a very hard question to think about. So much so that I was sitting outside zoned out and a fellow student whom I didn't know remarked to me, "trying to untangled your thesis?"  I have been stressing about the possibility that my idea is not architecture related. Or perhaps, I am asking too much of architecture. I think that will be the question I will be attacking the rest of the year. The concept gives me a refreshing sense of absolute panic.

What if architecture is life? Is architecture only a coat of paint on culture and quality of life? Or can architecture spark innovation? Can it cleanse the soul in such a way that we lay down our weapons of religion, nationality, race and embrace each other as humans? And if it can't, what can?

The home is the heart of your meta existence. You go there every night and rejuvenate. Can a perfect setting center you in such a way to promote the communal sense of self? Can it put you in flow with the universe?

The price of rice in China should affect architecture. Can architecture be that sensitive to the exact time in which it is realized that it acts as a time stamp of mankind? Is that perfection? Beauty? 

Thesis Abstract

PART 1

GOD

God is real. God is everything that is, everything that was, and everything that will be. God is all knowing. Every leaf, every cell phone, every conversation. God is perfect. God is beautiful. God is amoral. God does not judge, God does not oppress.

Everything that happens is perfect; the infinite amount of factors that coalesce to produce reality all taking place in a unique spec of space time is exactly where it should be.  

Each and every one of us is a piece of God. Without any of us, He is incomplete. We are merely pieces encountering other pieces of the same whole.

SENSE of SELF - COMMUNICATION

While we are all part of the whole, we are tasked with finding our fit. Finding our fit is what we deem ‘happiness’, or ‘satisfaction’. Our Physical and Meta self is on a journey to do just that, since we are not dead we want to find our most alive. To do that, we Communicate: through words, running, eating, jokes, selfies, tweets, making a coffee table, breathing. We communicate with people, animals, grass, the street, the culture, stereotypes, assumptions, the future. We communicate whether we are aware of it or not. We strive to be all aware and all knowing. The pinnacle being a state where all the confusion, fear, and surprise of the world has been cleansed from our being. At that moment we are Present. At that moment we are Based.

IDEAS/MEMORIES

All we have are our ideas, and with those all we create are memories. Our physical being is there to facilitate these, acting as a production factory. We receive various ideas from various sources, comprehend them to the best of our ability, and then synthesize like and unlike elements to produce altered versions of those ideas.

Only the beautiful ideas enter and exit untouched, perfect.  

Without a physical potential met, we cannot receive or send these ideas without harming them with our imperfect perception. This is where physical intake is paramount in the food we eat. We literally are what we eat, and there is a specific formula of nutrients our body needs to run at highest efficiency.

For all of the rumbles and ripples we make in life, anything and everything only moves with memories. A non physical form of verifying existence. If an architect makes a bank in the center of town, it will be remembered by the construction workers, the quarry where the stone was taken to make aggregate, the town who deposits the funds into the bank, the banks headquarters in a big city. When the bank closes, the memory will move on to the tuition that was paid with interest collected in that bank, the salvaged stone that now lines the bank owners house, the road that had a turning lane put in because the bank brought other businesses to town.

The bank was put together by various forces of time and space and faded away bank into its maker.

HUMAN CAPACITY

While we are part of the whole, we are capable of an amount on our own. Our physical body allows us to jump so high, to sleep a maximum amount at a time, to run so many miles non-stop. At the same time, our idea factory allows us only so much meta existence during our life. If we are a celebrity we have the same influence as a hermit. They each influence the universe equally in unique ways.

From this, we only need so much space to live, so much air to breathe, for us to achieve our potential. We have an instinct to know when we have too much, we feel overburdened, or when we have too little, we feel trapped, both feelings are Oppressive.

SENSE of SELF – COMMUNITY

The human capacity limits us to achieving a certain amount on our own. However, just as ideas can move and grow between people, our identity can too. In a sense, you are what you identify with in others, what you subscribe to. That is the happiness felt when a ball team wins a championship, the town was part of their consciousness, so the town celebrates. This is why seeing someone in need makes you feel you are in need also because you see yourself in them.

It is only when we wall of our identity that we are able to oppress others; with ideas like nation, religion, race. Those who do not fit, no longer are part of us, and can therefore be denied existence.

SELFLESSNESS in DESIGN

Knowing that we do not exist in a vacuum, no one man is an island, we cannot approach design with a self aggrandizing mindset. The very inputs that enable us to put the pen to the paper to produce the sketch have come from others. The art professor, the paper company, your parents who bore you and raised you. The based designer understands he is part of the continuum of space time and has a duty to produce the most perfected design to lift existence further.

If an architect designs a hotel, and it is perfect in every way, but it happens to have the same layout and aesthetics as the hotel across the street, he will be honored to deliver the result, to have contributed. Changing the design would lead to problems with the building, maybe unforeseen, only to achieve an inflated sense of existence.

ARCHITECT as FILTER

The architect acts as the filter. Sacrificing their desires for the perfect realization of the building. They must have enabled in them a perception of the desires of the count­less aspects, from client to contractor, from circulation to structure, to poetics of form, that come together to create the project. Once they are well versed in these desires, others can begin to trust the designer.

PERFECTING CRAFT

Once the designer is able to unmarry himself from the design, can he begin to perfect the craft. When concerned with getting new projects or keeping a name, the designer begins to be selfish and takes short sighted routes when building. The designer is only concerned with achieving universal perfection.  

THE SHOULD

Now, the designer could design anything and it would be, by definition, perfect. The question that arises is the Should. The designer could scribble anything, but he would not know how it would be perceived to reality. When the designer has squeezed out all of the surprise in the reveal is when the designer knows he should have designed it that way. If an architect designs a bridge and it is perceived as a hate symbol when it is erected and immediately torn down, he should have known it to be so and changed the design. While the bridge was perfect, it did not achieve what the designer had in mind.

 ****************************************************

PART 2

GOAL of a NATION

Physical things are what drive our Meta existence. And to a nation, natural resources control theirs. History will show, countries came to be identified from their natural resources and the communities it furnished, turning into borders. Now, the countries have scarce resources with which to trade with others nations, and the scarcer/more important the resource, the better deal for the giver. Problem is, resource importance changes with technology. At one time a spice trading nation could rule over many people, but as knowledge of spice farming increases, the market doesn’t need to trade it anymore, rendering the country powerless.

The goal of a country is to milk the trade of their resources until they become the bastion of innovation. Once they can innovate, they can steer the new technology to change the resource game in their favor. And a nation will use any means to keep up this dominance: War, Propaganda, Ethnicity, Religion, Alliance, Embargo.

The grand hope of the nation is for its citizens to exist fully. The problem is that the idea of a nation itself puts up walls to prevent others outside of the nation to contribute to the full existence. The idea of a world nation is the only way to erase Oppression, and strive for complete existence.

OPPRESSION CYCLE

Oppression happens when the forces of the universe aren’t allowed to achieve their full existence.

Ignorance -> Oppression -> Lies -> Oppression -> Lies - > Oppression…..

The beginning of oppression is when someone means well, but they are ignorant of the desires of others, or the desires themselves are ignorant. In example, a benevolent king gifts his subjects with goats. The goats end up destroying their homes. The subject have been oppressed, they will want retaliation. They retaliate, setting off a chain of counter-strikes. Now, if the subject knew the king meant well, they couldn’t be mad, and if the king knew the goats would destroy the town, he wouldn’t have done it. But once an issue arises that is unsure, we use retaliatory tactics to quickly solve the uncertainty.

Oppression also gives rise to lies. An oppression-less world has no need to lie, everyone can be themselves and be accepted. Lies serve to even the score in a physical or meta way. Lies can be in the form of art, as in a revolutionary painting drawing attention to government corruption, lies can be in the form of entertainment to make you forget your situation for a moment, lies can be in the form of religion to tell you there is a greener pasture.  

Is there a way out once oppressed? Knowledge heals the wounds of oppression and cuts the lies right at the source. There is no opposite of oppression except not being oppressed and arriving back there is a slow return.

CAPITALISM

Capitalism is the strategy for a nation to use competition to achieve innovation. Capitalism is inherently inhumane and implodes on itself unchecked. Capitalism does not care for quality of product, or for innovative measures, if it doesn’t produce profit. The goal of a capitalist is money, not existence, forgetting money is only a means. The only measure in which capitalism can survive is to balance it with Communism. And while Communism produces false markets and price vagaries, it gives rise to the Communal Sense of Self which we use to push forward our ideas and existence.

AUTOMATION

Man has strived to simply make life tasks simpler and easier in exchange for the ability to experience more and learn more about existence. This has been the human condition even before humans broke into their own species.  Automation has always been a ‘good’, but in a capitalist based society, it spells disaster.

Before heavy mechanization, a tribe lived in coordination with their neighbors. If someone needed help, the community felt it as their identity to help them. If someone needed a house, the town built it, only expecting future reciprocation in return. Any improvement in society has made new tasks available to be completed. This had been going on for centuries with an ample amount of tasks to be completed by a full work force. Therefore, we established a society centered on jobs for the sake of doing your part to help the community forward.

We are arriving at the point where we do not need employment to live. Food is plentiful, houses are available/or easy to build, knowledge on health is readily available…. Except in a capitalist country, we are bound by money and a job obligation to enjoy the fruits of this labor. We have been fed the ‘earn what you work for’ doctrine since birth. That should have been a temporary mantra for a greater goal of providing our communal whole with more potential existence. This job contract leads to resisting the thought of being jobless because of improvements in technology, which leads to resisting innovation.

LACK of INNOVATION

As jobs become more and more reserved for those in intellectual fields, those with jobs in the intellectual field hold on tighter to what they have. Instead of trying out a new, brave idea, they would rather produce a fail safe answer, produce another superhero movie that can’t fail at the box office. Companies will be averse towards making products that improve life if it means losing money. Those geniuses without intellectual jobs will waste away shoveling coal, instead of pushing existence for all. Capitalism will behave like a pendulum without a communal counter weight. Eventually Comcast will stop providing internet service since no one uses it and will go into commodities like apples to make a profit. We will shrivel back to food and shelter with money as the goal.

PIGEON-HOLING of ARCHITECTURE

Along with the stalling of innovation in many other fields, architecture will suffer/has already begun to suffer. To be able to have the freedom to design, the client has to be from money. The problem with that is those with funds are not centered in regard to necessity. They are in love with accepted norms, for they are the progenitors of those norms. They cannot be seen with a house that has the chance of being mocked, their worth depends on others acceptance. Therefore, in order for the architect to eat, the design must reflect these wishes and contain a fake brick façade when in reality the building wants a metal one.

Architecture almost has no choice in being aligned with money. The backward bit is that the progenitors of culture are usually the Oppressed. Those that have to have an outlet because they are not able to achieve more fulfilling dreams. So they dominate the arts: music, athletics, food, dance. They push that envelope because it is the only one you can’t price. The architectural result is stagnation as the underlings are shoved into dwelling painted to look ‘rich’ as if that’s the goal. Any design genius will either come from one of these dwellings with tainted views on architecture or will already be pigeon-holed to conform to them.

HOUSING

A home is the heart of architecture. It is inward. It is the most intimate space we inhabit. It is where we can lie down and feel safe. It is where we center ourselves to face the outside world anew. In today’s world a house is a trading piece, it is a status symbol, it is an outward portrayal of self worth. It has the power to cause recession. People spend 30 years paying someone to live in their home, worrying about the next month’s payments for all of their adult life, never able to completely feel it is their space.

Without this place of solace, one cannot center. This oppression causes unforeseen consequences and indulgence in artful activities. Architecture becomes an afterthought, it is a pipe dream.

****************************************************

PART 3

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE to UNOPPRESS?

As we have progressed in regards to providing for ourselves, we have increased what we deem basic human rights. With the capitalism pendulum stopping and about to begin its backwards swing, we must expand basic human rights to enable innovation. This would include healthcare, food, and housing—for free.

FREE HOUSING?!

A BASE HOUSE designed to achieve a maximum inward centering would cause a ripple effect throughout the nation. Ideas would be free to be expressed, shame would fade away, communities would grow and the sense of self would be allowed to wander beyond the confines of the physical body and into the meta of a communal whole.  

HOW?!

A nation has to recognize the benefit of trusting its citizens instead of forcing. It has to remember what a nation is, a family bettering itself towards finding itself, towards pushing existence. It has to sponsor the basic rights and it has to trust the designers to deliver. 

Corporate Creeping

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/16/starbucks-free-college-tuition/10569971/

Interesting

Soon....

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2014/06/12/of-course-noone-is-buying-average-cost-of-new-home-is-6x-median-income-n1850615/page/2

Thesis will be glorious