Carnaval y shopping

Bajo la cúpula del Westfield shopping mall, San Francisco.

¨El carnaval era la misma ciudad transformada; más exactamente, un intervalo de tiempo durante el cual la ciudad se transformaba, y volvía después a su rutina cotidiana. Durante un lapso estrictamente definido, que se repetía cíclicamente, el carnaval revelaba ¨la otra cara¨de la realidad cotidiana, una cara que estaba siempre presente pero que normalmente era invisible e intocable. El recuerdo del acontecimiento y la anticipación de otros acontecimientos futuros no permitían que desapareciera la conciencia de esa ¨otra cara¨.

Una excursión al templo del consumo es algo muy diferente. Su realización implica la sensación de ser transportado a otro mundo, y no, como en el caso del carnaval, la sensación de estar presenciando una transustanciación maravillosa del mundo conocido. El templo del consumo (a diferencia del ¨almacén de la esquina¨ de antaño) puede estar en la ciudad (si es que no se lo construye, simbólicamente, fuera de los límites de la ciudad, al costado de una autopista), pero no forma parte de ella; no es el mundo habitual temporariamente transmutado, sino un mundo ¨completamente otro¨. Lo que convierte en ¨otro¨ no es la inversión, el rechazo ni la suspensión de las reglas que gobiernan la cotidianidad, como en el caso del carnaval, sino el despliegue de un modo de ser que la cotidianidad excluye o que trata vanamente de lograr –y que casi nadie puede experimentar en los lugares de residencia habitual-.¨

REFERENCIAS. Zygmunt Bauman. Modernidad Líquida. Cap. Espacio/Tiempo, pág. 106 y 107.

Fotos de Myriam B. Mahiques, archivos personales.

Una de las vidrieras de Macy´s, San Francisco

Reflections on Pruitt Igoe

I´ve been reading an article by Dante A. Ciampaglia, for Architectural Record, about the documentary film on Pruitt Igoe, that was released last January 20th- He is right, nobody remembers the feelings of the displaced people who had been living there. It seems the film is a kind of demythification of implosion´s reasons. The first building was imploded in 1972.

¨Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing development was destined for failure. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its Modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition—in a spectacular series of implosions—less than two decades later. In the popular narrative, bad public policy, bad architecture, and bad people doomed Pruitt-Igoe, and it became an emblem of failed social welfare projects across the country. But director Chad Freidrichs challenges that convenient and oversimplified assessment in his documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, opening in limited release January 20.

He makes a compelling case. Drawing heavily on archival footage, raw data, and historical reanalysis, the film reorients Pruitt-Igoe as the victim of institutional racism and post-war population changes in industrial cities, among other issues far more complex than poor people not appreciating nice things. But while Freidrichs opens a new vein for discussing Pruitt-Igoe, he doesn't totally dispel the titular myth about it. There's a passing mention of the project’s failure being one of Modernist planning, that such developments "created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime." And of course there's an invocation of Charles Jencks' famous declaration that the death of Pruitt-Igoe was "the death of Modernism." But Freidrichs never adequately addresses Pruitt-Igoe's place in the history of urban design.

But even if The Pruitt-Igoe Myth falls short of its stated goal, it's nevertheless exceptional. In an important act of preservation, Freidrichs captures the voices and memories of five former Pruitt-Igoe residents. They tell stories of jubilation when they're assigned an 11th floor apartment (their "poorman's penthouse") and when they see rows upon rows of windows bejeweled with Christmas lights. They share horrific tales of siblings murdered and living in constant fear of who lurks in the shadows. They remember how the welfare office told them they couldn't have a phone or a television, and how their husbands and fathers weren’t allowed to live with them.¨

KEEP ON READING:

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/01/Pruitt-Igoe-public-housing-development.asp

All pictures were downloaded from architecturalrecord.construction.com

Active relations with the environment in Sunset Beach

Amos Rapoport, architect and anthropologist, taught us about the human interventions in the environment. Buildings would conform the fixed environment, furniture, objects, etc are the non fixed elements of the environment. When inhabitants interact with their environment, they leave clues about the way they live or feel.

Sunset beach is a quiet small neighborhood that was annexed to the city of Huntington Beach, Southern California. Here, some examples of the town character of some houses, the marine decoration, the nice garden in a public boulevard, full of stones with the ¨designer´s¨ memories. I´m not sure if everybody in town is allowed to add plants and objects to the garden, but I think there wouldn´t be any problem to share memories.

All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques, personal archives.

And that´s me, with some beach houses, in Sunset Beach. A bad picture taken by  my husband.

¨The ¨will to live,¨ often said to be the great inclusive motive of all living creatures, is in human beings not simply the will to stay alive but rather the will to live in active relations with the environment. Being equipped with sense organs and motor organs and a well developed brain, the human individual has a fundamental inclination to deal with environment. This motive is not primarily directed toward serving the organic needs and meeting the emergencies of life, but toward knowing objects and persons, doing things to them, and participating in what is going on in the environment. Just because this objective tendency is so all persuasive it is often overlooked and omitted from a list of fundamental motives, where it certainly belongs. It shows itself in the general tendencies to explore and manipulate the environment, and in a great variety of more specific interests.¨

Robert Woodworth and Donald Marquis, Psychology, 5th edition, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York, 1947, p. 323.

Footprints of the seaside´s visitors in a beautiful winter day. The track of the interaction with the environment

The artistic landscapes of Zander Olsen

Since 2004, architecture and landscape photographer and artist Zander Olsen has been working on Tree, Line, a series of “constructed” photographs that play with our notion of foreground and background in a forest (http://dirt.asla.org/2012/01/19/landscapes-that-fool-you/)

From zanderolsen.com:

These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.

http://www.zanderolsen.com/Tree_Line.html

ALL PICTURES BY ZANDER OLSEN

Reflexiones sobre la fractalidad aplicada al estudio de la morfología urbana 2

Fractal generado como simulación por el asentamient. Baila en Africa. Por Myriam B. Mahiques. Archivos personales

Imagen aérea de un mercado mexicano, archivo binario. Foto bajada de Google y pasado a binario por Myriam B. Mahiques. Ver referencia del autor en la foto

¨To the superficial observer scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings; they are imposed not only on us, but on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science. This is what they take to be the role of experiment and mathematics. And thus, too, it was understood a hundred years ago by many men of science who dreamed of constructing the world with the

aid of the smallest possible amount of material borrowed from experiment. But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen; it was recognised that it is as necessary to the experimenter as it is to the mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superficiality. To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.¨

From Science and Hyphotesis. By Henri Poincaré. Author´s preface to the edition of New York, 1905

Estas palabras de Poincaré me llevan a la reflexión. Dios está presente en la naturaleza, está ¨encadenado¨ a ella por las mismas leyes con las que la ha regido, leyes que se pueden descubrir mediante el análisis matemático, y según las soluciones descubrimos qué elecciones hizo Dios. Para ello, es necesario experimentar, y podemos dudar o creer, cualquiera de las dos determinaciones surgen de la reflexión.

La fractalidad, es la geometría de la naturaleza, y con respecto a la pregunta, toda morfología urbana es fractal? le transmití mis dudas al profesor Ron Eglash, por email, a principios del 2000. Y me contestó que para verificarlo, debía analizar el producto cultural de la gente que habitaba en esas formas urbanas. ¨Hablando¨ de su libro African Fractals, él había descubierto que las formas fractales africanas se daban en los peinados, en los juegos, en simbolismos, en asentamientos.... No lo dijo directamente pero dejó implícito lo que luego mi directora, dra. Vera de Spinadel me preguntó: Has probado la autosimilitud? La invariancia de los resultados a través de la escala?

Entonces, ya una vez establecida en Estados Unidos, me dispuse a verificar si las formas urbanas de los barrios mexicanos – chicanos respondían a la invariante escalar.

Y sí, las mediciones de la ropa típica, los grupos de viviendas con sus particiones (declaradas y no declaradas), las decoraciones, todo arrojaba un valor de D con tendencia o igual a 0.80, -el ansia por la ocupación total del espacio-.

2º POSTULADO: Para probar si una forma urbana es fractal, debemos verificar que su valor D (dimensión fractal) sea igual o de tendencia a un valor determinado a través de las distintas escalas.

Nota: hablo de tendencias porque por supuesto no son fractales deterministas.


Lea Reflexiones sobre la fractalidad aplicada al estudio de la morfología urbana 1:
http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2012/01/reflexiones-sobre-la-fractalidad.html

Concepts: analogy in fractal urban morphology

Analogía fractal de un campo romano. Generado por Myriam B. Mahiques. Archivos personales. Fractal analogy of a Roman field. Generated by Myriam B. Mahiques. Personal archives.

Analogy in a fractal urban morphology. Generated by Myriam B. Mahiques. Personal archives

Mathematicians therefore proceed “by construction,” they “construct” more complicated combinations. When they analyse these combinations, these aggregates, so to speak, into their primitive elements, they see the relations of the elements and deduce the relations of the aggregates themselves. The process is purely analytical, but it is not a passing from the general to the particular, for the aggregates obviously cannot be regarded as more particular than their elements. Great importance has been rightly attached to this process of “construction,” and some claim to see in it the necessary and sufficient condition of the progress of the exact sciences. Necessary, no doubt, but not sufficient!

For a construction to be useful and not mere waste of mental effort, for it to serve as a stepping-stone to higher things, it must first of all possess a kind of unity enabling us to see something more than the juxtaposition of its elements. Or more accurately, there must be some advantage in considering the construction rather than the elements themselves. What can this advantage be? Why reason on a polygon, for instance, which is always decomposable into triangles, and not on elementary triangles?

It is because there are properties of polygons of any number of sides, and they can be immediately applied to any particular kind of polygon. In most cases it is only after

long efforts that those properties can be discovered, by directly studying the relations of elementary triangles. If the quadrilateral is anything more than the juxtaposition of two triangles, it is because it is of the polygon type.

A construction only becomes interesting when it can be placed side by side with other analogous constructions for forming species of the same genus. To do this we must necessarily go back from the particular to the general, ascending one or more steps. The analytical process “by construction” does not compel us to descend, but it leaves us at the same level. We can only ascend by mathematical induction, for from it alone can we learn something new. Without the aid of this induction, which in certain

respects differs from, but is as fruitful as, physical induction, construction would be powerless to create science.

Let me observe, in conclusion, that this induction is only possible if the same operation can be repeated indefinitely. That is why the theory of chess can never become a science, for the different moves of the same piece are limited and do not resemble each other.


From Science and Hyphotesis. By Henri Poincaré. Edition of New York, 1905 (Bolt letters in this blog)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37157/37157-pdf.pdf

Analogy of a fractal and an  urban shape. Generated by Myriam B. Mahiques. Personal archives.

Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9

Poincaré was an influential French philosopher of science and mathematics, as well as a distinguished scientist and mathematician. In the foundations of mathematics he argued for conventionalism, against formalism, against logicism, and against Cantor’s treating his new infinite sets as being independent of human thinking. Poincaré stressed the essential role of intuition in a proper constructive foundation for mathematics. He believed that logic was a system of analytic truths, whereas arithmetic was synthetic and a priori, in Kant‘s sense of these terms. Mathematicians can use the methods of logic to check a proof, but they must use intuition to create a proof, he believed.

He maintained that non-Euclidean geometries are just as legitimate as Euclidean geometry, because all geometries are conventions or “disguised” definitions. Although all geometries are about physical space, a choice of one geometry over others is a matter of economy and simplicity, not a matter of finding the true one among the false ones.

For Poincaré, the aim of science is prediction rather than, say, explanation. Although every scientific theory has its own language or syntax, which is chosen by convention, it is not a matter of convention whether scientific predictions agree with the facts. For example, it is a matter of convention whether to define gravitation as following Newton’s theory of gravitation, but it is not a matter of convention as to whether gravitation is a force that acts on celestial bodies, or is the only force that does so. So, Poincaré believed that scientific laws are conventions but not arbitrary conventions.

From Mauro Murzi´s article at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://www.iep.utm.edu/poincare/

Año Nuevo Chino en Argentina

Foto Rodrigo Néspolo para La Nación

Foto de http://www.argentina.ar/_es/turismo/C10892-ano-nuevo-chino-en-buenos-aires.php

Ya han pasado más de dos años de la inauguración del arco chino en el barrio de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, y las discusiones y enfados de los vecinos ante su construcción sin su consentimiento, parece haber quedado atrás, bajo el empuje diplomático y por supuesto, las agencias de turismo.

Estaba viendo que el barrio chino de Buenos Aires, tiene su página web, sus restaurantes, sus eventos, sólo recuerdo algunos negocios incipientes del año 2000, con carteles de letras incomprensibles, y ahora estoy pensando si no será más lindo Chinatown Buenos Aires que en Los Angeles. Doy por seguro, que dada la historia de la ciudad, Chinatown San Francisco no podrá ser superado.

Entiendo que nuestra cultura latina-europea está netamente aceptando a la asiática, y me sorprende gratamente que los shows hayan tenido shows de música oriental, folklore y tango!

De la nota de Julieta Molina y Julieta Paci:

Un dragón colorido correteaba por las calles y veredas del barrio de Belgrano, mientras cientos de personas trataban de alcanzarlo para darle palmaditas y asegurarse buenos augurios. Ayer, cerca de las 15, la música oriental entretenía en una agobiante tarde de calor, a la vez que el aroma a comida china invitaba a quedarse y disfrutar de los festejos.

Ceremonias budistas, desfiles, las tradicionales Danzas del Dragón y del León, exhibiciones de artes marciales, de ensamble de tambores Taiko, de la ceremonia del té y de caligrafía china fueron sólo algunas de las decenas de demostraciones del talento oriental que se desarrollaron durante toda la tarde para darle la bienvenida al año lunar 4710, año del dragón, que comienza el 23 de enero y se extiende hasta el 9 de febrero de 2013.

En esta ocasión y debido a la gran expansión de su cultura en nuestro país, la celebración se llevó a cabo en las calles del Barrio Chino y se extendió a las Barrancas de Belgrano. Los organizadores calculan que unas 65.000 personas participaron (muchas más que el año pasado) y esperan que en los festejos de hoy, que serán desde las 15 hasta las 22, se multiplique esa cantidad de gente.

La inauguración oficial del "despertar del dragón" estuvo a cargo del embajador de China en la Argentina, Ying Heng Ming, en el escenario de Barrancas de Belgrano, que destacó la integración entre ambos pueblos y agradeció "a los amigos argentinos por acompañar la alegría y el ambiente" de la fiesta. Varias fueron las demostraciones de integración cultural entre ambos países, como las exhibiciones de tango y los shows de folklore y malambo que se intercalaron con las actividades orientales.

Siga leyendo:

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1442447-belgrano-vibro-con-el-ano-nuevo-chino

Concept of a landscape structure

This is a concept of a landscape structure or a digital painting that I see as landscape. The terraces of greens, a structure of rows of blue flowers and on top of this hill, the landscape is covered by yellow flowers, as those who  I can see on the 5 freeway, to San Francisco, in summer. And lakes as oasis among the yellow flowers.