Wikipedia defines industrial ecology as a “systems-based, multidisciplinary discourse that seeks to understand emergent behaviour of complex integrated human/natural systems”. The paper found at the link above (Allenby, B. (2006) ‘The ontologies of industrial ecology?’ IN: progress in Industrial Ecology - An International Journal, Vol 3, Nos 1/2 pp28-40) discusses this new discipline as a post-modern field of study embodying various interacting and in some ways mutually exclusive ontologies. It seems to me to contribute to an interesting discussion about how valid scientific knowledge is produced in a network culture that supports interdisciplinarity rather than closed independant fields of study.
Just found this symposium at Yale School of Architecture on systems, networks and the relation local/global:
“This symposium explores the relationship between networks and locality in the built environment. New innovations in communication and information technologies form the basis of an expanding virtual geography. Yet the physical manifestations of our interfaces with these systems are often less considered. While contemporary architecture looks towards ways to model the global, our heightened perceptions of geographical specificity instead call for new visions of local articulation. Popular mobile GPS applications, for example, allow us to directly interact with our environments through a play of social, and even cultural, databases. Through similar narratives of the local, this symposium seeks to reposition our broad and often vague definition of the global.”
The death of the ‘auteur’
The authorship of the architectural work seems to get increasingly dispersed and blurred – not only by the direct use of and reliance on expert systems (see Anthony Giddens) embedded in the new (software) tools of the architect but also due to the fact that creation or genesis increasingly takes place in subsystems – physical as well as processual - that interface in the final physical result. The building can be perceived as a node in a network connecting different systems. This physical architectural manifestation is perhaps theoretically conceived by one or a team of architects but in reality there is no way such an entity could possibly (on its own) synthesize the actual complexity of a present design problem (a.o. Christopher Alexander Notes on the Synthesis of Form). Only few disciplines today, counting e.g. film making and architecture, maintain tenaciously the illusion of the auteur as an identifiable subject. The auteur is dead. Buildings and architecture are nodes in a network created by increasingly complex networks of subjects and matter. /KSV’10
I/O and in between networks 1:24’
start
12:03 left network culture class - went for lunch
12:05 took out cell phone and turned on normal (loud) profile
12:06 connected - returned phone to pocket
12:12 bought lunch
12:18 back at library study carrel
12:20 looked for phone to turn on meeting (semiloud) profile – phone not there
12:21 disconnected
12:23 opened laptop
12:24 connected to airpenn net – skype open
12:25 called cellphone - # was not correct – could not remember
12:28 could not remember my wife’s cell # either
12:29 disconnected
12:32 walked route library carrel - lunch vendor – no phone
12:34 still disconnected
12:37 went home (10 min bike ride on city street grid) – nobody home
12:47 disconnected
12:49 Found T-mobile cell phone contracts
12:53 connected to home wifi – skype open
12:55 called own cell # - no answer
12:57 called my wife’s cell # - connected – (on her way back walking street grid)
13:02 sent skype sms to own cell #
13:03 disconnected
13:05 my wife home
13:07 called my cell # from my wife’s cell – no answer
13:08 sent sms to my cell # from my wife’s cell #
13:18 back to campus with my wife’s cell
13:20 walked route library carrel - lunch vendor, calling cell # no phone
13:22 disconnected
13:24 asked at lunch vendor – cell phone handed in
13:25 information desk – cell phone arrived 2 min. ago
13:26 janitor office – got cell phone
13:27 5 lost calls and 2 messages…from me
13:28 connected
End
This is me in 2007 in front of the olympic stadium construction site in Beijing while they were still working on the facade. Conceptually thought as two dimensional curves from ground level to ground level (straight lines in plan) forming a structural a web or a network. However in order to simplify structurally most of the ‘lines’ are actually pure ornament and meet in structural nodes in the horizontal zone of the web.
