a Fork Forked by Forkes
in Washington Square.

Citas/ Quotes

“La ciudad no es tal, sin sus ciudadanos unidos”
Francesco Di Giordio Martini 1482

“La ciudad es una obra de arte consciente, y continua, que incluye muchas formas de arte más simples y más personales. La mente adquiere forma en las ciudades y, a su vez, las formas urbanas condicionan la mente. El espacio, lo mismo que el tiempo, se reorganiza artísticamente en las ciudades.” _
Lewis Mumford 1938

sugerencias

I don’t know where to locate this, and how to integrate it in my thesis, but it is very encouraging to find this type of sentences in great professor’s blogs.

"(...) Thomas Mann worried about the responsibility of the artist and the intellectual in preserving notions of beauty and truth. (...) we are neglecting the life affirming role of art and culture in building human dignity and freedom. He feels we must be willing to draw on the well of Spinoza, Socrates and the classics to heal the wounds of the present."

(...) where Sir Ken Robinson held forth on the state of today’s public schools, drawing on his book Out of Our Minds:Learning to be Creative. Robinson’s main thesis follows the lines of our esteemed colleague Hugo–that K-12 Education, built on the industrial model, completely suppresses creativity in our students. (...)

I understand we will need a lot more engineers and scientists in the next few years, but in our rush to remake our school system, we cannot forget that it is art and the humanities that teach us how to creatively live our lives to the fullest."

http://jtaplin.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/creativity-the-humanities/

It might not be immediately related to my thesis but it's the kind of reading that makes me move on forward. It's called motivation, no? The font doesn't really matter...

The importance of Art in Urban Design

The title of the thesis is ”The collaborative use of Public Art and Urban Design in infrastructural projects to enhance culture in the public realm”. So I better Stara… manos a la obra…

Yesterday (26^th June 2008) when I presented in the review, I started saying why I think it is important using Public Art as a tool for Urban Design. And why so, it will be more important to talk about the timeline of the Urban Design process, how and when include art, or the artist in the process.

LEGIBILITY OF THE URBAN CONTEXT in all its complexity.

Makes people be aware of their surrounding circumstances. Invite them to reflection. Critical contribution to society. Refresh people’s life from their tedious routines. (they have things to talk about! It’s amazing to hear a boring person talk about something that has happen to them in the street and you realize that YES they have gestures!)

· Physical

· Social

· Cultural

· Political

· Economical

VITALITY:

The capacity of art to be an attraction to the public, to create vibrant spaces, and experiences.

· Economical: Art generate value of the land. This relates to gentrification. It becomes an economic attraction.

· Social: The capacity of art to create vibrant spaces and memorable experiences (of any kind, and in either way; being the cause or the consequence).

MEMORY:

It is a tool that creates a collective memory, or talks about it. Memory can be the cause or the consequence of the art. The individual memory might be most difficult to detect, to register, to evaluate but it is no doubt an important and interesting element. How art (and the city) affects the everyday reality…

It can also be use to map, identify, find the historical interest in the district. It could be a good tool for Preservation of the District, not only in physical terms, but also in a more narrative sense, as a good storyteller of the district, as a good “measurement” of memory.

IDENTITY:

Art can gather broad communities together. Can create a cultural space where people come together to look at issues in different ways.

It helps create a dialogue along the process.

“Art is a potent tool of communication, and communication can cross all sorts of boundaries” (Tom Finkelpearl)

“Cualquier obra de arte importante puede considerarse como un acontecimiento histórico o como una esforzada solución de algún problema. Es irrelevante ahora si el acontecimiento fue original o convencional, accidental o voluntario, torpe o hábil. La cuestión importante es que cualquier solución señala la existencia de algún problema para el que han existido otras soluciones, y que es muy probable que se inventen otras soluciones para este mismo problema. Conforme las soluciones se acumulan, el problema se modifica. De todas maneras, la cadena de soluciones revela el problema”

G.Kubler “La configuración del tiempo. Observaciones sobre la historia de las cosas, Madrid, Nerea, 1988 (ed.orig. 1962). P91

“Any important artwork can be considered as an historical event or like a challenged solution to a problem. It is irrelevant now if the event was original or conventional, accidental o volunteer, clumsy or agile. The question is that any solution indicates the existence of any problem for which there has been other solutions, and it is very probable that other solution will be invented for the same problem. But while solutions accumulate, problems change. Anyway, the chain of solutions revealed the problem.”

(Sorry for the bad translation)

Cooking Ideas I

Talking with Tony today (25^th June 2008) he said so many suggesting things. Some were still buzzing in my mind later in the afternoon.

I haven’t talk about the topic of my thesis yet. I haven’t written about it because, sincerely, I get lost doing it. It’s so important to me and it has been with me for so long now that it’s difficult to start it.

“Sometimes the world speaks too loud” and we need to be systematic in the way we tell things. It links with what Laura told me ones “I need a clear mind, brand new and clean.” I would love too… but it seems that I cannot, it’s not going to be easy, I can hear the world. It’s talking multiple languages, at the same time, with different voice tunes… I hear them… A lot of people do… Sometimes it’s hard to digest, sometimes it makes life better… and I will try to explain systematically what they say.

….Art and Citizen….

How Art already coexist with citizens in the street in a very spontaneous manner, in the way the world turns. So why don’t we turn around the question that comes in Urban process “When should we do the Community process?”. Why couldn’t the question be “How and when the professionals come into the frame and act, and proposed?”

A Catalogue of what is already being done on the street. A narrative of what is already happening. Doing a focused set of examples will help, as Gertrude Stein said “description is explanation”.

I need a method that doesn’t increased burocracy. A more organic method that doesn’t include paperwork in front of an institutional window. We need the human touch…. (I cannot let it be too conceptual…)

This has to do with improvisation, with the way we program things. Everybody that has work in our discipline, or maybe that has work, knows that we have to know how to improvised solutions to problems in minutes in the construction… One day, in Bermeo a port on the gulf of Vizcaya we woke up with a 9meter whale dead in the side of the construction. It had to lay down in the main construction area for 24 hours until we decided with the mayor to preserve it and finally make a space for her in the waterfront and program a maritime museum use to install the intact bones when it will be built. The project is a-waiting-for-state-money to get started. The whale is waiting for the money to rest in peace in the main hall of our project too….

Why everybody is so scared at what is going to be, at what is going to happen, why not “program the unexpected”. It’s my gestalt. How to do it? Maybe everything follows that process, but I’m thinking about doing it deliberately. Architecture has a lot to do about control, but we have to know where we don’t have to control. (I’m sure this was inspired by Tony)

Yona Friedman Illustration

This has to do with the conversation with Peter about the nature of change. How we can know give some “easy” variables about change:

We can rate it. We can say when is going to happen, the frequency, speed and money hat has to be spent. We can measure it and give a reference in size, scale and physical dimensions. But how do we categorize the type of change, what does that mean?

I just learnt that the technical word to say might be “trade offs”. Have I understood right? But who is the master? Who decides? Who do we want to listen to? Or Do we want to listen or guide?

This is important for me, but right now. I just want to go to bed.

Buenas noches!

PD:
I once read “the anticipation makes the food tastes better”.

We can anticipate, we can predict, but let it cook !!!!

Karlos Arguiñano. The best basque cooker.