This is exactly what I was alluding to - you cannot admit that measures of relationship of space are as valid as the one you seems to be happy to measure as if geometry was, always been and will be the "natural science" of "space as space", of architecture and topology could not be - ie Voodoo Science. That seems to be a very indefeasible view of what is science and what is not. I was kindly suggesting that the difference was a philosophical one (I thought discussion about "space as space" is part of philosophy of science too but ethereal fume might be misleading :-). I might think less kindly but remain polite - this is your rhetoric, your aesthetic, and your poetic - indeed you not alone but it does not make it absolutely informed.

You may be aware of the extensive use of topology and graph theory (the mathematic of relationships) in science and applied science i.e technology. Have a look. - You would then probably classify most of it as Voodoo Science too. 
Well, what could be said then?

Newton was very well verse in Voodoo Science too (and he literally was) - gravity, action at a distance, could you believe it?! That the stuff of magician, witchcraft and God indeed - gravity what the act of God, the greatest Voodoo of all. At the beginning, they did not believe it, but his theoretical predictive powers did overcome scepticism - that was pragmatism. However, that was physics, we are dealing with people, architecture, and architecture of the city, it must be different - geometry must be it, that worked so far, we must abide to it, forever. 
Paradigm shift don't come every Monday, when it comes, how do you get it?

Topology is a sort of informal coding of geometrical form - a rather weak one, a very limited coding that is still very efficient in its economy even for a designer. 
Check out the role of weak forces in physics, very important too, it does not mean that the strong forces are not important too. Again, that is physics.

So it is not about choice between one or another it is about knowing when, where, how to use them - to combine them as Mike is suggesting does not look very promising yet, but who knows. Informal coding, topology is strategical, geometry tactical, still, both are related and both seems to have scale free quality.

Have a look to the following book, it is a very interesting reading about scientific imagination - about different type of formal imagination - and science - the activity of producing predictive and explanatory theory.

The Poetic Structure of the World - Fernand Hallyn
Copernicus and Kepler 

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition." 

Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth century.

I am a relative indefeasible formist but I won't limit it to geometry - it is a far too limiting way to understand and imagine form - not to say that I very keen  on form performativity - affordance.
_______________________________
 
Alain Chiaradia
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-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Dine [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 24 July 2004 16:32
To: [log in to unmask]; Alain Chiaradia
Cc: Tom Dine
Subject: Re: Configurational Analysis: application to 'real

--- Alain Chiaradia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Are relationships of space real? Do these
> relationships create forms? Could these forms and
> relationship be taken as real than stuff?

The 'relationships of space' are rather different from measurement
space as space.  I am thinking of science rather than philosophy.    I
can measure spatial relationships alright...

I can measure space between ...(walls, people, etc)
I can measure space for ...(action, observations, etc)

And if you can match the space needed for (significant activity) with the
space between(defined features), you have something interesting - an
affordance which may explain and predict.

But if you think you are measuring features of the aether then it looks
like Voodoo Science
(to borrow Robert Park's useful term)

Regards,  Tom Dine
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