>
>I'm not sure you are right - yes I did put the last comment in a little
>tongue in cheek - but if the deserted city has structure - what sort of
>structure is it. The point I was trying to make in the previous paragraph
>in reply to Tom Dine's thing about mechanism is that the structure refers
>back to something we are doing or 'knowing'. There are no doubt millions of
>objective structures in the spatial configuration of the deserted city -
>but that's kind of trivial. The axial map gives us a particular structure -
>which has relevance only by reference to the processes and their
>spatialisation. I speculated as to what these may be - the fact is we don't
>know 100% what they are - but we're pretty sure they are there and that
>they have something to do not just with the city but also with what we do
>in it - and remove the process, remove the point of the exercise - it's
>like seeing faces in clouds again, entertaining if you like that sort of
>thing but not of interest to us.
I suspect that we are probably saying the same thing, and that this could
be seen as an academic 'chicken and egg' argument. Which comes first,
spatial structures (millions of them) or the structures of "doing or
'knowing'"? I think that space and its mathematical logic comes first.
Lines of sight and minimising depth in axial maps no doubt have social
implications, as do the notions of convexity, however the only processes I
can concieve of that lead to those being 'knowable' run from the ability of
the human mind to 'read' these sort of structures and turn them to use. A
bit like seeing faces in clouds - humans are quite good at that kind of
thing. In my view the 'logical' structures of space come first, ie: there
has to be somthing there to 'know'. If we try and argue the reverse, we are
left proposing that the logical structures of space are somehow responsive
to ('aware of'?? clearly absurd) what humans can know. This may be argued
(in a weak version) by those that say that space is 'social' purely in so
far as it is a product of social and ecomomic forces, but in principle the
argument seems to me to be illogical and fundamentally wrong. It is just a
fallacy put about by those that seek to distinguish humans and the human
mind from everything else in nature.
>
>What the archaeologists are doing is speculating about the city when it was
>alive. The social and process aspect is very much there. So I would say the
>structure doesn't exist without people - or rather that a million
>structures exist without people, which is about the same thing. The
>structure cannot be purely spatial.
Of course the structure is not purely spatial, its just that the spatial -
because it is not and never can be "knowing" - must come first.
________________________________________________
Alan Penn
Director, VR Centre for the Built Environment
The Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning
1-19 Torrington Place (Room 335)
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
tel. (+44) (0)171 387 7050 ext 5919 fax. (+44) (0)171 916 1887
mobile. (+44) (0)411 696875
email. [log in to unmask]
www. http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/
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