#aboutdesign

The appearances of the wave, its shape and the happy white crest, are actually outputs of this system. They are what they are because the system is organized in the way that it is, and this organization produces an inescapable kind of behaviour.

The cross-section of the wave is parabolic, having two basic forms, the one dominating at the open-sea stage of the wave, and the other dominating later. As the second form is produced from the first, there is a moment when the wave holds the two forms: it has at this moment a wedge shape of 120°. And at this point, as the second form takes over, the wave begins to break—hence the happy white crest.

Now in terms of the dynamic system that we call a wave, the happy white crest is not at all the pretty sign by which what we first called an entity signalizes its existence. For the wave, that crest is its personal catastrophe. What has happened is that the wave has a systemic conflict within it determined by its form of organization, and that this has produced a phase of instability. The happy white crest is the mark of doom upon the wave, because the instability feeds upon itself; and the catastrophic collapse of the wave is an inevitable output of the system.

I am asking “Did you know?” Not “did you know about theoretic hydrodynamics?” but “did you know that a wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe, as a result ofits internal organizational instability?”

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Desigining Freedom by Stafford Beer

— The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience. Meike Schalk, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Östermalmsgatan 26, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden— Metabolism Reconsidered. Raffaele Pernice, Wasdea University Japan link

Urbanism. If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous defi- nition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new only about the “more” and the “modified.” It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment.

— What Ever Happened to Urbanism? Rem Koolhaas. S,M,L,XL, OMA, (with Bruce Mau), The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.