23.3.05
Do-It-Yourself Urbanism:
Psychogeography, Generosity, Serendipity and Turriphilia.
"Examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone" - John Ruskin (1853)
Form Follows Flights of Fancy
Horace Walpole (1717-1797) was a psychogeographer long before the word was invented in the early 20th century. His contributions to culture are many: he wrote a gothic novel called "The Castle of Otranto", he authored an important text on garden design, he coined the term serendipity [finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else], and he was a true icon of turriphilia [the manic desire to built towers]. Walpole, like his contemporary and fellow turriphiliac gothic writer William Beckford is often regarded as a specimen of a predictable kind of romantic eccentric. Psychogeographers however, admire Walpole for his rare ability to create, seemingly by accident, new sensibilities as a by-product of his generosity. Architecture was one of many mediums of expression Walpole tried his hand at. In a period of 20 years he reconstructed a unassuming Tudor mansion into a famous gothic castle on Strawberry Hill near Windsor, London. Both the interior and exterior of Walpole's 'toy-castle' were meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors. This carefully engineered psychogeographical atmosphere created a feedback loop with its creator when it inspired Walpole to write his 'The Castle of Otranto', a book that simultaneously defined and superseded the genre that culminated in Harry Potter. Tongue-in-cheek from the first to the last syllable, Walpole entertained his readers by serving them at breakneck speed what would become predictable clichés: ghostly interventions, witchcraft, haunted rooms, secret trapdoors and dark dungeons. Through sheer irony Walpole was saved from the one-dimensionality that characterises his followers: Walpole's generosity works at several levels at once and he gave too much for some to grasp the immensity of the gift.
Psychogeography
In psychoanalysis the word psychogeography is used in relation to phenomena of location based hysteria: you are perfectly sane, you enter a particular room and within a split second you are stark raving mad. Only when this response is universally shared and not dependent on a random individual neurosis, this power of a room can be called psychogeographic. Albert Camus suggested another form of place induced behaviour by telling the story of a man who, hypnotized by a conspiracy of sun, beach and ocean, committed a murder. These are the fictional reports of intuitive minds trying to grasp the conditions that lead to extreme deeds. Both are circumstantial evidence for the existence of something impossible to isolate: the power of landscape to force us into certain behaviour, sometimes even overpowering our will. As it turned out, this interaction is much more complex than generations of urban planners, politicians, political radicals and behaviourists suspected. Urban planning has had its fair share of projects attempting to hardwire human behaviour in urban structure. Walpole exemplifies the suspicion that psychogeographic effects can be artificially created, not as a linear process, but as an emergent, that is serendipitic, enfolding of events. The importance of these indirect consequences of urban form resurfaced as relevant subject in urban planning in the late 1950ties when Kevin Lynch modestly rephrased the need for architectural objects that generate meaning, in his concept of imageability, "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer".
Do-It-Yourself Urbanism:
http://www.socialfiction.org/diy_urbanism.html
"Examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone" - John Ruskin (1853)
Form Follows Flights of Fancy
Horace Walpole (1717-1797) was a psychogeographer long before the word was invented in the early 20th century. His contributions to culture are many: he wrote a gothic novel called "The Castle of Otranto", he authored an important text on garden design, he coined the term serendipity [finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else], and he was a true icon of turriphilia [the manic desire to built towers]. Walpole, like his contemporary and fellow turriphiliac gothic writer William Beckford is often regarded as a specimen of a predictable kind of romantic eccentric. Psychogeographers however, admire Walpole for his rare ability to create, seemingly by accident, new sensibilities as a by-product of his generosity. Architecture was one of many mediums of expression Walpole tried his hand at. In a period of 20 years he reconstructed a unassuming Tudor mansion into a famous gothic castle on Strawberry Hill near Windsor, London. Both the interior and exterior of Walpole's 'toy-castle' were meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors. This carefully engineered psychogeographical atmosphere created a feedback loop with its creator when it inspired Walpole to write his 'The Castle of Otranto', a book that simultaneously defined and superseded the genre that culminated in Harry Potter. Tongue-in-cheek from the first to the last syllable, Walpole entertained his readers by serving them at breakneck speed what would become predictable clichés: ghostly interventions, witchcraft, haunted rooms, secret trapdoors and dark dungeons. Through sheer irony Walpole was saved from the one-dimensionality that characterises his followers: Walpole's generosity works at several levels at once and he gave too much for some to grasp the immensity of the gift.
Psychogeography
In psychoanalysis the word psychogeography is used in relation to phenomena of location based hysteria: you are perfectly sane, you enter a particular room and within a split second you are stark raving mad. Only when this response is universally shared and not dependent on a random individual neurosis, this power of a room can be called psychogeographic. Albert Camus suggested another form of place induced behaviour by telling the story of a man who, hypnotized by a conspiracy of sun, beach and ocean, committed a murder. These are the fictional reports of intuitive minds trying to grasp the conditions that lead to extreme deeds. Both are circumstantial evidence for the existence of something impossible to isolate: the power of landscape to force us into certain behaviour, sometimes even overpowering our will. As it turned out, this interaction is much more complex than generations of urban planners, politicians, political radicals and behaviourists suspected. Urban planning has had its fair share of projects attempting to hardwire human behaviour in urban structure. Walpole exemplifies the suspicion that psychogeographic effects can be artificially created, not as a linear process, but as an emergent, that is serendipitic, enfolding of events. The importance of these indirect consequences of urban form resurfaced as relevant subject in urban planning in the late 1950ties when Kevin Lynch modestly rephrased the need for architectural objects that generate meaning, in his concept of imageability, "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer".
Do-It-Yourself Urbanism:
http://www.socialfiction.org/diy_urbanism.html
# posted by alvaro @ 1:03 p. m. 
