*Until ten minutes ago, I had never heard of the architect Balthasar Holz. Now I'm all intrigued by his aphorisms about time, futurity and decay.
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/probable-form/
*Some delphic sayings by the late Mr Holz:
“Time condemns us to change. We would rather not change, but we have no choice.
Change does not happen in a sequentially linear way, but simultaneously, in many directions at once.
Each thing is growing and decaying at the same time, only at different rates.
Change is not defined in a sequence of succeeding frames, but in a matrix of frames that each occupy the same space and moment.
Change is not defined by a steady sequence of frames, but unpredictably within a field of probabilities.
Architecture is a conflict between differing ways and means, never a harmonious resolution of them.
(...)
The task of the architect is to set in motion, in a particular direction, a chain of events he cannot control.
Transformation. Transmutation. Transfiguration. Terms that dignify the fate of architecture.
Architects, like most people, like what is new and fear what is old.
Architects do not understand change, how it works and what it means—and they do not want to understand.
Architects want to protect their designs from changes made by others, who they think do not understand them. They are right—the others do not understand and that is exactly their virtue. That is exactly the virtue of the changes they want to make.
Architects strive for a moment of perfection—when their building is finished. But as soon as that moment passes, their building begins to decay. A finished building is really unfinished, the first frame of a descent to destruction.
Architects must embrace the decay...”
((("Embrace the Decay," 2003, an electronic artwork by Bruce Sterling)))
http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?&dgDetail=bsterling
(((Bonus thematically-related pic: an urban fox taking an escalator in the London underground.)))
*Nobody seems to know much about Balthasar Holz except for Lebbeus Woods. I wonder if Woods made him up.
