In the “Space, Time and Architecture” excerpt, Giedion describes artists and architects as guides for the rest of the population- those who re-frame the world for us in terms of what we are missing or not seeing when look at our surroundings because they are able to think with emotion.  While I think that he is right in that artists do have the power to reveal and expose their environments, I do not totally agree that, as Giedion says, “A great deal of our world would lack all emotional significance if it were not for his (the artist’s) work.”  He suggests that without artists representing them as beautiful, something like a mountain range would frighten and confuse us.  I don’t believe that to be true.  Mountains, as well as other powerful natural occurrences existed long before artists were around to paint them- so why would I need an artist to tell me that I shouldn’t be frightened of it? Perhaps I’m wrong.  Maybe I don’t find things like mountain ranges or canyons frightening because I’ve seen pictures and videos and paintings of them my entire life, and so I’m used to them.  Does everything we don’t already know scare us?  Why do I find them pleasing?  Because they are incredible or because I’ve been told they are incredible?  I realize that this is focusing on just a small section of this reading, but it is what compelled me most.

In the second reading, Giedion explores movement, and how man’s developing interest in it brought forth tools of both necessity and convenience.  Since Oresme recognized that movement could only be represented by movement itself, humans have been devising tools to study the changing states of almost everything imaginable and then making use of those discoveries to invent other tools.  I found it interesting that something like the movie camera was first devised for research purposes, because Marey needed something that would allow him to study a moving object continuously.  This instrument is now used to help us understand how most objects and beings move, whether for practical purposes or for pleasure.  I found the comparison of inventions that came out of necessity versus convenience very interesting, and how both can be considered progress.

All three readings seem to stress that as technology evolves, so does our own knowledge of our surroundings.  An understanding of space and time in relation to each other is key if we wish to continue developing these technologies.

Questioning the nature of space has long fascinated architects, artists, philosophers and scientists. Throughout the history, each have provided different definitions regarding the true nature of space. However, and this is what is being stressed in these articles, as we seek through the convergence of science and art in the modern times, considering the history of modern architecture as discussed in Gideon’s “Space, time and architecture”, as well as the theories of relativistic physics, we find out that both scientists and artists are coming up with the idea that the classic conceptions of space are too limited to be able to connect what we know and what we conceive of the world that we live in.  One cannot anymore think of space as permanent; as just as an endless three-dimensional extent that is separated from the events that take place inside it. On the contrary, as discussed in Gideon’s article, extended from the vision of cubism, the many-sidedness of space releases infinite potentialities for relations with and within it and one has to project himself through the space in order to understand the true nature of it. All of these conceptions bring us to the idea that space and time which engages movement and the happening of events, can be regarded as a single concept. Added to that, as discussed in the Gideon’s “Mechanization takes command”, in more recent years, technologies have opened up new ways that suggest a revision of the approach to the conception of representation of space.

The first two readings, ‘Springs of Mechanization’ and ‘Space Time and Architecture,’ discuss two sides of the mechanization and industrialization of movement.  The first being the mechanics of movement; the technical aspect of how objects and systems actually move.  The analysis basically mechanizes organic movements; that is to say that Oresme, Descartes, Marey, and Gilbreth’s end result is a graphic representation showing the mechanized movements.  The mechanics, once extracted from the movements could be used to re-create them in a man-made mechanic system like Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanic performers.  The second is the presence [or non-presence] of art in mechanization and industrialization (products).  At a point, art is seen as irrelevant and the public only cares about utilitarian ideals such as rapid production; it is as if the pure lack of art is necessary because the raw industrial product showcases the new methods and abilities of production.  It can also be argued that this lack of art in a sense became the new art because the utilitarian, or modern, products were, arguably, seen as beautiful because they were different and new.  Art has to continuously be different, it needs to change, it needs to evolve, to influence exploration of new ways of thinking and interpretation.

Fashion designer and artist Jean-Paul Goude took an interesting spin off cubism between the 60’s-00’s where he broke images of people into bits and pulled them apart to create more appealing proportions.  He refers to this work as ‘Modifications’ and it is quite similar to the productivity refinements and mechanization of the industrial period.  These studies also included experiments on actual people, one example is how through using mainly clothing alterations and enhancements he made a small, scrawny man into a  good looking desirable one.  There is a video where he shows the ‘modified’ man wearing tall platform shoes, lower waisted pants, shoulder pads and fake teeth.  Once something is made, it can be studied and then be made better.  In industrialization the movements of workers were studied (as seen in the movie ‘Modern Times’) to reduce them down to the bare minimum in order to increase efficiency and profits. The worker could be made better since his movements could be studied.  Likewise, Goude took images of people, some models with perfect proportions and some normal people with less than desirable proportions, cut them up and laid them out giving him the ability to reconfigure their proportions.  Through this process he made normal people into theoretical super models and he also experimented the altering the propotions of models into new visulizations of beauty.  He has a series of work in the latter field called ‘Muses’ which are beautiful abstractions of the human body.

To tie this back to architecture, the idea of improving has always existed in architecture and manifests itself in technology.  As time goes on, technology evolves and is incorporated into buildings; it can be seen as the movement of architecture or the evolution of buildings.  What needs to be done now, as it has always been done in the past, is to take the current state of buildings and through empirical studies and experimentation incorporate [and invent] new technologies to improve the performance and construction of buildings.

All the articles are speaking of the same concept: time and space. I quote this from “Space Time and Architecture” which I think it’s the most persuasive description about time and space: “Space alone or time alone is doomed to fade into a mere shadow; only a kind of union of both will preserve their existence.” From decades, people try to figure out the relationships between time and space, not only by philosophical debates or theory development, people also try to represent the mystery of time and space by many ways such as drawing, literature and photography.

Photography is a relatively newer technology to record the status of an object in a space. What I am really fascinated is the photo-gun which reminds me a photographer Eadweard Muybridge. While Marey was inventing his photo-gun, at the almost same time Muybridge using another apparatus which is numbers of cameras from varies of perspective to shoot a moving object (usually the object is animal.) For me, chronophotography is interesting when speaking of time and space because it provides a chance for people to look deep inside of an ephemeral action which happens every moments in our daily life, also it proves time and space are rely on each other; we see “time” from changing status of an object, and the motion of this object define the “space.”

From the article “What is the Theory of Relativity”, through the concept of box suggests the space is a constantly existence. It reminds me an old philosophy debate: if a tree falls down in a forest but no one see or hear it, is the tree’s falling down real? I would say what in an enclosed box is not a “space” if the premise is “there’s nothing at all but space” because space is always existing and changing along with time even we can’t tell the changing status in a micro-scale. However, if it can be proven that there is air in the enclosed box and the ingredients inside is changing (the proportion of oxygen, helium, etc.), I’d admit it’s “space” inside of the box.

I remember myself; a three-year-old boy playing in front of our house in a street. I clearly remember that by running through the width of that street for a couple of times, I completely would black out because for me it was really vast. Finally, we left the city and I never saw the street again.

After 15 years, I went to find my childhood house in my hometown and I never found that. Yes, I found the exact location and it was really like our home and that street like the street in my mind but only visually. However millions of other factors were just unfamiliar for me. Believe me I am sure, I found the street width a middle range one. Don’t Einstein define a theory about streets being short over time? No?

I am not to clarify the definition of space and place. However I always use place instead of space and I should add this fact that no one has complained me yet about this, maybe you will be the first (just sometimes to mention the space where the stars are located or something with a specific dimension, I use the world “space”). As people we create places and call them big, large, huge, small, tiny, lovely, cool, interesting and millions of other adjectives, you don’t need to be an architect to make a place. We use any adjective to describe the place which is probably a part of space. We don’t care if it is curved or not. My point is; if none of our conceptions are fixed and constant, we may have as different conceptions of space and place as the number of people and other intelligent creatures in the whole world. Even our conceptions can be changed by growing up or aging. We can find something smaller than what we thought before and just expand this too all other conceptions of place and space.

A scientist tried to document the movement of a seagull and it end up something like 3D computerized modeling two centuries later. When someone speak about a very complicated theory which says time is fluid not constant, how could it end up? Relativity is something out of my conception. It is connected to me just when I dream about it.

I am not to prototype but I think architects like other people can make places, the only different is they can be able to program a physical space to be the context of a place and it’s just a program and can be something completely different from what they thought at the end.

Maybe what I wrote is not related to what I read. It is just the thing which came to my mind right after reading the texts.

First I want to mention that this post is based on my own interprets about the articles I read and more importantly about the combination of the three texts and their relations.

The point that interests me the most is the process of Investigation about space itself. From ancient times humans could define themselves by the space in which they were located though until the 20^th century they cannot think to space as a phenomena.

Space was always the platform based on which other things happened. The space was never subject to change so it can be easily used as a reference to all works; not only scientific, but also artistic. The perspective which was vastly used in renaissance paintings, maintained its presence even to the first years of 20^th century. The use of perspective is based on a simple rule; the space is a constant global fact that we can comprehend with our visual consciousness.

In “Space-time” article by Gideon, he mentioned that the whole art movements of the beginning of 20^th century tried to redefine and represent the space in a new way. In works of Cubists as an example, the objects and events were not subject of innovation. In fact the space which was once only the blank canvas, became the phenomena that should be explored.

In the very same time, scientists like Einstein were working on space to redefine it. Based on their experimental physic works we know that space and time are not constant. Though the conception of time was more questioned by artists through the history, scientists preferred to consider the time as an objective parameter.

In terms of technology, we meet lots of great works that tried to explore the movement as a simultaneous phenomena which was formerly considered as something happens through the time. This simultaneity also helped Futurist artists as well as Marcel du Champs to create scenes on which an object occupy two or more places at the same time; the statement that seemed to be illogical before that time.

Finally, even though they had their own approaches to the issue, the way the artists and scientists worked just like a multidisciplinary group on such fundamental conceptions like space and time really inspired me.

Architecture; the thoughtful making of space as defined by Khan needs a revision. As space cannot be created, only enclosed, we as architects merely arrange it with our physical divisions within it. I’m referring here to Einstein’s box example, where space is illustrated as a sort of constant. That if the edges of a box close in on themselves, the space that was inside still exists, just now outside the box. No space was destroyed, hence no space can be created-just ordered. And if motion is dependent on time, illustrated by the fact that if we aren’t moving through time, motion in space is impossible, then time is inherently another space architects have ignored. Steven Hawking said this most clearly to me: “All physical objects…exist in 3 dimensions. Everything has a width, and a height, and a length. But there is another kind of length; the length in time.” This is the fourth dimension, the other space we inhabit in our four dimensional world. The problem with time is that we experience it nearly as a constant, and treat it as such because we cannot perceive it’s error. The fact is, if you are moving faster relative to something else (the closer your speed is to the speed of light), the faster you are travelling through time. That is by spatial motion, the law of the speed of light (which cannot be broken) slows down time to keep you moving slower through space and slower than the speed of light. So space and time are forever intertwined. If time is a space, and we as architects claim to be arrangers or makers of space, are we not bound to be responsible to designing in the space of time? How do we even do such a thing?

What has really caught my attention in these readings is how other professions, physicists, painters, sculptors, mathematicians, ect. try to explain and organize, diagram and understand space in general. To myself space is infinite it is all around us and can be subdivided into smaller spaces but all that are part of a larger.  The first reading talked a lot about space and I never thought about space from the point of view of a physicist who by definition “Space… is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference”. This relates back to movement through a space which was theorized in the architecture of the Slow House, by I believe MoMA (I will check on that). Another thought about designing space might be space itself as in outer space where there is infinite space not limited to a particular direction. The limitations there are of course for the designer to make a sealed space in Space.

Both of Giedion’s readings evolve or are fundamentally about the relationships between the arts and sciences but also between the relationships of time and motion. On springs of Mechanization, Giedion starts by emphasizing and dissecting various procedures to register and map movement; from the use of photographic cameras and other various mechanical contraptions to the development of new graphical ways to record motion. Eventually, these mappings became a tool that was later used in the development of industrialization and mechanization.

Mechanization and automatization have been part of human culture since the time of Alexander of Macedon. However, it has not been until the early 19^th century that it has become a means to further human progress in a very practical way. From the development of machinery that was first employed to produce cotton fabrics to expedite agriculture, entertainment, transportation and finally the domestic realm.

In Space Time and Architecture, Giedion explores the relationship between cubism and futurism. First of all there is the contrast between art in the renaissance (tridimensional and very focused) and the art generated by Picasso, Le Corbusier, etc who explored the relationships of different points of view merged into a two dimensional composition. “Walking Dog” Balla, 1913; is perhaps one of the pieces of artwork that most directly relates to this idea. A very flat picture of a dog on a stroll with its master fully captures the idea of motion and the dynamics of movement.

What is the theory of Relativity? Einstein describes the principles of relativity. First, in order to measure the motion of an object; it must be contrasted in relation to a different object. Ex, space and time are measured in relationship of one another.

Second, light has a definite velocity of propagation; this means that light will always be perceived in the same way regardless of the state of motion of the observer.

I still require further clarification in this last subject.

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