Seminar (cliff-)Notes 7 Feb

1 Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter & Forgetting
(see the History of the Blackbird section)
consider - angelic laughter/laughter of the devil
consider also Cervantes, Sterne and Brautigan

2 Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being;
the notion of coincidence and the confidence of
the random - re: USSR/Czech Republic pre 1989.

3 Consider adding/extending the alphabet:
provisionality
undecidability
incongruity
interiority
exteriority
bull

for the concept of 'bull' see my How Architecture gots its Hump
(MIT Press) for the notion of the Architectural Bull -
edict, papal bull, trope, directive, paradox of congruous incongruity...

4 Edward Said - Orientalism
how the West constructed the East and still does
so...see also Said's many books including
'Covering Islam'. Said died last year. For an
interesting (brief) assessment of this see
Ahdaf Soueif's Mezzaterra, Fragments from a Common
Ground - consider how "modernism' re-colonises the
common ground!!

5 The story of the architecture student and the boss's
command - make it Western, well hell, make it Western!
And Western it was!
Best Western!! (see the other SOA blog for this story in detail).

6 language & architecture
consider the word for architecture in Finnish
"rakennustaide"
rakennus = building
taide = art/skill
the art/skill of building??
consider the untranslatable in buidling across cultures.

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