Architecture

It's been a while since I've written something of interest on the blogs, and that trend will probably continue for a while. Despite the brief respite of the summer I have a whole bunch of things planned for the summer, mostly things to study before the summer's end. In between works, write-ups to do, and the references to sort through there doesn't seem to be much free time for anything else.
 
One of the things I'm studying during the summer is architecture. Nothing too formal, mostly on the theoretical side of things. I'm interested in studying architecture of the fantastic, utilizing the manipulation and configuration of space. When put in such context design of buildings become aesthetic, philosophical exercise, and there are some quite interesting utility to that. Like an entire fiction built around the concept and practice of architecture. The characters become more of ornaments on a gothic building, each of the facades coming together in hundreds to form a general pattern that leaves the shaped marbled and hardstones to shaping and manipulating the very nature of light itself within the building. From the cold, rough beginnings of material endeavor emerges the aetheric architecture of shaped and colored lights, dedicated to the very pinnacle of platonic ideas.
 
The architecture as narrative is especially interesting to me since I think I've been practicing it without knowing what it is for a while now. A lot of the creative writings I've done over the years rely heavily on formation of the spaces around the characters, using the world itself as main motivator for the characters within the stories. The world itself increasingly took on resemblance of a huge, sprawling architecture exercise of the fantastic bent, a lot of it inspired by the dreamlike worldscapes of Mamoru Oshii as exemplified by his earlier work like the angel's egg (when I think about it Mamoru Oshii also has a very vivid architectural imagination, with reoccuring imageries of museums as gigantic wunderkammers at the cross-section of the material and the ideal). Many of my longer works, both texts and images, always end up having images of fantastic cathedrals and the curtains of light, gigantic whale-like structures both organic and artificial slowly swimming across the skies, life-like yet impossible sculptures, unreal cities and winding alleys, ancient libraries and museums of the world. I've always loved those things and with better understanding of the philosophy of architecture maybe I can write/draw something even better, perhaps even in time for this year's nanowrimo.
 
A good source of the kind of architecture theories and practices of more esoteric kind is the bldgblog.blogspot.com I'm even thinking of picking up a book of the blog's author.
 
Combined with rapid computerization, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology and synthetic biology, we might not recognize architecture in a few years. And I like that. The world is changing for the better.
 
It's pretty crazy to be writing stuff like this on my blackberry at 4 in the morning, but I seem to have hard time falling asleep these days. Maybe I should try to have another dream of the architecture.
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