Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis or maybe Transmigration

Marina Warner takes us far back in history from the greek era leading to build a description of metamorphosis as a complex transmigration of the soul and body. She talks at length about metamorphosis being a transmigration defining metamorphoses as “all souls are deathless, and migrate from one form to another.” Again heavily grounded in Platonic thought and even unabashedly referencing so many of his descriptions in the Republic. It is clear that she thinks positively of these historic figures as a source of authority and even as a sort of spirituality in her “sage Pythagorus.” The form on the outside is described as a “pliant wax stamped with new designs.” These are also principles behind most eastern philosophy and seems to be one that she likens to. She implies that it is only now that society is embracing the souls relationship to the body as a metamorphosis of nature by citing the De larf (The Larva) example. The discussions tend to be spiritually all encompassing or perhaps a unified theory/philosophy. She does this by piggybacking plato’s allegory of the cave, and describing life through a flux of a “time-bound dimension” and “the way we imagine the world” as being truer to reality than life itself. Finally this metamorphosis can be achieved through imagination and new scientific developments where formally it was only in the hands of the “gods.”

The dialectics of entropic change are the concern of Robert Smithson in his interview with Alison Sky. He starts the conversation with many well know fictional and factional stories such as Humpty Dumpty and water gate to ground a complex issue into common knowledge. He continues to build his sources as well by mentioning well known figures such as Buckminister Fuller and Norbert Weiner to establish a authority and legitimate framework for his discussion. His conversation goes into what seems like tangents moving rapidly from strip mines raping the earth to architecture and economics sharing the same paradigm. This may of course be a salute to his very notion of entropy existing through far extremes somewhere between “wasteland” and “tranquility,” so the discussion should exist through a multiplicity of differing topics.

John Frazer builds a case for an evolutionary morphology through a set of commentaries on the nature, science and architecture. Interestingly in the forward, Gordan Pask starts by saying that the book “records” the present state and future “research,” binding the book into a scientific model. As with the other two readings, Frazer embraces the state of flux that the descriptions of morphology creates. For example he praises unity as being a state of “coherence and diversity admixed in collusion” never to be mistaken for uniformity. Nature also plays a huge role for the future of architecture and therefore the principles for design should be thought as an instantiation rather than case specific. By that I mean that he wants the architect to create “instructions” for all design rather than a “blueprint” for a specific set of plans. His conclusions are not about a specific formal morphology, but rather a series of commentaries on nature and science, and how they can inspire the inner logic of architecture.