what excess?

Does the self of the building or the place have to be in the formal relation of its parts to one another? In the grammar of the system? Bernard Tschumi: excess beyond rule and form, that's where the pleasure is.

Distinguish endless differences from endless open possibilities. If differences proliferate and escape the linear or the dialectical, that is still a matter of finite possibilities, though no single closed set of them.

What is it that exceeds form but not as matter does? Is it the presence, not a potential the way shapes are potential in the clay, but a presence "on the horizon" of other forms: other traffic patterns, other joinings of spaces, other combinations of parts, other metaphors, unintended and without communities of discourse?

(Presence through absence is a way of saying potential in Aristotle. Is there some other way of talking about presence/absence that is not the same as potential?)


Index
connections/oppositions

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001