TROPOLISM

As a practicing architect, I have felt nothing but comlete bewilderment at Gutter's thread about libel. At Tropolism, we find this to be high-functioning complaining. Tropolism means cities are messy, and the ideas for buildings are as messy as they come. Bring it on! Most of my job is fine-tuning, and that includes the inspiration process. Sometimes projects are just fine-tuning someone else's idea, material, pattern, or whatnot. The point is that result is always new, because it has a new context.

As an illustration of how messy (gorgeously so) inspiration will be, a friend was shuffling through his 1965 MoMA catalog for "The Responsive Eye" on Sunday (as one does) and he thought this Francisco Sobrino sculpture from 1962 shares a lovely visual similarity to Lord Norman's Hearst Building. The similarity wasn't just visual...the see-through nature of the sculpture, as a result of the triangulated structure, hit upon exactly what I meant by "diagonal living": triangulated structures allow us to see through buildings, conceptually as well as visually. Thank you, inspiration.