Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.