I think what I was trying to say while having dinner with a friend tonight about architecture was that navigating this terrain is like walking into a house or an apartment with an identical floorplan, watching with a mixture of diluted horror and fascination as you see objects and components reshuffled, changed, familiar forms of vision and architectonic journeys shifting and surprising at every turn. Such as: going to Tokyo, looking at similarities (or identicalities) in terms of infrastructure, disorientation happening localized at the soles of my feet.

It's hard to navigate and put feelers out while asking the same questions -- canon, judgment, subjectivity, axioms, etc. So far it seems that much of what is seen as "good" architecture (obligatory and necessary scare quotes) is sort of an axiomatic flowering combined with careful and precise adjustment -- an organizing principle or concept that you spring, spread, fling, hurl, scatter across a surface like maybe thousands of dice thrown across hundreds of board-game playing fields, then carefully rotated and organized, aleatory results tweaked to become deliberate. Somewhere in all of this the aesthetic lies as this question mark. I haven't decided yet where it seems to be; the happenstance intersection of the flowering-out and extension of functionality with aesthetic appeal taken as an absolute plus.

It's sort of a hidden addition, the effect of aesthetics maybe more unsaid than not. Diagrams all the more valuable because of the sort of deliberate confusion that aesthetics brings on -- maybe there's this usage, aesthetics as this distancer, not the indifference that Kant talks about but the eye-popping effect itself separating content from form and thus allowing some sort of secondary and new elucidation of content to be extracted from form. Things that look good make you look at them in a new way. From this comes the pataphor that I talked about, the controlled free-fall of creativity ((perhaps) hopefully) leashed to functionality.