high school: cookies buried in the snow, messages in mailboxes, pinata abductions, balloon trails across boston.

==

what I keep thinking about, like constantly keep thinking about, is this thing called aesthetics (hello, aesthetics) in architecture, and how it is there, and how it can be there. what is its role? how do I justify its usage? why do I need to justify its usage? an aesthetics for whom? for me, or for you, or for them, for us? is it enough to be awed by aesthetics?

how much does architecture try to be a separate discourse than art (or does it?) how much is it (ostensibly) beholden to the constraints of performance, space, plausibility? performance? what is my resistance to a beautiful drawing? maybe it's because I think that 'beauty', at least within diagrammatic representations of reality, often times correlates with an incomprehensibility, a signified depth-full-ness, a sense of partial blockage. that the conditions within a perspective/plan/section/diagram that generate an aesthetic appreciation of the thing go hand-in-hand with a unreadability. the diagram doubles back on itself and cuts itself short, and at this gesture we are wowed and surprised, maybe. ("what is this? I know it means something, yet I do not know what it means.")

and why am I not okay with that? why does this bother me? is it some kind of 'honesty' within the discourse that I'm looking for -- that diagrams reveal themselves as diagrams, and representations emote as representations? any of these beautiful diagrams, these beautiful plans and sections would be okay within the discourse of art, I think, at least for me, I would be utterly okay with them. my eyes would change, I'd shift in my seat, something would click.

and maybe I should just go and push, be hazy, be opaque, be absolutely cryptic. I could do that right now, line up a series of words and take delight in the impenetrability of sentences, of meanings that carry valence for me only and carry a valence of valence for others, a signified signification, a sense that this means something. but I'd rather not, because it's uninteresting to me, because there's only delight in the performance of communication (or not).

or what about this:
really, the vertigo or the sense of spatial rearrangement that happens when you enter into a radically different space, a space of physical alterity, is this kind of vertigo, a reading-of-the-space that then tumbles into an acceptance of the space. if a body-oriented, phenomenological perception of a space can be constituted as a kind of 'reading', then you walk in and see this as something to be read, and then you read, read read read read read, and then you start to understand, maybe. at some point there is a communication that happens here, between the form of your own fleshy body and the solid (or not) walls of the space you happen to be in, a rich foamy luscious discussion emerges out of this discussion. now you're in this space, and now you're reading.

==

layers of plastic sheeting tumbling down from underneath a metal roller door