Volumetric Poetry: Conceptual Architecture, Intuition to Insight

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The following series of posts are verbal sketches describing the ideas and inspirations for a new conceptual art form for a propositional architecture.

An intuition to an insight working at a pizza joint

I came to work one day and someone had made a mistake and ordered an inordinate number of pizza boxes of different sizes. They were stacked up making different size rectangular volumes.

I made a habit of listening to jazz before coming to work. I had "Boo Boo's Birthday" in my head. Lumbering, symmetrical rhythms inside of lumbering, symmetrical rhythms resolved with a horn. Boo Boo Bear is not slow witted, he is methodical. The horn is a metaphorical bear vocalization and eureka moment.

I was trying to imagine how many color field paintings I could see putting sauce on the dough. Although they are 2d, I could perceive them as 3d volumes as expanding, contracting, static spaces depending on the color. 

They had recently gotten one of those conveyor belt ovens and it reminded me of the 4 alphabets on the printer chain of the old IBM 360 main frame computer.

This reminded me of a fluid dynamics simulation using a pointer vector program for the graphic output. Space is like a fluid.

Upon reflection now I believe what had been an intuition about this place was the different temperatures I encountered walking around and how they flowed together like slipstreams.

The simulation program was through the cross section of a pipe. The graphic output used the special characters of the alphabet to represent the variables in the simulation: flow rate, viscosity, temperature, specific gravity etc. as they were distributed along a cross section of a pipe. 

By analogy the interior of the pizza parlor was the pipe and the different temperature atmospheres with their different characteristics were the variables.

I had been driving all over the state going to different libraries. Pre-internet on a journey of trying to figure out how to combine architecture and psychology.

I was studying color field painting at the same time I developed an appreciation of environmental music. Then they made sense as 3d atmospheres defined by the volumes of the pizza boxes.

The most striking thing about this place was the number of different temperature variations there where. I tried counting them but gave up. The temperatures were so extreme they were palpable 3d volumes.

They also had different characteristics associated with them.

Open the oven door cooking pepperoni pizzas and walk past the pickle bucket.

Thick blazing hot greasy volume with a kind of thin sour on the edges opening in the void. 

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