examples show this effect particularly well: the Garden of Exile in Daniel Liebeskind’s’ Jewish Museum ( 1999 ), where uneven ground
3 – 4 editorial
and tilting columns produce disorientation if not nausea. Lars Spuybroek uses the vortex as a generative principle of form in his project for an exhibition space, wet grid ( 1999 - 2000 ). Not only was the structure produced by interaction of vortices on a set of parallel lines, but by the
s p at i a l p r a c t i c e s 5 – 8 dutch artistic research event # 3 andre as mueller
9 – 18 e s c a p i n g t h e g r i d
placing works of art above, below and around the visitor, imploring a tilting of the head, an arching of the back and other extreme
erik a jacobs lord
19 – 28 s p at i a l s c e n a r i o s
positions. Vertigo and the vortex become part of the experience of space. ( Spuybroek 2004: 157 ). The vortex functions as a manifestation
wim marseille
2 9 – 4 0 c r e at i v e c a s t s
of smooth space, in feeling or in form. More importantly, it is an
andre as gerolemou
example of how smooth space can be designed via Spuybroek’s analog
41 – 4 9 t r a n s e r i u m , a n o n - p l a c e
machine, which produces vortical, vertigo - inducing forms. The vortex,
ilse beumer
the progeny of the clinamen, breaks up the grid and instead of drawing a line between two points, spirals and dances around them. Dancing brings us back to where the clinamen was first described,
research report 50 – 54
m a p p i n g p u b l i c s pac e
by Lucretius over two millennia ago. The inbuilt contradiction of turbulence – of order that it creates but can also disrupt– can also be found in the language, in the gap between turba and turbo. Turba is a multitude, confusion and tumult, disorder. The Greek τυρβη, turbé, is also used to describe the mad dancing in Bacchic
festivals ( Serres 2000: 28 ). And there is a difference withto turbo, which describes the vortical and comparatively ordered movement of a spinning top, stable even while it leans and sways, but which only gives an illusion of rest. This is the movement of the wind, and of water. Lucretius writes of the streaming - chaos or laminar flow in the void, and the cloud-chaos, a fluctuation of oppositions ( Serres 2000: 30 ). There is no true rest in Lucretius’ universe, but only flow and streaming chaos changed by declination, the minimum angle, the vortex forming to create and destroy. The world around us is a flowing, dynamic system, whether we characterize it by the fall of atoms or the spinning of quarks. Even on the human scale there is a flow to life, a fluidity that surrounds us in nature, the seasons, in the path of a life. Yet as much as science tells us about nature or what we can observe ourselves, the architectonic objects produced by our culture place a greater value on static, rigid forms. Architecture is now in rehab after its long-term addiction to the grid. At the height of Modernism, and later during the reign of the “superstructure”, the grid on the engineer’s drafting table had thewas in danger of becoming more important than its inhabitants. By using the notions of smooth and striated space as tools of analysis and design, the grid can be mollified. The minimum angle can be set free to spiral away, dancing towards chaos and back, flowing between layers of smooth and striated space causing crashing storms or lulling them back to laminar flow. conclusion
“Do not multiply models,” write Deleuze and Guattari ( d & g 1987:499 ); but in this case, Messieurs, I will have to disappoint you. To understand smooth and striated space in terms of the physical environment
56 c o l o f o n
16