Week 8: Entropy, Maintenance, Waste

Key Readings:

Bataille: The Notion of Expenditure

Crisman: From industry to culture

Hetherington: Second-handedness: Consumption, disposal and absent presence

An interesting new comparison to the other museums discussed by Crisman would be Chipperfield’s refurbishment of the Neues Museum in Berlin. Although the project did not deal with the empty shell of an industrial building, many similar issues would have been tackled, such as what to restore and what to replace, as well as the relationship between the building and the objects on display.

“The museum is above all a conduit of disposal.” Hetherington, p. 166

For me, this statement provides a radical new way of understanding the programmatic nature of museums that has strong implications on their design. It becomes all the more interesting when the museum itself is built in a recycled shell, since whilst it holds objects before disposal, the museum itself also undergoes a process of disposal and decay (perhaps more so than a complete new build). Both Hetherington and Crisman touched on ideas from Eco’s text on the semiotics of architecture, acknowledging that a building’s meaning and value is not a constant, but changes over time.

In my 4^th year project on the Edinburgh Kitchen, I worked with Olly Cooper to study the contrast between a typical architect’s conception of an immaculate kitchen against the reality of a lived-in kitchen and its own landscapes of dirt. It reminded us of the difference between our ideas and the messy reality of life, as well as highlighting the different forms and materials that take dirt differently – which are the areas of a room that are always dirty, and do they need to be designed differently? Are there areas where dirt is acceptable? In Crisman’s essay, as well as in Auer’s ideas on plastics, we were reminded about the futility of attempting to control weathering in materials. In the Dia:Beacon, the scrupulously cleaned brick has become covered with a white efflorescence.

Musicians tend to deal with entropy much more directly than architects. For a note to be sustained over a longer period of time, more input is required from a musician. With string instruments, this is done through bowing technique. The ends of notes are even more significant in ensemble music, since if all musicians do not end simultaneously, the result is a ragged performance. Ligeti created a musical equivalent to Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown in his work, Poème Symphonique, in which 100 metronomes are wound up and released simultaneously, slowing to a halt over about 20 minutes. Although his primary interest is in the rhythmic patterns created by mechanical imperfections, this piece could also be read as a study of the entropic condition of musical production.