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Excesses beyond form
Does the "self" of the building or the place have to be in the formal relation of its parts to one another? Or in the grammar of the system? Bernard Tschumi: excess beyond rule and form, that's where the pleasure is.But what kind of excess? If differences proliferate and escape the linear or the dialectical, that is still a matter of definite finite possibilities, though not a closed set. What kind of excess surrounds what is present but refuses itself to be captured in presence?Presence through absence is a way of saying potentiality in Aristotle. The most obvious case of potentiality is: matter. Is there some other way of talking about presence/absence that is not the same as potentiality? What is it that exceeds form, but not as matter does? Is it the presence, not a potential the way shapes are potential in the clay, but a presence "on the horizon" of other forms: other traffic patterns, other joinings of spaces, other combinations of parts, other metaphors, unintended and without communities of discourse?