Structure

It used to be that you could find plenty of magazines to read on your train ride home from the city on a Saturday night, magazines being the medium of choice for such travel. But nowadays my magazine reading is down to the bare minimum: The New Yorker, of course, MacLife, Publishers Weekly, Rostrum (!) and Gourmet. And if I miss the latter two, I am not overcome with grief. But this particular train ride last Saturday (after seeing “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” about which I’ll probably comment soon) commences with a visit to the magazine shop at Grand Central, so you theoretically have the world to choose from, but the only magazine in addition to those above that I ever come away with (and those I actually subscribe to, so I wouldn’t exactly be buying them at a shop) is Wired. There’s stuff available along the lines of Critical Theory Today and various political and literary quarterlies that put you to sleep just reading the covers, and some guy that wouldn’t move was standing in front of the comic books (and looked as if he intended to read each one, in sequence, until the next issues of each came out, and he would just keep going on, forever) so there may have been something there but nowadays comics really are all part eleventy of a forty-seven part series so that’s pretty unsatisfying, so, Wired it was.

Now here’s the deal. Structure, in architecture, is whatever holds the building up. It is the framework of the building. Look here: http://www.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/15-12/mf_baker_sb
What Baker is able to do, and what he’s doing with Burj Dubai (which, according to the article, has already set the record as the tallest building/tower in the world, although it’s still under construction and steadily growing taller, to some unspecified height), is dwarfing other tall buildings because of the footprint of his structure, the buttressed core and the three wings. Look at the illustration. In the (real) Sears tower, you see usable space around a core, and crisscrossed structural elements. The problem at the top, and why you can’t go any further up (in the imaginary Sears), is that you need an immensely larger amount of structure to keep the thing from falling over or swaying so much that you get nauseous on the upper floors. Baker’s building doesn’t sway because of the three sides providing counterforces and counterbalance. It’s also fast and easy to build, with lots of space that isn’t structural.

So, what’s the point? There’s a quote in the article to the effect that the bigger and more complex you build, the more the framework takes over, until there’s no room left for anything else. This is an architectural truism. And a building that’s all framework/structure is no longer a building, it’s a sculpture. There’s no room in it anymore except for whatever it is that is holding it up.

And I’ve seen LD cases like that. All framework and no room left for anything else. They may be interesting, like sculptures, but they are not useful, like buildings. They can’t hold anything up except themselves. Which may be why I find theory debate so uninteresting: it might be aesthetically pleasing, but it has no content. It is jejune. It’s useless in a practical sense. And what is the point of an argument that is useless in a practical sense? A framework that structurally supports…nothing.

Architects of necessity fight this battle of engineering and art and practicality with everything they build. So should LDers. At the point where we’ve moved away from the resolution and simply concentrate on the structure, we have failed as architects of argumentation. And I’m not quite sure what we’ve become instead.