The name’s a bit thinky, sure. I want to use this blog as a garden where I can plant little thought-seeds Johnny Appleseed-style, and move on through my digital landscape knowing they’ll sit there dormant or sprout away. A thought construct to me is any idea of the mind that can be explored, built-upon, pruned, re-built, renovated, and maybe someday become real. Then what does it become, when it jumps into our reality?
What happens when we build an idea?
Everything about Architecture is a thought construct until it is built: every drawing or model or image of a space. Every line or color or perceived shadow. When we stand inside a built work, small as a room or vast as an Olmsted park, it may confirm your thought construct, or it may feel like something else entirely. Did you catch my use of the word “feel” in this thinky intro?
Fiction is a thought construct: storytelling is a way of weaving all of us into a connected narrative through places and times with truths and untruths, a structure made of words that when assembled can reveal who we are: think of the characters’ psychology welling up in a novel, or the thought-reconstruction of histories and biographies. Poetry is the spoken, irreducible condensate of a thought construct.
Painting is any thought-construct applied to a two dimensional surface.
Music is a thought construct pulled from noise.
Photography: a thought construct framing a stolen or captured image.
Film might combine all of these thought constructs into a dream-viewer or dream-displayer.
“Culture is everything we don’t have to do.”
Brian Eno said that (In his book A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, which i just finished). The statement draws a blurry line around civilization’s needs, and puts art and sport and culture outside of it. There are form vs. function arguments coiled up in that statement too. Design probably inhabits that blurry zone (‘We need shelter: What does it look like? We need clothes, a fork, a wheel, a phone..’). But our eyes see color, therefore we have art. We are animals that move: let’s dance. Our brain remembers: retell it in a story. It’s all survival. In the end we have to do it all. I don’t want to draw a circle around Architecture and exclude anything.
Eno’s book is a diary but more so, collecting passing thoughts and deeper ones that grow into major themes and moments in his work in later years. It connects beyond his own work into teaching, music production (he was working with Bowie, U2, and James at the time), and family time. Seeking, not always finding. The book is buoyed by essays and thoughtful pieces that are unafraid and honest and unabashedly smart.
I am not a renowned avant-garde artist. I will never daydream with Bono about the next U2 song. I will never hatch an artistic movement like ambient music. But I am someone who thinks and feels and looks for ways to incorporate what I find into art or my work. Eno’s book was very revealing about life: He was roughly my age when he wrote it, and the honesty in sharing the desperate thoughts, scary thoughts like: Is this work any good? Am I repeating myself? Is the idea-well dry? I can relate: I often go through periods where I am squeezing a full sponge of creativity, but then that sponge needs to sit and do nothing. Absorb. Inevitably, the quiet message comes back through out loud: I’m just getting going! Will I have time to do it all! I think of photos of myself taken at half my current age: I want to shout to that kid, “You were right! Don’t stop now!”