Ants

From Waking Life

(Main character is coming out of a subway and bumps into a girl.)

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant, you know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant auto-pilot with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw, I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, no. I don't want to be an ant either. Heh. Yeah, thanks for kind of jostling me there. I've been kind of on zombie auto-pilot lately, I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one. It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road. And instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls "the confrontation between their souls." It's like, um, freeing the brave reckless gods within us all.

Then it's like we have met.

(They shake hands)

There's something unusual to me about the inanity of human interaction. Even when you take the time to legitimately ask someone a personal question, there's no guarantee they're in the divulging state of mind requisite for them to respond in kind. You're more likely to get a dismissive "fine" or "all right" to a question à la "how was your day?" than the cathartic expression of emotions that the question ought to elicit.

Of course, this is not terribly surprising. Most people ask such questions as a courtesy, to establish what linguistic theory calls a communicative channel. No one really wants to know "what's up", most of the time. And who can blame them, when the real answer (even from a friend) might be "Well, i didn't sleep very well because i kept having to get up to relieve this explosive diarrhea i've been having, plus my ex-wife isn't speaking to me since i took our kid to that Slayer concert, so that was awkward picking him up before work. Then i missed breakfast, which i was really looking forward to..."

Who cares?

Well, maybe no one, for that example. But the point is that sometimes people really need you to listen to them, and sometimes you really want to know about a person. Especially if you haven't spoken to them in a while, and want to re-establish the connection. But that's not what i wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about crazy architecture. Or at least, architecture which ostensibly has little function, but which i'm going to argue is worthwhile anyway. In another post, i might argue that anything worthwhile is functional, but for lack of a better word, i'll stick with functional. The Vanna Venturi house is a good example. Not the whole thing, just the nowhere stair. It truly is useless. It goes nowhere. But it's interesting, because it's different, and it jostles us out of our ant-mode. That's worth something, right?



Bear with me for a moment as i describe something else entirely. In an entirely appropriate way, the Zumthor Baths at Vals epitomized an idea i had had for years before i'd ever heard of the project. These images taken from another blog.


Here the walls drop directly into the baths, more like naturally flooded caverns than pools with decks, albeit, you know, quartzite and concrete. Now, i've always appreciated an extreme use of water, especially in unexpected places. I suppose baths aren't exactly the most unexpected of places, but the style is pretty fantastic. What if you had something like that in your basement? You know, you open the door to the basement, take a few steps down, and BAM! it's a pool! Pretty awesome, right? Maybe if you really had to have a deck, it could be on the opposite side, so you had to swim there. I guess you could have another entrance of some sort for the land-bound, but that's really not the point. The point is avoiding the banality of normal, almost institutional forms like pools...or stairs.

This is all well and good for design studio, but how can it be realized in the harsh consumerist reality of a practice? Can it? It's certainly not easy to sell something on the basis of how cool and unusual it is. There's validity to the opposition, too. If you live in a house with a second story door that opens to the outside...air...after a while the novelty of it will wear off, and you'll never open the door again, except maybe to laugh about it with visitors. The same goes for the useless stair. It has to be both unusual and useful in another way. You have to want a pool to appreciate a secret basement-pool.

But if you do want one, wouldn't you rather have one that's different from everyone else's? And the more people that feel that way, the more often you'll be jarred out of your ant-mode.