The first in a series of posts recognising design & architecture related Blogs emerging from the Long White Cloud. Written out of Auckland by Carl Douglas, Lecturer of Spatial Design at AUT,
Diffusive Architectures is a refreshing glimpse into academia and other worlds from an experienced and enthusiastic voice.
As I write this,
BLDGBLOG has forwarded kudos to
Diffusive Architecture, as top new blog for 2009, fortunately for us that means Douglas has posted an especially useful menu of previous posts, my pick being '
Sleeping Over' –a fantastically written account of three dreams in one mad night, an excerpt:
–I dropped into my dream, slow wave and rapid eyes. I dreamed about architecture. There was a monastery, solid, stable and Byzantine that held the horixon down. The ground was still my desert, but it was soft and plastic and inky like me. I was a monument being built and held up by crutches that were sensitive to my misshapen body–
The thematic dexterity of posts from Douglas is formidably carried by their substantial content. Published as a personal-but-public "testing" blog for ideas around 'diffusive architectures' (by which he means "various manifestations of distribution, difference, and collective subjectivity."), Douglas is not shy to post drawings, personal recollections, and developing threads of thought, readings, and even supplemental Tweets, which offer ambiguous and teasing citations.
As I say, it is reasonably rare to be offered such candid insight in to the workings of academia and teaching, in fact I've heard of studio leaders abroad who ban blog posts about their teaching or studios which is curious.
As well as Douglas's selection, make some Sunday-reading time (if you've found us over the weekend) for a deeper browse through Diffusive Architectures' archive, I'm convinced you'll find something intriguing.
diffusive.wordpress.com