dude, the charter of the new urbanism just arrived from amazon, and it’s a fucking monster. I was expecting, like, a pamphlet or something. this is the real deal, tho: a heavily annotated collection of essays in support of the whole mess, plus tons of pretty pictures and serifed-up type, printed on nice heavy uncoated stock. I am going to read the fuck out of it, afterwhich I will probably post some more naive bullshit about my feelings. yes.

yes! but so yeah. as regards all this blather: I have calmed down significanly since posting it all and thought about shit somewhat logically. the way I see it is this: program-driven architecture is the logical extension of applied modernism. modernism is a direct product of industrialization, right? ostensibly driven by program. but now “program” is driven by data as abstracted from process. back in the day, data was sort of a by-product of process, but now it’s more the other way around (hence XML, etc etc).

right well yes. ok more when I read the book. toodleoo.

-fish

sometimes i am scared that since you are so smarty pants that your brain will explode (or implode a la ren and stimpy styles)

geez. sorry havent’ visited your site in a while. a LOT to catch up with. although half the time i don’t know what you’re talking about haha. it makes me feel stupid. and that’s good. because when i feel stupid i wanna do something to make myself not feel stupid again.

anyways, here’s my comment regarding your post. as far as the transformation of the role of data in a given process - i think it has a lot to do with change in people’s psyche as technolgoy advances (which is fed back and drives technology again and so on). so you from predetermined mechanical systems to emergent types where you’re explicitly dealing with non-deterministic and sometime blackbox sysytems. wiener would agree with me here. in his view, what you are describing would be a result of a shift from mechanistic world view to evolutionary one - which in turn is in part a result of advances in electronically driven technology which prompted shannon, kolmogorov, etc to consider quantifying information - as it was the driving force behind such advances (communication technologies - teletype etc). and of course automation of machinery as a result of developments in feedback control theory. as always military backed this whole thang up. so data is not only the the product but also the source driving the process along. sean would probably call it data-flow or whatnot.

greetings—

where are you, kind sir?

wishing you the best.

good,
wendell.