I went to a used bookstore, where I bought a copy of the pritzker prize award ceremony program for the year 2000. I cut each page off of the binding, including both covers. I then folded the pages into pleats and restacked them. to wit:

… presently, they are awaiting rebinding with rings and grommets. this was for a class on bookbinding I’m taking. the order was given to seek out a book and destroy it; presumably, the idea being that in a book’s unmaking one can learn a thing or two of their making. I had been reading this book “folding architecture”, which laura gave me early last summer, and so I got this assignment, and so the content and context sort of worked out there, n’est ce pas?

yeah so I’m trying to figure out more about this folding architecture thing. according to both the author of the aforementioned book and mr. boyer, this is the quintessential work on the subject. it’s a wonderful way to make forms, tho… low impact (except for the occasional paper cut) and cheap, and the results look nice I think:

… plus, like, you could do this to things like the airline safety card, or magazine blow-in postcards, if you’re bored and stuck somewhere.

erm yes. does anyone know of any 20th century architects who were into zen? when I say “into zen,” I don’t mean “had an asian fetish and as such festooned their shit with tons of faux-japanese gardens and whatnot.” I mean like the way robert irwin was into zen, or john cage, or yayoi kusama, or robert pirsig. well maybe not pirsig, cuz someone told me he went nuts, and was later found curled up in the corner of a plain empty room, gibbering madly, naked and soaked in his own urine/feces. so pre-feces pirsig is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

cuz yeah while doing all the folding, I got to kick back and relax, sorta, cuz it was all very meditative. this was nice. it’s been widely reported that the average person living in the western 1st-world these days is stressed out beyond belief. so that seems to suggest an interesting dichotomy: stress your body, and you become incredibly strong, resilient (nay, “buff”) and adaptive. stress your mind, and you go mad, or at least become stupid from excessive cortisol poisoning. that is of course a perverse generalization (and, you could make the case, another poorly masked instance of the nonstop intellectual romantic idolotry of stereotypical “working class” values) but you get me, yes?

all those aforementioned people were on some serious zen shit, and they got there by doing excessively physically repetitive things. irwin and kusama especially. you could easily say, “aha, kusama, she was nuts as well, wasn’t she?” to which I could say “yeah but irwin most certainly was not, at least not in the traditional sense… he liked fountain sodas and fast cars and hot women, for chrissakes.” plus kusama used her zen powers against her endemic instabilities, so there.

so erm yeah lemme know. in any case, I have to go hack apart some more stuff with x-acto blades. more to come. I will post pictures if I sever a finger accedentally. wordup.

-fish