For Leibniz, for Nietzche, for Wil- liam and Henry James, and for Whitehead as well, perspectivism amounts to relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of the truth accord- ing to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject. Gilles Delueze, The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque, translation by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p20. Reprinted by per- mission of University of Minnesota Press.
KPMB’s Jackson Triggs Winery Tom Strickland
T he concept of the human condition — mere existence itself — is argued to be ‘a condition in which the variation of a truth appears to the subject’. From the first conveyance of modern thought, some 40 to 70 thousand years ago, manners of thinking around this human condition have, in a broad sense, been represented through aesthetic styles. It follows then that a building detail will reflect this condition and as such the identity of society at large. The appearance of this human condition in the built environment is as follows: how a detail is designed and constructed represents the intended quality of building construction. This in turn is a representation of how a building is valued within its geo-political region by the users, the builder and the architect. Naturally each of these groups involved in the process present their own agendas and responsibilities to society at large. This, in general, is perspectivism amounting to relativism.
In theory then, one should find all the complexities of this condition in the processes and eventual completed wall system of a Wal-Mart, even if it does reveal an expression marked by a lack of invention. A detail need not be merely a flaccid reflection of the design process but can instead be an opportunity to express the human condition through the sophisticated assembly of construction processes. At the recently completed Jackson-Triggs Winery in the Ontario Niagara region, Kuwabara Payne Mckenna Blumberg Architects have designed a single detail that reveals how a flexible and inventive approach to building materials has produced an aesthetic that conveys the current complexi- ties of the human condition.
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ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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