WORKS Chaos

In his writings, Chuan-tzu, the Chinese mystic and philosopher of fourth century B.C., describes a king named Chaos, who had no eyes or a nose. One day, he invited the king of south and the king of the north to a meal. In return for the meal, the two kings opened one orifice each day in Chaos, but he died the moment the seventh orifice was opened. The Japanese word for ÒchaosÓ(konton) comes from his name. There are said to be three sources for research into chaos in the West: PoincareÕs problem of the motion of three or more astronomical bodies, ReynoldsÕs problem of fluids, and the ergodic hypothesis of Bolzmann. All date from the second half to the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, quantum theory and the theory of relativity took center stage, and chaos began to attract attention again only in 1963 when Lorenz published his work on heat convection currents. Interestingly, it was in that year that Arata Isozaki published Ò The Theory of Process PlanningÓ on transformation in architecture. We live in the extremely volatile aggregate called the contemporary city and attempt to deal with an extremely complex part of that aggregate called contemporary architecture. Modern architecture in the twentieth century taught us to think of buildings as things standing in isolation in a characterless, transparent open space. An actual site, however, has a surrounding environment, its own seasonal, social and cultural climate and its own historical background. Any building, even one that is newly constructed, is an addition, if we look at it in a sufficiently broad context. Buildings are points in the chaos of the city. What I have in mind is using those points to perform on the city an acupuncture-like procedure.