11.
Purpose and Radical Uselessness
These relationships,
their differences and adaptability have led me to my current position
on purpose in architecture. Systems that perform some generative act of
organization in a binary environment such as computing or architecture
will yield coded mixtures of categories and the opposites of those categories.
For example, generating an inside will also generate an outside. And generating
something with purpose also generates something without purpose. This
is crucial for the establishment of a rule-based freedom for architecture
to be both useful and useless, to function as well as exercise itself
as a medium, and to support a kind of radical uselessness. Radical uselessness
is a purposelessness that emerges out of the same rules that produce purposefulness
itself.
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