Design IntelligenceS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two sisters lived together in a glass house by the woods. They were identical twins and wore matching clothes ever since they were little girls. In order to tell them apart, one sister wore the letter “S” on the right shoulder of her outfits, and the other wore the number “2” on the left shoulder of hers. (This was easily done, because the same character could be traced and cut from fabric and flipped depending onto which sister’s outfit it would be sewn.) The letter “S” stood for “Sister,” the firstborn of the twins and the number “2” stood for “Squared” the second born twin. Squared always signed her name with the superscript “²”. Being very particular about how she looked, Squared thought the “2” on her outfits was sewn too low.

Although they looked the same, the two sisters had very different personalities; Sister was always shy and introverted and Squared was quite the extrovert. Squared liked to be seen, stay up and out late at night. Sister preferred the early mornings when she would take long walks in the woods surrounding their house on three sides. The other side faced a field, where Sister never went. She always left the house and went into the woods and walked off the paths where the trees were dense. She liked the solitude of walking in the woods’ shadowed space.

Squared, on the other hand, slept for most of the day. Usually, Sister didn’t see her twin until the smells of dinner filled the air of the house. Conversations at dinner were usually about Sister’s walks, where she went, what the weather was like and what she saw. Sister would give an update on each tree that she passed. Then Squared would excitedly talk about her night out and who she wanted to meet and what to wear. Squared liked to dance. She felt alive and in the world when dancing.

Squared often asked Sister for advice on what to wear. This was important because as twins, they always wore identical outfits and had to reach an agreement. At dusk, they would meet where two hinged glass doors met in a corner of the house. With the lights on inside the house, the glass would be reflective and when the glass doors were opened wide, the sisters could see all sides of their outfits through the reflection of one glass in the other. Sister and Squared would stand side by side and see reflections of themselves in a stack curving into infinity, the insignias on their shoulders smaller and smaller until they could no longer be read.

Like a two-way mirror, the glass walls were transparent or reflective depending on the amount of light on each side. At night, the twins could not see out but one could easily be seen inside the house from the outside, without seeing who was doing the seeing. Sister always imagined someone outside at night looking in. It made her afraid of the dark. During the day, the dwelling’s boundaries blew out from the planes of glass to reach in between the trees. It was as if the house had two personas: the relaxed and extroverted space expanding into the surrounding woods during the day and the contracted self-reflecting dwelling at night.

Sister wished that she weren’t so shy. One night Squared stayed home instead of going out, Sister stayed up, and the twins played cards. Because Sister didn’t want to be visible from the outside, in case someone was there, they played by candlelight. Out of nowhere, a moth flew towards the light. Sister hated moths. Also afraid of the dark, moths ate the leaves that formed the shadowed space of the woods that Sister loved. Sister cast a spell. She said, “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni!” (We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.[1]) The moth flew towards the light again, but this time, flew too close and into the candle, getting caught in the molten wax.  The moth tried to pull itself out, but could not escape the hardening wax and was cast at the candle’s edge in its struggling gesture. Sister blew the candle out and the card game was over.

Days were easier for Sister as she took to the woods. She wove a path through the natural placement of trees. Sister imagined a seedling’s destiny tied to how much light was left after the surrounding trees already took the air and light that they could.  Lightning struck some down, giving room for saplings. Others died of rot or ice storm; gypsy moths made banquets of oak trees. Bats slept in their hollowed trunks.

Movement signaled an intruder. Peripheral vision sharpened perception of anything that moved.  Intuitively, Sister looked away from what she sensed, in order to find it. Keeping her eyes half focused so as to not preference any portion of view over the periphery, she could dwell in the wood’s depth. Between two trees, two more trees and between those two trees, two more. Each tree had cast a visual shade: a sweep of obscured space. And when her line of sight shifted, just by a fraction of an inch, a completely different set of views extended into its depth.  Sister’s moving point of view exchanged one visual shade for another; a blinking shadowed space.

Most of the time, there was no intruder; she found only the trees, birds, rabbits, raccoons, and chipmunks. Giant oaks, maple and elm stood guard as survivors. Sister felt safe as their dignity stopped wrongdoing in its tracks. The woods were her dance hall. She felt in the world here, dancing with the phenomena of view and shade.

One evening at dinner, Squared was excitedly talking about her night out dancing with friends when she noticed Sister’s fallen face. “What’s wrong?” Squared asked. “I wish I weren’t so shy,” Sister replied. “Maybe if didn’t feel so exposed, I would have courage to go out like you. I feel safe in the woods, with all its shadows. I wish I could live in a house that’s shadowed like the woods.” Squared said, “Then do it! Design a house that’s shadowed like the woods and we’ll build it.” Sister’s face began to glow and expand into a smile. “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it.” And the sisters made a pact that evening, to build a house of visual shadows.

The next day Sister brought her sketchbook and pencils with her on her walk in the woods. This time, she skipped and walked and danced and then stopped and drew what she imagined was there, all the eyes of the chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, birds, and even possible intruders. She drew cones from those imagined eyes coming from all directions as she moved through the woods. The drawing looked like a fantastic sea urchin of intersecting spikes. The trees stood intercepting the cones of sight and Sister’s path. And openings between the leaves of the canopy cast tiny suns everywhere, a thousand pinhole lenses projecting images. That gave Sister an idea: her house should be designed to intercept all the sight cones so that her imagination could run free.

Sister went home and found some paper and tape. She made all kinds of cones by rolling the paper and taping them. Tall skinny cones, fat short cones and oblique cones of all kinds. At dinner, Sister showed Squared all the cones and told her about her plan: “if we could intercept all these cones, we’ll have the design of the house,” she said. Squared looked puzzled. “I have an idea, but we’ll need to light the candle,” Sister said. That night Squared did not go out and Sister stayed up. They arranged the cones in all sorts of ways. Sister cast her spell again, but this time in reverse, “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni!”  Sister lit the candle with the encased moth and tried not to notice as the wax melted from its wings.

Sister was preoccupied with her experiment. She had a card that had a hole in it. By holding up the card in front of the candlelight, a cone of light was cast through the hole. Where this cone of light fell on a paper cone was an intersection of two cones. By tracing this intersection, templates could be cut, and the walls of the house built. Sister held the card in front of the candle and Squared arranged a cone according to plan. If the card was close to the candle, the cone of light would be wide; if further away, the cone of light would be narrow and if the card was angled, the cast cone would be oblique.

Sister placed the card. The intersection of the light and the paper cone was petal-shaped. By varying the placement of the card, the petals looked like they were from all species of flowers. Squared traced the petal-shaped intersection on each of the paper cones. As the twins moved around the model, the house started to emerge. “What was that?” Squared asked. “What was what?” asked Sister. “That.” Squared said, as a shadow flew past the cones. “A bat,” said Sister. The black shadow in the air flew in sync with its shadow on the walls and ceiling; a crack through the room. Sister got up and opened a door so that it could fly away.

Once all the walls were traced and cut, Sister blew out the candle. The moth was gone; but Sister said nothing about it and the twins went to bed.

Sister had a dream that night of a flower blooming. She was inside the flower where the seed pod was while the flower slowly opened around her. From the inside, she heard the words:

Never, not for a single day,
do we have before us that pure space the flowers
continually open into. For us it’s always a World,
and never a Nowhere without the No — a pure,
unguarded space you can breathe and fully realize
and not be longing after.[2]

Out of nowhere a giant moth approached. Its wings flapped like flags, sending puffs of pollen into air. Sister awoke coughing, but longing after the flower’s space. She took out her sketchbook to draw the light filled and magically open, “Nowhere without the No” and wondered, “If light shapes flowers then it could shape my house too.” Sister set out to shape all the parts of the house from projected light.

Sister projected light on cones to shape petal-walls. The shadows of petal-walls cast on other cones made a second set of walls, the space in between became rooms, and the projected lines overhead, vaults.

All of the petal-walls could be arranged to protect the center of the house so that it would be obscured from sight – a blind spot of a kind. And if all the spaces of the house were arranged around the blind spot, Sister could move through from one space to another without being visible to the outside.

That evening Sister and Squared discussed the house’s progress over dinner. Squared had been thinking too. Once the plans were done, Squared and all her friends could start building it at night, with lamps at full-scale. The sisters agreed and Squared set out to recruit and gather her friends. Sister laid out a plan, a folded geometry of spaces organized around a blind spot. The fold of the plan ran north-south with the spaces built up around, in a clockwise fashion, each space being a couple of steps higher than the next so that when all the spaces were in place, the center of the house was a spiraling stair.  Starting in the east was the kitchen, or “sunrise-room.” Then as you moved clockwise around the center was the dining room, next in the south was the living room or “floaters,” in the southwest was the entry or “blink,” then the studio or “fuse-with-the-all-room,” then in the west was the bathroom, and finally in the north was the bedroom, or “deep-sleep-dream-room.” “Deep-sleep-dream-room” was a full set of steps higher than the ground below.

She wrote the letters “dn” for “down” on the stairs with an arrow pointing down and named the space below, “insomnia room,” because that was the space to be when she was “up.”

For weeks, Sister would sketch and model and Squared and her friends would build the house.

One night Sister had a dream that she was in a blind spot. Again, like her dream of being inside of a flower, everything was in slow motion. As light slowly entered the blind spot, she could see a giant lens that slowly focused the light. An upside down image started to take form on a concave wall on the other side of the lens. Just as the image started to appear, she realized that she was inside of an eye and woke up. Sister took out her dream journal and sketched her dream of an eye and thought, “Images are possible only in blind spots. I have to build a lens for my house.”

That day she found an old ten-gallon glass jug with a thick solid glass base and broke off the base from its sides. She chipped off the pieces left from the sides of the bottle. Using sand and a flat pavement stone, Sister ground the base into a blank.  Next she needed to grind the glass blank into a lens. Squared gave her an iron pipe about half the blank’s diameter. Sister rocked the blank back and forth on the open end of the pipe forming a curved surface on one side of the glass blank. For weeks Sister spent her days grinding the lens while Squared spent the nights building the house. Each evening they would meet and discuss their progress. The lens took shape as the blind spot took form. After the lens was perfectly curved, Sister started to polish it using finer and finer grit each day.  The lens became sharper and clearer as the house grew more shadowed. Squared told Sister that bats would often visit the building site. She could see them in the lamplight diving and catching moths, their shadows on the petal-shaped walls.

One day Sister held the lens up to the sun light and it focused a sharp beam onto the pavement. “It’s done.” The twins decided that the lens would be placed in the blind spot, at the center of the house.

She went back to the plan of the house to draw the lens in place; but, this time she viewed the drawing from another point of view. “dn” which she had written earlier, for “down,” appeared as “up.” “Hmmm,” she thought, “a downside up stair, a perfect location for a lens that projects images upside down.” Sister felt satisfied, was tired and went to bed.

The next morning Sister woke up and looked at the blue sky. She noticed the floaters in her eyes and chased them, looking to the right as they fell out of view, like a dog chasing its tail. Even though they seemed like they are in the tears on the surface of the eyes, she knew that they are in fact deep inside the eye between the lens and retina. “We don’t really know where the self begins and the world ends,” she thought out loud. That made her very excited in thinking about her house. “To be in between a lens and a projected image on a retina is to be filled with wonder.” She looked around her and the lens that she had finished the previous day was gone. Nothing was left in the glass house besides the bed that Sister slept on. Not even Squared was there. Sister went outside and ventured down to the open field, where the house was being built. It was the first time that she went into the open and the first time she saw the house: a strange set of petal-shaped walls and vaults. It was surprisingly porous, and open; none of the walls enclosed a room, yet she could not see deep into the center. The walls of the house were arranged exactly like the model, in a way that screened its core, making it invisible. 

Sister wove her way past the petal-walls and into the house. At the core of the house, a stair accumulated from the levels of each room and connected all the spaces of the house. Rooms, in essence, were landings for the stair that gently spiraled up. And the walls of the rooms screened the center, the blind spot of the house. There was her lens, mounted in the wall that screened the stair, a wall that she had named “lens wall” and an image of the outside was projected upside down on the concave side of its twin wall, which she had named “retina.” Everything else was there, all of her belongings: her furniture, her clothes, her art supplies and pots and pans.

She decided to make a great meal to celebrate the house and cooked all day. No one showed up to her dinner, not even Squared.

Every night she had fantastic dreams and every day she painted them on the concave surfaces of the walls of her house. She would apply wet plaster in the morning and paint frescos of her dreams in the afternoons. She thought that by filling them with her dreams she could make the walls dissolve.  The concave surface of the vaults she painted a Prussian blue, because Prussian blue has the longest focal length of any color and it made the vaults seem so far away that they almost disappeared.  

The walls slowly filled with images of her dreams and the retina wall flashed with images from the outside, projected by the lens.

Each morning she took her walk in the woods and passed the glass house, each time looking inside. It sat empty. Each evening she prepared dinner for Squared; but Squared never showed up. In fact, she never saw Squared again. But occasionally her friends would stop by, and they would have dinner together.