Negotiating lights on / lights off

You were saying you wanted to know everything / I was saying that I wanted to see silence / You had to be here, in Brooklyn, in this room / I had to be out there, anywhere, in the landscape / You wanted the lights on / I wanted the lights off / You were talking about sex / I was thinking about my PhD

Jean and Etienne were saying abstract representations are meaningless / Their point, the ‘power of abstraction’ only comes from someone relating it to a specific situation

I am doing it again / Listening by talking about myself / It is how I listen, how I understand / But I should be able to do this without talking

I always go on about Terry / I like the way he talks about design / About speculation as open water / About surveying the ground as excavating / For him, the creative program is always in fragile balance / For me, it’s always in negotiation / For me, this push and pull is where the agency of design rests

I was bored with the specifics of your story / You didn’t see the relevance of my generalizations / We always argue like this / Two designers / We should be skilled at navigating between the concrete and the abstract / Between the conditions and the program

For Jean and Etienne the notion of participation blurs the standoff / Between abstraction and experience / Between contemplation and involvement

Clive talks about design as the realm of possibilities / He says science and the humanities describe the world / But design…he makes that sound far sexier / Calls us world makers / Not in an arrogant architectural way / But in how we ask ‘what if’, instead of asking ‘what is’.

You said you liked that the narrative wasn’t written into the script / I agreed that the story lay in what was left unspoken / We stopped analysing the film and walked home in silence

At the studio we claimed that our pieces read like a beat script / An invitation for the audience to complete the narrative / To make the situation resonate / An invitation for reverie

Luke wrote something like imagination, innovation and invention / Made me wonder about imagination / Made me wonder how we imagine a new script—a new world

You said there were too many questions left unanswered / I liked that I was still working out what the questions were

I loved Zora’s chapter opening / There are years that ask questions and years that answer / It took me a decade to work out I wasn’t so interested in the answers / I need to question so I can wonder / I need to speculate so I can imagine I don’t want to tell you how it is / I try to end with a series of questions / But you tell me you want more / I understand / Because I also want more from you