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      Chapter

      Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture
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      Chapter

      Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture

      DOI link for Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture

      Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture book

      Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture

      DOI link for Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture

      Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture book

      Edited ByAriane Lourie Harrison
      BookArchitectural Theories of the Environment

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      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2012
      Imprint Routledge
      Pages 8
      eBook ISBN 9780203084274
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      ABSTRACT

      Our building problem is just the opposite of Étienne-Jules Marey’s

      famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the

      invention of his “photographic gun,” he wanted to arrest the flight of

      a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive

      freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight, the mechanism of which

      had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the

      reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look desperately

      static. It seems almost impossible to grasp them as movement,

      as flight, as a series of transformations. Everybody knows-and

      especially architects, of course-that a building is not a static object

      but a moving project, and that even once it is has been built, it ages,

      it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what happens inside

      and out side, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated and

      transformed beyond recognition. We know this, but the problem is

      that we have no equivalent of Marey’s photographic gun: when we

      picture a building, it is always as a fixed, stolid structure that is there

      in four colors in the glossy magazines that customers flip through in

      architects’ waiting rooms. If Marey was so frustrated not to be able

      to picture in a successive series of freeze-frames the flight of a gull,

      how irritating it is for us not to be able to picture, as one continuous

      movement, the project flow that makes up a building. Marey had

      the visual input of his eyes and was able to establish the physiology

      of flight only after he invented an artificial device (the photographic

      gun); we too need an artificial device (a theory in this case) in order

      to be able to transform the static view of a building into one among

      many successive freeze-frames that could at last document the

      continuous flow that a building always is.

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