A r t I c u l a t I O N

Alien Support

What is articulation? This strange word that means the utterance of vocal sounds but also means the composite integrated movement of limbs. In architecture it is used to mean the different twists and turns of a building. The demarcations that are not caught up into a single gestalt but must in a sense be enacted or worked through each time the building is considered like the decoding of a movement pattern by the minutiae of bends and deformations that put off centre continuously any single bench-mark of up/down, left/right.

Maybe we only know such orientations according to a waywardness that tips the centre pole out of its literal rooting. Buildings like humans are systems of gravitational leanings. Otherwise they become so upright as to lose the quality of what it means to be a habitat or to inhabit.
A person, a building is an influx of tendencies that push and pull it out of shape. It is the risk of rain; the risk of falling that makes us understand a shelter and understand uprightness.
In a sense we are always working between a structure and our use of a structure. They do not tally although one informs and situates the other.

It is the piecemeal breaking down of structures into surfaces of use that is their articulation; their breathing configuration. Their on-going metamorphosis.