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Au pouvoir s’associe l’idée de quelque chose de proche, de présent. c’est une force, plus immédiate que la puissance. On le voit bien dans l’expression de pouvoir ou force physique, qui conviendra mieux pour désigner les degrés inférieurs, animaux, de la puissance. Dans le cas, par exemple, d’une proie dont on se saisit et qu’on porte à la bouche. Quand le pouvoir prendre sont temps, il devient puissance. Mais au moment de crise qui finit toujours par arriver, à l’instant irrévocable de la décision, il redevient pouvoir, force pure. La puissance est plus générale et plus vaste que le pouvoir, elle contient bien davantage, et elle n’est plus aussi dynamique. Elle est plus circonstanciée et a même un certain degré de patience.

Pouvoir et puissance, in Masse et Puissance, p.299, Elias Canetti

Always design a thing by considering it in a larger context a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan

Eliel Saarinen

Source : Magical Nihilism

We once built some baskets with a Native-American basket weaver named Terrol Johnson, and learned we have much in common. Before Terrol, we had always described our approach to design as computational, since we preferred to create our own design tools rather than purchase them. this meant we could use a very fundamental type of language, computer code, to build up our concepts, whatever these may have been. our exchances with Terrol taught us something else : that with any technique — whether one calls t craft or computation — there exists a certain disengagement from the object being formed ; the process becomes more about the relations around that objets.

Terrol spole of masket-making as a process that brings people together, both those around him and the ancestors through wich he continues a tradition. He spoke of many voices in that object, as if each basket was, in essence, a conversation. So too, we began to think of making architecture as a conversation between themes of universal significance, such as geometry and matter, with the actual experiences through which these themes become manifest. It is a bouldless and inspiring conversation, one that reminds us that designing can be about communing between two worlds ; one entirely abstract and coded, the other very real and alive, like what we find through our interactions every day with people, communities, and cities. In the end, like those baskets, the truly inspired moment of design comes with the realization that neither of these worlds is of our own making–both were always there, and somehow discovered along the way.

What is parametric to us ?, From control to design, Aranda and Lasch

As the chef Ferran Adrià says, the cutting edge of creation is not “inventing the onion omelette, but inventing the omelette itself” Inventing means going back to the roots of human activity and contributing to it by developing plural applications of what has been invented.

Development of the information society represents a new moment in history that redefines paradigms in architecture. Many technological inventions have transformed architecture and urbanism. Electricity, the lift, the car, etc. The term invention is rarely applied to architecture. But, as architecture becomes the result of advanced processes, the product of informational and industrial developments that affect the way architecture is thought of, represented, produced and carried out, the concept of invention can be assimilated. New processes of representation can be invented that transform construction system ; materials and mechanisms that transform the functioning of skins and structures ; spaces for thinking and action that may suppose multiple specific applications, using the resources available in each economic and cultural surround.

Inventing architecture means going back to the prototype when projects are produced. The process involves not knowing beforehand what the result will be, yetproposing that the result be a specific response to the object of the project ; a new approach to general, commonly accepted foundations of architecture.

In fact, one fundamental strategy for the advance of architecture is to invent questions that respond to situations affecting architecture as a whole. With his office building in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse in 1919, Mies van der Rohe invented the question of high-rise glass architecture, a question he himself resolved with his Lake Shore Drive apartments twenty-nine years later, the first apartment buildings to have a glass and a steel facade. Le Corbusier invented the question of separating structure and facing using his Domino structure in 1914, which became a central them of architecture in the following years.

In both cases, the proposals pick up technological solutions developed by other persons or organizations. Their basic contribution consisted in presenting the question in the realm of architecture.

The metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture, Invent (p. 366)