Structures and Things

Philosophy and action

Is philosophy understanding or the development of structure on to which hang understanding?

Philosophy seems to be the answer to a lot of questions. It challenges us to continue and strive to achieve an end to which there is none presently apparent. We integrate, postulate, instigate, initiate and promulgate continuously chasing a dream or perhaps more appropriately a vision. Our daily steps and effort provide further clarification and greater mass to generate a cohesive direction of momentum toward an end state of fixed knowledge of the entire is. Yet our very generation of integrative pathways create vast possibilities unknown to our present state and further adding massive initiating energy propelled in all existence to alter the very beginning of the journey started and finished some state un-remembered to our present postulation.

Setting aside present physical experience and focusing on purely mental energetic events occuring at various levels of awareness, we have no conscious means of experience. Our embodied energetic receivers and transmitters are integrated and wholey misunderstood. We striate our lives into levels and states with boundaries fixed by structures of thought bound by our physical experiences and thought forms binding us within the entire energy spectrum of purely physical energies expressed to our instruments of observation. Our instruments are clearly beyond our mundane use of them and still we take no observation of this and utilize our philosophy to understand the energies that lie without of our shells. The presence of elements that exceed our present understanding and philosophy engender energies intended to restrict our actions and efforts to create integrative structures capable of maintaining understanding. We focus our philosophies upon other familiar energies that are expressed almost exclusively in the physical realm of expression. We interact with other people and their energy matrices to reassure our own philosophies and energy structures.

We create our philosophy. Our philosophy is only the energy complex of our present energetics including our transmission and receipt of energy states within our world. Our attunement and sensitivities provide opportunities for developing greater philosophical structures for understanding and new integrative pathways capable of expressing physical and energetic expressions of experiential states heretofore unknown in the present energetic consciousness perceived by our similar energetic expressions that we call living beings. Creation is an attuned and focused energy matrix capable of sustained propagation and complex morphology that is responsive to energetic expression within greater creation matrices.

Energy unbounded is supremely unlimited in both expression and entrainment. The attunement and expressive harmonics reach all within the highest creation matrix. It is sometimes seen that philosophy has only the singular goal of expressing and understanding the highest creation matrix as can be understood by our humanity.

Every action is either in response to or cause of energetic creation matrices that we are attuned with or sensitive to. Action is therefore our present philosophy structure imbued with our understanding. It is then critical to have a proper philosophy and understanding to act toward creation that is both sustained and responsive to the energies we experience within our own energy structure. Philosophy is the sum of your life with its energetic linkages capable of transmitting and receiving energies. Your expression of these energies is only limited by the pathways, your sensitivities, and the energies with which you interact each moment of your living state.

Choose actions and philosophies that best attune and harness your energy transceivers.

Do you believe your understanding is doing this for you?

Operations and structure

What we do is often just as important as how we do them. There are obviously a number of ways to achieve a goal or plan. To the moon and back is a way to cross the street, and often the journey provides all the benefit, while the destination just provides closure.

We are often provided, through education or agreement, the structure under which we may operate to achieve our goals and plans. This begins in the home, continues in the formal education structure, and endures in the world of the employed. Now, when you are employed, it is based upon an agreement with another entity, whether it be a person, company or government. You and they have agreed to interact within a given framework that is supposedly beneficial to both parties. It is an exchange of labor for a means to transact trade within the larger community. You are being paid in accordance to your acts, skills, and perceived efforts. The payment varies in each country, and it is often a currency of exchange valued according to some principle agreed upon by the government, financial, and manufacturing industries. All mediums of exchange are just agreements made when operating in the realm under which the medium has authority. Take your medium to another realm and it has a different value.

Value is not only the perception of things, it is the perception of actions. Achieving something with the least amount of effort has value to some people. It is a perception that becomes embossed upon the minds of people who are educated in the present age (I don’t agree we are the ‘modern’ age). Another element to achievement that holds great value to some people is repeatability. Doing something once may be incredible and holds its place historically. Performing an act repeatedly provides the opportunity for gain through mass appeal.

Mass appeal and mass markets are the present standard for operations and the structures by which acts are achieved. Employees get compensated to achieve the same tasks on a daily basis. No long term account is held for these acts and they are forgotten as soon as they are performed. The act is the yield and the history of acts fails to provide any present value. We are told not to value the past, not to cherish our acts, and to seek to perform better in the future. We cannot help but do better if the conditions are the same as the past, for we now have the power of knowledge to leverage our present actions against. So clearly, forgetting past acts is a hindrance that leaves us with no lever upon which to improve ourselves and our actions.

Structures that involve defining the realm of our actions and operations are often defined to maximize yield and not secure the past actions. We are forever on the wheel unable to recognize when the past has returned. We have structures that regulate our actions in every form of our public lives. These structures regulate how we move, where we travel, what we eat, what we drink, where we get present information, where our monies are spent, what our homes are like, what our children will know, who we will elect to guide us (don’t laugh or cry too hard at this one), and any other number of actions that we want to do. Some acts we choose to do, and others we act in response to. These are the response mechanisms of the operational systems under which we act. Start your day and ask:

• Am I rested? Why am I choosing not to be?
• What am I eating for breakfast? Is it sufficient and healthy? Why not?
• What shall I wear or adorn myself with today? Is it comfortable and expressive of who I am?
• Is this the path I want to take to my work? Is this the best time to go?
• How do I do my tasks? Is it my choice? Do I know a better way?
• Is this how I choose to be treated and to treat other people? Why do I treat others the way I do?
• Is my work complete for the day and am I satisfied? If not, why not? Is it my own dissatisfaction or somone else’s?
• Is my life outside of work structured for me to act freely? Is my family free to act and operate? Do I bring other non-relevant realms and structures into my home for my family to operate under and did they agree to it?

Structures provide many benefits and convenience. The structures of operational methods and techniques allow for repeatable acts to be achieved in a consistent manner. In fact, this is the whole underlying principle of ‘Science’ and the ‘scientific method’. Structures are also embedded in the things that we refer to as ‘tools’ and ‘toolsets’ in either a physical or electronic form. These efforts are just the codification or dogmatic isolation of a set of beliefs, acts, and materials. The world constructs many tools and methods for achieving repeatability, convenience, and mass appeal. The principles allow institutions to train, educate, and provide experience in a controlled method that can be shared across many platforms and locations around the world. It is the means of industrial revolution. This provides equal opportunity, though not necessarily equal access, to convenient services, equipment and goods.

We presently indoctrinate our children and adults of cultures unfamiliar with our operational structures with the benefits of convenience without explaining the agreement to which they are making. All agreements bare a cost that sometimes is not worth paying. Our costs are paid based upon our past acts and the account upon which we rely. That account is now empty and we cannot afford to pay for the agreement any more. Other people joining the operation structure have no history upon which to leverage their present actions. Their medium of exchange hold little or no value in our realm.

Plainly, the present American market method is an agreement that does not translate across this world. Our structures are based upon an agreement made with our resources, people and history. If the conditions are not the same, and we have learned nothing to leverage our future acts, then the wheel that is our ‘American dream’ will crush and exhaust all those who try to ride its benefits without understanding and baring its costs. We used to value our history, we used to value our families, we used to support our community business and now we just blame them. We forget the acts and just recall the feeling. We have no longer learned to leverage and cherish our actions. Art and creation are just commodities that have left behind their inspiration and historical mark for the convenience and feeling of equality best expressed in a socialist democracy. Operations and structure surely provide a temporary relief from the feeling of fear and insecurity regarding the unknown and choosing to act.

These strategies and methods are not the only way to live. They are not the best way to live and they certainly will no lead us anywhere except to the next rung of the wheel.

Transit Structures - Linking people and transportation

To travel around the world, people use a variety of methods that employ a variety of technologies. We use wheels, combustion, airfoils, magnetic repulsion, bouyancy, and bi-pedal actuation. We sometimes use quadripedal actuation, and it is often in the leisure capacity. No matter how we get around as individuals, we often have to travel in large groups using a common conveyance. Our culture therefore uses an infrastructure of transit systems that are comprised of roads, rails, shipping lanes, flight corridors, interstate highways, canals, waterways, bike paths, horse trails, and walkways. We share these public accessways with neighbors, visitors, and commuters. Reaching our point of destination is usually the most challenging aspect of using these systems. They are vast evolving networks whose capacity varies hourly, daily, and seasonally. The use and capacity is often predefined, and rarely in agreement with the demands. The challenge of any complex network is adaptation.

People and behaviours are very often the most complex design element to any structure. The range of users and their very make up across a variety of design elements make them the biggest square peg for the round hole solution. People use the transportation infrastructure uniquely. Each person sees transportation as a personal experience that must address their specific needs and demands. It must provide personal service, minimize the time commitment and be responsive to the demands of their schedule. Transporation must be reliable, safe, robust, and be capable of addressing the various states of the user when they change their function from individual, shopper, parent, mover, partner, business trraveler, vacationer, athlete, and first time user. Getting people the varied amounts of space, comfort, and reliability is easy when you set the rules under which they must operate. The challenges faced include getting the people from a central hub or station and providing the means for them to access businesses, services, and their homes within a reasonable distance. The solution to this challenge is often addressed with the following:

• Multi-modal transit stations
• Single mode transit stations (bus, taxi, train)
• Rental vehicles (taxis, buses, shuttles, cars)
• Airport trams, lightrail
• Subway, elevated light rail, monorail

The infrastructure that links these elements all together are the roadways and highways that interlace across the entire continent. So the question becomes one relating to the “how” of connecting people to the transportation infrastructure. Is it walking, bicycles, cars, buses, subways, trains, planes, or ships? How do we get people from their homes to their jobs, and the businesses whose services they rely on day to day? Many suggestions are present.

Some suggest providing better public transportation networks comprised of mass transit rail (subway, light rail trains, monorail) systems to cover an entire city complex with a secondary network of buses, taxis, and local conveyances. The question of scale arises. When is this method the best solution? The city population, geographic and geological elements all play a big part of this solution. Others suggest concentrating the populations into city centers where access is available as pedestrians. This limits the amount of transportation required because the needed elements are close in proximity. This method usually brings up questions related to quality of life, health and safety. The counter to this argument is to improve city services and municipal safeguards. Then the question is one of individual action and freedom of movement. Additionally, the concentration of populations has historically contributed to an overwhelmed waste management system and social friction related to geographic status. This arrangement also contributes to a highly volatile property and valuation structures exaggerating economic earnings, inflation, and socio-economic divergence. This solution does not address the question related to the distance that goods must travel to reach the city.

Other arguements are against a phenomenon referred to as ‘sprawl’. This is the expansion of consumer bases far in excess of city and/or county resources. It is seen as a commercial venture that isolates communities and requires that greater costs and efforts be provided to introduce goods and services to the community. This relates to the cost of fuel, the impact of the additional travel and the lack of local production of goods. Residents are further and further removed from the source of their supplies.

A conversion of these structures to accomodate local production, as most production is performed outside of the country with the exception of perishable goods and some durable goods products, would provide a needed reprieve and additional resource. These communities, that are comprised mostly of housing, with a few basic services and conveniences located in the community, are unable to maintain themselves without a constant stream of goods. Trucks, trains, and aircraft bring in all of the goods that the community utilizes. Power, water, waste, and gas are all transported over great distances to fuel and service these communites. The arguement against this arrangement is associated with the added costs and burdens to the central supply stations. They are overwhelmed and must consistently produce equal or greater goods to satisfy the growth and consumption that occurs annually.

So the solution to all of this? I would offer that cities, counties, districts, municipalities, and towns take inventory. I see it this way. We cannot look outside of our community for the things we need to live. If we lack a fundamental capacity, such as water, fuels, or electricity, then an agreement must be made with neighboring communities to supply to them resources which they lack in exchange. It is a symbiotic relationship with a few additions. Initially, cities should help each other build the necessary infrastructure for them to maintain health and planned growth. The city should plan for the means to generate its own resource pool. If electricity is lacking, plan for a solar, wind or geothermal solution. If water is lacking, plan for catchments, reservoirs from reprocessed water sources, including rain, waste water, and runoff. If food is lacking, resource land for sustained farming methods that rotate crops, plots and processing those goods. Support and provide supplemental assistance to home growers, home generators of electricity, and private property water reclaimation efforts. Additionally, it would be a great idea to leverage city management across an entire district of homes rather than centralizing the city services. People should be able to install in their neighborhoods, homes, and communities water reprocessing facilities that use local energy generators and trained labor for managing the resource for maintaining landscape, farming, and secondary water uses. It would also be great for a local neighborhood or HOA to invest in a battery storage system for emergency power requirements and to harvest excess energy generated by individual home systems. Local communication hubs that use encoded direct communication systems similar to fire departments across the country that utilize direct microwave communication networks that support their individual cellular or radio communication infrastructures. Once the basic operational systems are in place, then additional local health resources, fabrication facilities, repair services, educational resources, and other services that are necessary for the maintanence, growth, and replacement of infrastructure can be introduced. Each home and building should be capable of standing alone or working in a symbiotic relationship with its community. It should be capable of giving more than it takes in or at least breaking even when it is attached to the city infrastructure. If you’re off the grid already, then you have faced your demons and done something about it already.

Getting from one place to the other used to be an adventure and not a convenience. Transportation has become such a key element to the success of America up to this point. Providing a public means to convey people from one place to another to provide an equal opportunity for everyone to succeed in their endeavors. There is no gurantee of success, only an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. Bringing people together to do great things and providing them the opportunity to see this great land is the mission of transportation infrastructure. It is time that we valued and re-examined our infrastructure to ensure that we continue to endure, succeed and maintain our historical directive for achievement. We will not perish from this earth if we think about the future we want to live in and act as individuals to improve our selves, community, and relationship with our resource pool. Why are we wasting money, effort, and time relagating our health, safety and welfare to people thousands of miles away seperated from our needs?

Support the heart of complex structures.

At the base of all structure is a fundamental element that keeps the rest functioning. It can be the legs, trunk, stem, molecule arrangement, ground, or chassis. It is this structure that provides a platform for beautiful expressions to spring forth in response to the environment that must be endured. This is the center or heart of structures. It is the means by which structures find their ultimate form.

Form and function have been linked as though they were inseperable. A form can exist in many environments. Functions exists that express themselves across a variety of applications. It is when we try to combine the two for a specific application, like building architecture, that we often ignore the environment that must be adapted to and the function of the building in a greater context. It is not often that building designers are able to have the luxury of designing an entire community or ecosystem. Is this really a sufficient reason not to explore the greater context during our planning and discovery phase?

Buildings, like other structures in this world, exist within a specific environment. We all exist in a gravity field. The sun shines on most of the earth regularly, the winds blow, the snow and rain fall. Ice forms, the ground swells, and seasons change. The ground that all structures perch upon is comprised of differing materials that each respond differently to the pressures placed upon them. Mostly, buildings interact with a rigid platform constructed of concrete, steel, or wood. These are our foundations, pylons, piers, slabs, and pads. We stand on the earth and understand that it is fixed, rigid and immutable (geotechnical engineers will disagree because they know better, and they are right).

Would we be able to achieve the great structures of the world without having mastered this basic element? I don’t believe so. However, we do sometimes forget to carry this concept forward from the ground to the rest of the structure. We fight a bad design with more design, engineering and compromise. In order to achieve complexity and robust ability in our structures, we must study and occasionally mimic nature’s structure. Humanity has developed his own structures and systems independent of nature. These exist mostly in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. They exist independently from outside interference. They are young structures that lack the rigor of time to test their robustness.

Isn’t it interesting that we look to the natural world for our inspiration and then we ignore the lessons we just learned in favor of our synthetic structures. We could not possibly know of all the real world influences that shaped the structures we find present in nature. Do we really take into consideration the following when we design:

• Solar cycles, radiation, daylight cycles, infrared radiation, UV, thermal impacts to the earth surface
• Rotational spin, gravitational variance, air pressure, lunar cycle, seasonal changes, moisture content, soil changes, acidity
• Availability of resources, water quality, waste, occupancy

Yes we do, and more so on a regular basis. Well how about the following:

• Adaptive mechanisms to move the structure to optimize current conditions
• Skin/facade systems that absord and use, rather than deflect and absorb
• Regenerative materials that correct damage and/or wear
• Mechanisms for resource allocation to avoid over-saturation or depletion of local resources
• Symbiotic relationships with structures of differing function and form

These are features that we have yet to mimic and master. Complex structures require the infrastructure and systems that provide them the opportunity to flourish and enrich their ecology. The irony of it all is that the strategies employed are often simple when understood. A basic methology is employed consistently throughout the design. Great design employs continuity, robust features, and adaptive mechanisms to weather the world’s impact. We have termed our understanding of basic methodology ‘science’. We describe its codification as ‘design’, ‘engineering’ and ‘architecture’.

Complex structures only exist when the proper infrastructure and mechanisms are in place. Without the heart of the system, replenishing, nourishing, and healing the systems, you have failure. When design efforts include complex structures, it is important to consider robust fundamental principles and continuity. No matter how high we rise in to the sky, it is the ground that steadies our stance. When we conquer the effects of gravity it will be a whole new game.

What is structure?

Etymology

< French structure < Latin structura (“‘a fitting together, adjustment, building, erection, a building, edifice, structure’”) < struere, pp. structus (“‘pile up, arrange, assemble, build’”).

• a thing constructed; a complex entity constructed of many parts;
• the manner of construction of something and the arrangement of its parts;
• the complex composition of knowledge as elements and their combinations;
• a particular complex anatomical part of a living thing;
• give a structure to;
• social organization: the people in a society considered as a system organized by a characteristic pattern of relationships;

Structure is a fundamental and sometimes intangible notion covering the recognition, observation, nature, and stability of patterns and relationships of entities.

A structure defines what a system is made of. It is a configuration of items. It is a collection of inter-related components or services. The structure may be a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships) or a network featuring many-to-many relationships.

Is our mind a structure used to develop other structures or is it something more than just structure?

Shells and Nature

Shells. Sometimes it’s a game. You are supposed to guess where the pea is hidden after someone moves your options around until they feel you haven’t kept up and then the question comes for you to commit. Is it a trick, a matter of probabilities, or a metaphor for you to pay attention to life’s ever-changing nature? Success is always about paying attention.

Shell structures are found in nature utilizing a variety of forms, materials and strategies. There are the kind that most people are familiar with that are encountered near beaches, old inland seas or gift shops. Then there are the kind that are familiar to architects and engineers. We know these structures as performance systems that give us a variety of benefits that utilize minimal materials and internal structure. Shells are structurally configured using an surface and a thin superstructure. Thin being relative to the span, curvature, and loading. Thin can comprise itself of multiple layers of structure. The behaviour is in the relative thickness. This relative nature lets you decide if you are dealing with a shell or ‘spaceframe’ or truss structure.

Shells have the capacity to take local loading effects and transfer them to the global system without failure. They use deflection, planar force transfer and geometry to accomplish it. Shells often have a rigid perimeter to provide them the necessary stiffness or rigidity to perform as we expect.

Shells in nature use a minimal amount of material to enclose a volume and produce rigid surfaces. The egg is an example of a shell structure. A hermit crab shell uses the shell methodology in conjunction with a curvature stategy to provide a lightweight, strong defense to the inhabitant.

Shells also have a redundant capacity to them. A portion of the shell can be buckled or removed and the remaining shell remains intact. You can drill a hole, crack a portion away, or even damage its perimeter support and the shell still is capable. A global failure of shells is usually a buckling effect. The whole shell reverses curvature past its neutral plane and fails. There are rubber toys that simulate this. You push them inside-out and in a couple seconds they find their original form and ‘pop’ off the table. These are made of rubber. Whereas for most rigid materials, a global buckling means ‘failure’ in the form of a collapse.

Nature’s shells provide architects the ability to use the same strategies to enclose volumes and cover spaces using single-layer structures and a membrane. We have always liked shell structures for their beautiful shapes, engineering strength and their elegant simplicity. Their design and analysis is another issue altogether. The shell may appear simple, but the behaviour and mechanisms that provide it benefits to us are sophisticated and require experienced engineers. Shells are meant to be light rigid structures, and understanding their behaviour and strategies provides the path for getting there effectively. What’s your application?