Central Heating and Cloud Computing

Where is "hearth"?

Kenneth Frampton. The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition. (1979)

Furthermore, the word "edifice" relates directly to the verb "to edify," which not only carries within itself the meaning "to build" but also "to educate," "to strengthen," and "to instruct" — connotations that allude directly to the poetical restraint of the public realm. Again the Latin root of this verb — aedificare, from aedes, a "building," or, even more originally, a "hearth," and ficare, "to make," has latent within it the public connotation of the hearth as the aboriginal "public" space of appearance. This aspect persists even today in the domestic realm, where surely no place is more of a forum in the contemporary home than the hearth or its surrogate, the television set, which as an illusory public substitute tends to inhibit or usurp spontaneous emergence of "public" discourse within the private domain.

Cecelia Tichi. Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture. (1991)

For the decentralized TV environment, promulgating dispersal, always risks betraying the hearth by exposing tensions and divisions between generations and between sexes. [...] One cartoon of 1956 suggests this very tension by spoofing its resolution. The cartoon shows a family of three gathered before three lined-up televisions, mother, father, and son happily watching different programs while the audio comes through headphone sets that each wears. Gathered together as a nuclear family, each member inhabits a separate on-screen world. [...] The family's contentment comes from not having to gather to watch the same thing. Technology lets them escape the tyranny of the hearth.

Frampton highlights (as manipulative and apolitical)

Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, wherein the author asserts that the Americans don't need piazzas, since they should be at home watching television.

Mobility may restore to urban populations power. Energy storage & transportation take the "hearth" for a walk... A return to nomadic tents? As Frampton quotes Arendt: "Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." One more word: pitched. Channel surfing.

And so for day 1374
17.09.2010