ON CONTRADICTION and TYPICAL PLAN

Studio has started! The first project is to marry two incompatible plans as an exploration into the spatial relationship between two set points and to design from plans.

One of the readings is Venturi's Complexity Contradiction, which considers a new dimension of "time, space, and architecture"with multiple focus thus multiplicity and flexibility. Here are some notes:

The tradition of "either-or" versus "both-and" architecture;
         The source of the both-and phenomenon is contradiction, its basis is hierarchy, which yields several levels of meanings among elements with varying values.
          => produce ambiguity and tension
          => valid ambiguity promotes useful flexibility

Both-and versus double-functioning
the "both-and" architecture emphasizes double meanings and the relation of the part to the whole, and the "double-functioning" element pertains to the particulars of use and structure.
          =>(parallel to) the "vestigial element" discourage clarity of meaning, it promotes richness of meaning instead
            => (like) the "rhetorical element", is infrequent in recent architecture and mostly ornamental

TYPICAL PLAN by REM
   
The significance of typical plan:

• the end of architectural history: fetishization of the atypical plan
•     typical plan is part of an unacknowledged utopia and the future of architecture, which strip out all the traces of uniqueness and specificity: the plan without qualities yet of primary importance, since on the floor performed all the activities
•  //it never occurred to me how bad I am at reading plans and to spatially visualize the orthographic drawings from the paper. The different sets of rooms and sections tell different stories about a lot about how human would occupy the space and what kinds of interactions would take place. Or even, how we architects can direct people through the spaces

The characteristics of a typical plan

• rectangle: pragmatism
• minimalism for the masses: pure objectivity
• can only be in typical plan, but not sleep, eat and make love.
• deep: beyond the assumption that the contact with the exterior is a necessary condition for human happiness
• a world laundered of ego
• western: the stamp of modernity itself; but failed in Europe
• a place of worship
• relentlessly enabling, ennobling background
• repetition: indeterminacy; undefined
• typical plan * n = a building
• the authors as erasers
• hidden affinities with other arts; the positioning of its cores on the floor has a suprematist tension
• as empty as possible: exclusion, evacuation, non-event
• typical plan makes no choices, and postpones the decision, therefore keeps it open forever
• // design is a process which leads to the reduction of possibility/entropy, in contradiction to other natural processes
• An absence of content in quantities that overwhelm or simply pre-empt intellectual speculation

//I'm not sure that I understand it correctly, but it seems to me that Rem is proposing/unrevealing a typical plan for modern day business that strips all the superfluous addition of architecture that aims at the optimization of work space, which arguably contributes to the modern day white-collar caricature. Through the stacking of the typical plan skyscrapers erect. Within each typical plan, the positioning of the program creates a tension, both on the same level and onto other connective levels.

How would these contributes to my design of marrying two plans?