The Paradoxical Reality - Klein Bottle House

"A paradox is not a conflict within reality. It is a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality should be like.'' -- Richard Feynman

The Paradoxical Culture - The Danish Pavilion 2010 EXPO

"For a nation, survival depends on the capacity to adapt and to develop new institutions and new personality types to deal with changing times...The same is true for culture. Culture is man's major adaptive mechanism. But, culture is also the major environment in which man develops and with which he must contend. That is, man must adapt to himeslf, both as a member and product of his own culture and in a world of other cultures."
- Eward T. Hall

The paradox in the Vitrahaus design process

Paradoxical design process for Vitrahaus

The first step - Abstraction

The types of spaces of forms are abstracted from existing houses

The second step - shaping

the father combination of the forms by stacking concept

Does paradoxical pocess result in an architecture paradoxical?

"The qualities of paradoxes which are proving to be of considerable value to design are amiguity and complexity."
- "The importance of paradox to the design process", Thomas Joseph Becher

The paradox of form giving...
Human communication is a two step process
abstraction - allow meaning to be presented, recalled and manipulated, it requires that some structureor pattern be taken from an original context
(meaning is the result of consensus within the relevent community using the pattern system)
shaping - union the abstraction with a medium, in the social environment, the "combine"of an abstracted structure with a medium is to create an institution.
Abstraction is a tool for focusing meaning, shaping is a tool for express it.

"...the object is to be undertood as a concrete persistent thing only after it has been possible to develop a conception of it, that is, paradoxically, that its concreteness depends upon the development of abstraction."
- "Semiotic Approaches to Psychiatry", Harley Shands

Is this paradoxical architecture ?

" a paradox can be defined as an apparent contradiction. It is to be valued for its ability to introduce indeterminate thinking to the design process."
-- Thomas Joseph Becher

The Paradox in Process - Vitrahaus

" a paradox can be defined as an apparent contradiction. It is to be valued for its ability to introduce indeterminate thinking to the design process."
-- Thomas Joseph Becher

architects & architecture

Herzog & de Meuron

Craig Dykers

Zaha Hadid

Claude Parent

Enric Miralles

Bernard Tschumi