17


Numerical answers often suffice for ponderings like 'why?' or 'why not?' as if life were a mathematical equation. Nutritional facts, schedules, percentages, and sale prices being examples of such stack-based culprits. Likewise, in addition to the rights and wrongs of law, and the growths and declines of economies, academia itself maintains enough authority in the shaping of

motives and constriction of actions to deserve some questioning itself. For what purposes do we seek scientific truth; knowledge or quantification? Must knowledge involve quantification? Is there any pursuit more offensive than the quantifying and statistical-analysis of human behavior produced by social sciences?

  On the other hand, a pile revolving society might be void of such quantifying thought patterns and definable themes. Of course, it might be difficult to envision the plausibility and infrastructure of such settings given the restrictive stack-based ideologies we are used to. Stacks are all-or-nothing guidelines; they blur in-between realities. Thus one need not conceive of a world totally devoid of numbers to portray a non-stack-based culture. Numbers are universal. Piles acknowledge numbers, but unlike stacks (and capitalistic societies) refrain from becoming victims of numerical authority.

  The pile and stack comparison revolves around form, not content. Like with numbers, it is the approach to objects and behaviors that matters most. For instance, the idea of money. Pile migration is not an attempt to rid the world of money (although we applaud the ridiculousness of such utopian thoughts), but rather an attempt to conceptualize money differently. As with nearly any object, one can have a stack of money, and one can have a pile of money. What distinctions of form can be made between the two? Why do we argue piles to be preferable environmental architecture to stacks?

previous page home     next page