Properly constructed walls

Properly constructed walls

When one sees a wall one can never tell what's behind the outer layers. The paint and plaster may be immaculate but underneath the bricks can be rotten, thrown together haphazardly or full of holes. Reversely, the paint may be flaking off, the plaster cracking but otherwise the wall can be sound, just in need of some light maintenance. It's often difficult to know.

I guess it all melts down to what one wants to do with the wall. It's condition may be acceptable depending on one's requirements and purposes. A flaking wall indoors makes little sense but in a garden it may be acceptable as a picturesque element, something weathered and full of reminiscences. Even a crumbling wall might do in a garden but one wouldn't have it indoors. It would n't just be unity and dirty, there's little if anything one can do with a crumbling wall: one can't use it to support a floor or a roof, or to separate spaces; it might be useless even for hanging up shelves or pictures.

It's always like that: it's not the wall but what one wants to do with it in the particular location and situation. It might be because we call too many things "a wall". If we used more specific terms, we might be able to express more precisely what we want. It can also be that a wall doesn't have a purposeful existence without a space to bound and support: what we want may be part of the space and it just gets projected on the poor wall.

Walls

Walls 

There are some things that rarely escape the background. Walls fall under this category. They are important only when we build them. Afterwards they become just limits of spaces and surfaces that accommodate decorations and the like. We expect a lot of them, from supporting our own weight when we lean on them to grasping onto screws and nails that lift even more weight. Indoors they determine our horizons; outdoors they shape streets and squares. Still, they are largely treated as immaterial entities; only their surface textures are apparent to us.

One often reads of intelligent objects, e.g. intelligent behaviours of object symbols in digital representations. It's a fascinating subject and I firmly believe that we can do much with such intelligence. The only problem is that I don't see it as applicable to walls, not because walls require no intelligence but because they don't seem like objects to me. Especially when I look at them in floor plans, all I see is a complex, often ad hoc network with fuzzy subdivisions. More than an object it looks to me like an amorphous substance that fills in the gaps, covering and protecting the rest. Such as substance requires a different kind of intelligence to the anthropomorphic one we take for granted.