Bernard Bolter

Throughlines

Rules dropped when material leads

Preconceived compositional rules are abandoned once the actual material — lived experience of a place, or its real geometry and cultural significance — proves a better guide than the rule itself. First seen in the Digital City Series after the Basel piece, when a fixed civic-landmark triad (museum, church, city hall) was dropped for London in favor of what the skateboarded route through the city actually surfaced. Recurs in Megacities' city-selection logic: population, capital status, and cultural weight were all named as criteria, but none applied consistently, and formal constraints (viable seams, workable coastline geometry) overrode conceptual selection as often as they served it.