I still remember learning about axioms in geometry class when I was a freshman in high school. Axioms are things that are so obviously true that they don’t require proof. I’m sure they are useful to mathematicians everywhere, but I don’t really like the idea of taking things for granted. It seems like a cop out. I think there are some architects at El Dorado, Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri that would agree with me. Generally, we accept as axiomatic that things that are as different as an apple and an orange (which are really not that different at all) are incomparable. We even have an English idiom based on the idea. The good people at El Dorado, Inc. think that you can compare not only apples and oranges, but really any two things that your mind has the capacity to consider.

They put together this humorous video called “The Big Chart.” The Big Chart is a organizational device that the Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (C.I.C.I.N.A.) uses to compare things. Which is better: apples or oranges? seahorses or English people? C.I.C.I.N.A. and the Big Chart have the answer. The video is an elaborate and hilarious joke, but they take their counter-intuitive comparison seriously at El Dorado, Inc.

They like to compare their projects, mostly buildings, with things that seem to have little in common with buildings, like comparing a barn to a camel, or a parking structure to a Def Leppard album. In another video on the El Dorado, Inc. website, the architects discuss their methods of counter-intuitive comparison that they seem to consider a serious (if slightly silly) part of their work. The outcome is not important (usually their projects lose). What is important is the process of deliberation. By comparing a barn and a camel, one determines criteria for comparison, and in doing so, is forced to think about the barn and the camel differently. They both store things. the barn can store more, but the camel’s storage is mobile and can be converted into energy. With the help of another camel, the camel can reproduce and make more camels; the barn cannot make more barns. By thinking about barns and other buildings in new ways, the architects and designers at El Dorado, Inc. expand their creative vocabulary.

The Big Chart is here.

The other (long) video about using the counter-intuitive comparison process on El Dorado’s projects is here.