I'm reading The Poetics of Space and it's wonderful - but that's a ramble for another day. For today, one of the many beautiful passages to be found within:
Nids blancs vos oiseaux vont fleurir
............................................................
Vous volerez, sentiers de plume.
ROBERT GANZO, L'oeuvre poétique
Ed. Grasset, p.63.
(White nests your birds will flower
............................................................
You will fly, feather paths.)
 |
| As a flower, all life will unfold itself to receive care. |
Undoubtedly, the analogy between the creation of a human and a gardener's care for her flowers has been drawn: A human, as a rose, needs to be nourished with all the essential nutrients, to be tended with love and care, in order to blossom beautifully, or the like. And certainly the distinction between a plant's exclusively physical needs and a person's psycho-emotional needs has been well exhausted. But I think there's something to still be made clear about how we can apply these ideas to architecture.
White homes your children will flower, is, to me, a perfect adaptation for this discussion. I have always thought that the purpose of a well-built habitat is nothing more than to nourish its inhabitants so that they may properly "blossom". Of course this is, matching the nature of ourselves, a complex undertaking. A complexity that has been largely lost with modern/contemporary architecture. (See:
To quickly retract: beyond the simple fact of our psychological aspects we differ from flowers in a basic way. While rose plants may diverge from one another in trivial matters, and some rose bushes are certainly malnourished as to not achieve their potential beauty, the limits (even if vague) of a rose bush's blossoms have been discovered and reproduced for centuries. Further, these complex but minute differences produced between rose bushes, while a quintessence of their aesthetic intrigue, render no intellectual intrigue. Humans, even of the same bush, vary so completely that we may be comfortable calling them different kinds of flower. More interesting is the idea, certainly true, that we have yet to realize our potential; satisfying all of our capacities for nourishment as well realizing any form of psychological saturation seems improbable, if not impossible. Indeed, it is probably true that the petals of our soul are borne out of dissatisfaction.
While modern architecture may have unfurled certain mutant "blossoms" which were interesting in their novelty, the connotations of mutant here ring true in that these were rarely fully or practically developed, and thus were almost exclusively doomed to fail. This stems from modern architecture's tendency to defy our primitive roots, an unwillingness to recognize the emotional aspects inextricably constitutive of our nature, and thus a failure of basic nourishment. Any disagreement on this point I assume to be intellectual divergence from one's nature - no rare occurrence.
*As I got to this point in my writing, I receive an email from a good and always enlightening friend (the past two days have been beautifully serendipitous!).* At one point, he offers this:
Home From Nowhere, J.H Kunstler, page 82:
"Nature appears to consist of things, of stuff we call matter, but more correctly may be said to consist of patterns of energy. The patterns are bound atomically by charm and animated by gravity, which is charm at a higher order of magnitude. At the quantum level nature miraculously springs to being as set of mere probabilities, and upward from there elaborates itself into ever more complex intersections, or relationships of relationships. It is in the nature of nature to be charming and therefore beautiful. The many patterns of nature at all their intersections are charming and therefore beautiful. The many patterns of nature are charming at all their levels of intersection. Where patterns live--and here on Earth is so far the only known dwelling place of living patterns, which we call biological organisms--they reach out tropistically, ever-evolving, to become something else, arguably something higher and better.
In terms of human behavior and self consciousness, charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretense. When we say that a person is charming, we mean that he makes himself permeable, and, in so doing, invites you to do likewise, so that the two patterns of your personalities may intersect for a while. I think the same principle is true for the things around us. As Christopher Alexander has ably pointed out, what we perceive to be things in our everyday surroundings--buildings, walls, streets, fences--are more properly understood as patterns intersecting with patterns, relationships between other relationships. It is when they cease to be relationships and become mere things that patterns lose the quality Alexander calls "aliveness." A window in a house is a relationship between the inside of the house and outside world. It transmits light and air, and it affords glimpses between the private and public realms. When it fails to operate in these ways, it becomes a mere hole in a wall. From this point of view, it is easy to understand how various relationships and patterns in our everyday world either possess the qualities of 'aliveness' or 'deadness.' It is this quality of aliveness that I propose to call charm for the purpose of this discussion. Charm promotes the intersection of relationships and invites one set of patterns to interact with other patterns, including the complex patterns of individual minds."
"Nature appears to consist of things, of stuff we call matter, but more correctly may be said to consist of patterns of energy. The patterns are bound atomically by charm and animated by gravity, which is charm at a higher order of magnitude. At the quantum level nature miraculously springs to being as set of mere probabilities, and upward from there elaborates itself into ever more complex intersections, or relationships of relationships. It is in the nature of nature to be charming and therefore beautiful. The many patterns of nature at all their intersections are charming and therefore beautiful. The many patterns of nature are charming at all their levels of intersection. Where patterns live--and here on Earth is so far the only known dwelling place of living patterns, which we call biological organisms--they reach out tropistically, ever-evolving, to become something else, arguably something higher and better.
In terms of human behavior and self consciousness, charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretense. When we say that a person is charming, we mean that he makes himself permeable, and, in so doing, invites you to do likewise, so that the two patterns of your personalities may intersect for a while. I think the same principle is true for the things around us. As Christopher Alexander has ably pointed out, what we perceive to be things in our everyday surroundings--buildings, walls, streets, fences--are more properly understood as patterns intersecting with patterns, relationships between other relationships. It is when they cease to be relationships and become mere things that patterns lose the quality Alexander calls "aliveness." A window in a house is a relationship between the inside of the house and outside world. It transmits light and air, and it affords glimpses between the private and public realms. When it fails to operate in these ways, it becomes a mere hole in a wall. From this point of view, it is easy to understand how various relationships and patterns in our everyday world either possess the qualities of 'aliveness' or 'deadness.' It is this quality of aliveness that I propose to call charm for the purpose of this discussion. Charm promotes the intersection of relationships and invites one set of patterns to interact with other patterns, including the complex patterns of individual minds."
It follows, then, that the willfully abstruse architecture of the modern movement is devoid of charm. Are repulsion (not-charm) and goodness mutually exclusive here? Probably not. Though I would guess that repulsion is never an optimal condition for goodness, and certainly it is never a necessary one.
Anyhow, I've forgotten if I was meaning to come to a specific point so here's to hoping that you might do it on your own. Maybe, at least, I've maintained a bit of charm.
This morning I'm thinking about the nature of motherhood and how we can relate it to architecture. The obvious thing to be said is that if a mother is required to match (actually exceed) you in complexity in order to raise (nourish) you on her own (one is never able to nourish a child "on their own"), why should we expect anything else from our homes?
I was thinking back to a college psych class and remembered an interesting study regarding the emotional formation of apes. It was shown unequivocally that apes who are raised in a bare cage, without any ape-to-ape contact, remain distrusting and mortally dysfunctional for life. More interesting is that apes which were raised in a cage with an inanimate yet furry object were practically as functional as apes raised with their mother. Such an effect from a simple environmental addition!
"The impulse to seek something soft is an innate rather than learned characteristic of mammals."
Make soft architecture.
No comments:
Post a Comment