Writing Words to Feed Birds

I'm from Minnesota, and winter seems like it might happen this year. I guess I was missing it because I'm preparing to reminisce the hell outta this post. About winter. Concerning weather I should be writing elsewise, but I'm a bad person. So this will be but a bullet-point. You fill in the proceedings. (And perhaps I'll hint)...(or did). The pre-proceedings:

I grew up in a log home along a rural portion of the Minnesota river valley. I have memories. I lay them like logs:

Long Lake here, Horseshoe Lake across it like so. The front door is framed out of a ravine: great wedge cut from flesh of The Earth, spreading down and out from a point behind my house. It begins only with sky and grass but quickly becomes dark and submerged under the arching of trees. I imagine there is an ancient obsidian arrowhead sleeping somewhere in dirt of which one lengthwise and breadthwise half is a miniature negative. Its ridges and grooves a perfectly inverted map. I can feel it here between my fingertips.

A map

We would follow this ravine's silent, kind belly down to Long Lake, and emerge.

I'm very young as I remember black holes in the white, isolated image of this frozen lake. Next to the holes and the same color are mounds of speared carp, then reaching as high as my head. Their frivolous killers always absent and mysterious - sheer circumstance their prey and everything physical its offal. It looked as though these were piles of dirt made with a shovel and which with a shovel would unmake the holes. But they could never unmake the holes. A winter scavenger perched atop one pile, gorging; a string of viscera connecting beak with claw, pulled tight and torn. Dirty face-feathers. My slow, shy walk - and always listening to the ice. Eventually, my back to the sadistically-exact middle of the frozen water, big brother and his friend relishing my naive fear (once, a bit south of here, my brother driving our four-wheeler with me on the back along the ice of the Minnesota River itself, scaring me by doing donuts too close to the open moving water; once the tires catching on a frozen peninsula of sand while sliding sideways and so the four-wheeler rolling over and spinning toward the open water with us in orbit like gangling moons; frantic thoughts of Jake, the boy who drowned fifty feet away in second grade; a dreary, dilapidated pine bench at our school, built and inscribed in his memory and eventually, revisited at 21 and melancholy, in lichen. My brother was sorry and we went home and were silent and did not drive on the river again). Back against the ice and its contained darkness, afraid. The deep, guttural sound of cracking, grinding. What strange thing am I in this strange world? Periodic muffled gurglings, like you are lain akimbo with eyes closed across your own upset belly. Am I to the world, or am I merely in it? It seems some great thing, I would like for it to see me.

My brain, in section.

Of its things I love best is when the air is so still that snowflakes fall almost straight, nudged around by only the inertia of individual air molecules themselves which are fixed like pegs into the calm with the snow tumbling down through them like a divine version of games of Plinko seen on lazy summer TV. And if you stay quiet you can hear these collisions, grazings, the collective white noise, like water through a sieve but so much softer. And it is snowing so thickly and the flakes are so big that you can also faintly hear their patter on your eyelashes and shoulders and you can feel an acoustic smothering to the air, like when you were young and would hide under sheets.

Snow is a strange phenomenon as long as you live. It is your finally being granted a pause in the ceaseless turning of the world to be lone, to be a soul in the world, set apart like a jewel. (And I wonder, are cats' whiskers bewildered by a heavy snow? Do they feel the world closing in, invisibly?)

And carving architecture out of the glittering latticework of snowdrifts and my father pushing snow into piles with his old, rusting Ford tractor (my ankle-bone badly burnt across that hot muffler) for us to play in. Learning through experience of spanning, arching, of compressive structures built in gossamer brick. A few heavy collapses and childishly sincere fears of death. Icy rotundas with "skylights" and "shelving" and "beds" and "storage for snowballs" and maybe even multiple rooms for increased resale value. And always destroying them in mercy because they were ours, we were the ones who created them but we must leave. We cannot not stay with you.


UPDATE: No, winter is not going to happen this year.

I Want to be A Stonemason.

Click for slideshow.

It was for work like the last, in particular, that I used to harbor distaste for Gaudí. Since then I've realized how absolutely deliberate, thoughtful, organic, and profoundly beautiful it all is. These buildings are incredible. Why didn't I like them? I guess I just always thought they seemed..."silly". Really, it boiled down to the embarrassing fact that I wouldn't have been caught dead taking a woman back home, for example, to something like that. Which is really because we've learned to evaluate everything as we evaluate products in 30-second televisioned glimpes. Mystery, complexity, challenge, engagement, commitment have all been foregone. There once was a world, but it has been replaced with an artifice. Ehhhh the whiskey doesn't want me to but I shall stop that at that. Back on track: I thought His work seemed "silly", then I gained perspective (a luxury of the -------): if you found any of this in miniature, nestled in sand along the ocean, you'd think what wonderful wisdom is hidden in nature and take it home to treasure.

These are not square, and that was my perspective: square. Why? Conditioning, I suppose. But why do we want squares? Squares are easy. I could make guesses about how they were our way of defying nature, of setting ourselves "apart" - and they might be reasonably accurate. There is also a lot to be said about industrial manufacturing, modular building, and how in certain ways they lend themselves to straight lines. But that's not really important here. What is important: phenomenologically, why should we hang on to the square? 

The square teaches us nothing. It holds no wisdom, no lessons. Squares are merely digestible; it is easy to discern when a square was intended to be achieved and whether it was. We get immediate satisfaction from that, from being able to glean intention and evaluate its specific success. But we do not get lasting satisfaction.  Squares offer no fuel for lengthy contemplation. Gaudí takes time. That is why it is good to live a life within him. And we are round pegs, we do not fit into square holes. Yet we continue to choose to make them so. 

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's easy. 2 - 5 - 1. It's a trick that we all know and that it works for something. But do yourself a favor; respect yourself. Calm the fuck down, think things over, stop making decisions before you understand the choice. And, above all, enjoy complexity, because everything is all you've got.

Mies achieved the square. Kudos. Now what did Gaudí achieve?

All photos taken from antonio gaudí by George R. Collins. 

Grand Central, New Year's Eve, 1969.

I think things need to change if people do not feel comfortable sleeping in public
(voluntarily). I imagine a world of little nooks filled out with dreaming minds.
Half of the strangers you meet to wipe a bit of sleep from their eyes,
wearing a head of tousled hair. People are their prettiest
when they have just woken from a good nap.

And, all the while, "Gymnopédies, 1" gently
dribbling from anonymous cracks. 

Fuck Decorative Mulch 2012

Fortress of solitude. 

What the hell. Why do we do this? Why do we bulwark our homes with moats of mulch?

Historically, planting exotics about one's property was a sign of power and affluence. Of course such exotics were rarely able to survive among locally adapted vegetation, so a tool, mulch, was needed to exclude them from competition. There is no aesthetic charm* there, in that exclusion. It's apparently still practiced for the association with wealth. And, like with so many stupid things, people often do it just because they think they're "supposed to". My dad recently planted a beautiful oak. He proceeded to sequester the trunk with mulch and plastic edging. Tragic. That trunk should make a seat. No one wants to walk barefoot across or sit on (or make love on) mulch. pffft!

Likewise, one should feel welcomed to rest against the side of a building, like the trunk of a tree or a smooth boulder, as if it is set into and a part of the landscape. If you must have your grass, let it grow right up to the building, like this:

Doesn't this feel so much more welcoming?  So much more welcome?

*See Kuntsler's excerpt in previous post "Architecture Without Architects".

Playin' with German banknotes.
Soon enough.

Corners

  

Looking through my old photos, I find the recurring subject of unattainable but alluring scenes-within-scenes. 

  

This is an idea with which I, like us all, have been obsessed: nesting. But it's not enough to call it an idea. It's a sensation. Like I myself am something coiled, furled, layered, furnished and furnishing, filled with discreet but deserving life. Ready to be lain out, to finally breathe. To be picked and pulled apart with gentle fingers, turned over and over, discovered, felt, tasted, by something beyond my comprehension, just as I seek to do to the things which find tack within my unknowably narrow purview. As though the accumulated pith of dreams and experiences (heavy and smooth and softly glowing in lobes and nuggets, like gold bullion and soft) is to be flayed and gently roasted, consumed by some parallel and innocent being.

Of course the beauty of these images is the mystery, the invocation of warmth and safety. A hint of an experience. What is that sunlight doing in that "empty" space? Who is present to give it purpose? To make it real? Is spirit manifested from nothing in that place, to give the light its necessary resolve so that the universe does not fall to bits? (It's almost a feeling of pride, jealousy: "Sunlight, let that room be! For I am not in it.") Michel Tournier - a writer whom I much admire - refers to the beauty of the unraveling of the universe's nesting as "a quarry within a quarry". I believe for any home to foster any full sense of being, being well, of a being-well*, it must maintain this sense of nesting, mystery, which eludes even its owners, builders. This is the only way to make a home feel at home in the world, for this is the nature of the world and all of its mechanisms are driven by questions, or the absence of experience. Not answers, if such a thing even exists.

...

When Uncle Jimbob had to clean the well he would draw out all the water and lower you down into the darkness on a little wooden sling of a seat. You dreamt of it...(for you had been so bred as a well-creature, brother to the bucket, lowered empty and pulled up full and brimming clear to be drunk down by waiting thirst - child of wheel and cistern-child,  with gift of turning)

...                                                                                                                                                     House of Breath by William Goyen

   

So, whaddya say, let's try to cohere all this clutter? Well, architecturally, this becomes a conversation about the corner. On a more primary phenomenological level, the corner is something to be avoided. Generally, then, I will advocate vaulted ceilings and, where possible, rounded walls, because they embrace us, they recognize that we are round creatures. This is the purpose of corner molding. (Certainly for a child to be conceived in a box-shaped womb sounds inhumane.) Corners are innately repellent of our nature: they do not welcome us into their space and, no matter how we might push ourselves into them to rout them - perhaps as a pouting child - they always enclose something beyond reach. Corners are the original fractal; crop but a tighter portion and a corner will always regain itself. And this is why they are actually necessary, in moderation, for any proper home.

Corners are a presence. I love my apartment, but it is too large for just myself. I feel the emptiness of the unoccupied rooms like a threat. Corners are similar, but different in effect by a difference in degree; corners are smaller than us, and so are comforting to have around. Corners are also a concession. They say that I live in a world where I cannot know everything. That I love the mystery and would like for it to have its own place, cohabiting me. Whatever you would like to name this mystery does not matter. God, the higgs boson. Mystery fills out the corners of all life and it always will. Corners are where our dreams find periodic refuge from us. I dream of being smaller, always. I dream of honing myself to explore the smaller and smaller corners of the universe. A fine being can walk through more doors than a giant. And certainly, if God exists, he is found out by the tiniest of things.

More than anyone, children need corners. A good home has hidden corners, corners behind miniature doors. Known, but rarely seen. This not only welcomes their imagination into the world, but it acclimates them to mystery. As a result, they will be comfortable when they cannot know something. They will relish it.

*See Bachelard's The Poetics of Space

Memories Abide

My high school experience was little more than perfunctory. Most of my minimal effort was spent crafting ennui into retrospectively grotesque but effective daydreams. Was I a "fly on the wall"? No, I was a dustmote nestled in the grain of an antique vanity of a quiet villa in Spain. At some point various people concerned with my life gently reminded me that I was expected to attend college, and that I should attend to the thought. And it was an interesting one, vigorous fuel for new daydreams. Mostly I imagined the women I might meet and potentially striking fame through the inherent virtue of my robust and cutting-edge philosophies, sans discipline; very little did I consider any concrete path to academic success. I saw a college advisor and promptly singled out the prettiest of her many brochures. Trinity University was some exotic oasis beckoning me from the strange land of San Antonio. 

Now I think of my time there as a beautiful, vivid dream. Academically I was fruitless but the experience was maybe more constructive and more constitutive of my character than the rest of my history put together. The foundation of my architecture is lain in Trinity-Red Brick. Its windows are fragments of the San Antonio sun, still smoldering away in my head. Its vaults the mottled canopies of live oak, cracked in jagged blue at the peaks, where the trees softly confer.

A live oak, sodium-vapour silhouette. 

Cover your ears, mom: Trinity University was like the summer camp I never had, peppered with but minor scholastic annoyances. My roommate (Preston, impossibly kind) and I made quick harmony and likewise befriended the two odd girls living opposite our sunny room's a-bit-of-wood-veneer-and-nothing-more wall. At some point during this first year we four packed up a little silver Saturn and stumbled down to Padre Island National Seashore. 

North Padre is a string of an island just off the Gulf Coast of Texas and it's laid out neatly in three sections: you have your long, uninterrupted strip of beach; parallel to the water and maybe 50 feet from it the beach abruptly turns a steep, grassy ridge which seems to serve as a buffer between two separate dreams; across the ridge and in the direction of Texas you are given an inexplicable spread of sand dunes. In some ways I'm a bit of a country-bumpkin. I haven't traveled much and I don't know if this particular geography is, well, very particular. But it is wonderful. You drive your car down the beach and you drive until you're alone. The water and wind and birds are noisy and relentless and wonderful and your phone doesn't work and it's just you and your friends and a small world suddenly become huge. And you walk to the top of this ridge which is natural but is so continuous it seems like a man-made dike and suddenly you see this blanket of dunes and nothing else and you immediately try to recall how far you really drove. I felt like we'd slipped through a rift in time at that oh so perfectly proverbial small-town Dairy Queen or we were just so young and happy and beautiful that the universe conferred us immunity for the weekend. Indeed we couldn't help but to ignore the dilapidated warning signs and explore the moonscape.

We slid and stumbled down the opposite side of the ridge, vaguely wary of rattlers, socks filling with sand as the grass fizzles out, and suddenly you can't see the ocean but even more strange is that you can't hear it. You hear nothing except for faintly the sound of the sky rubbing against the Earth and this of course only serves to make the nothingness greater. And you are given opposite versions of the same thing. This is an ocean of water, of life and noise and violence and change, and an ocean of sand, of stillness - all separated by a scraggly berm which acts as some enchanted diaphragm between. I am not being metaphorical, there is no point. This was the world and we saw it and we felt it. (It is there, go to it.) And so we are four silly kids joined by somewhat ridiculous circumstances and all products of a world of so many intricate forces and finding ourselves in this profoundly beautiful, unspeakably isolated dream. You cannot imagine the isolation but you should try, it is important.

And so we explored and eventually went through the beautiful comedies of tent-erecting, rattler-battling, hot-dog-roasting etc. until at some late hour it became dark. And it became so dark. You never see stars like this and there is no horizon and you feel that if you jump with too much force you will tumble out into the heavens and spin away through the galaxies forever. (And you pause to weigh your options.) And you lay on the beach and look at that dusty strip of the Milky Way vaulting overhead and realize that the threshold to the universe is the cold, hard earth at your back.

This whole episode is such a blissful blur for me, my memory is strange. In this darkness, just us four and the world around, I look down the beach to either side and the stars dust the beach with faint light, that pure whiteness of a few photons drifting just so slowly and softly like snow (and you imagine for the beach's sake that itself is really a fair cheek under the soft breath of a napping lover), but it's still so dark and the lines of the ocean and the beach and the sky so insubstantial that it just seems like you're floating in the sounds and smells and feels of everything, subsisted no longer in matter but in some perpetual motion device that is the mind or the spirit or whatever the fuck ever which was set into motion by the intricate and cryptic arrangements of matter that are beautiful and that we love dearly like a father and mother but that we feel truly relieved to be dispossessed of likewise. And I look down the beach to either side and I can't see anything which is to say - being hopelessly optimistic - that it looks like it goes forever and so I start running and I've never run faster than I did then. I ran and could not really know how fast or for how long because everything was so blurred together and soft that there was nothing to reference but the breeze on my face. It felt like flying and I mean that wholly, literally, sillily. It felt like I was flying.

And I go back to the tents and I am emotional and beautiful and in the dark I frantically kiss the first girl I've ever really been with and eventually sleep. And at some point in this dream I wake up and go to the beach to piss and I piss and as my eyes adjust I see something which is making me cry as I retell it. As the waves come toward me sent from somewhere out in the universe, and fetching bits of it, they crash and when they crash they light up. My friends are asleep and I am the only person alive as far as I and God are concerned and I swear to him that these waves light up, faintly at first, and spark like neon as they tumble and break. And I don't understand it but I do not think of it this way and I am not surprised because nothing else could've happened. And I run to the ocean like I am five years old and I kick the water and when I kick the water it is like kicking the embers of a fire and I run to the tents and scream for my friends to wake up. And we are four children held by darkness in some strange place, a part of some strange miracle which we have been slowly primed to understand and accept, running and kicking and slapping the water to send this inexplicable phosphorescence out in to the night, adding stars to the great deep cistern of the sky.

San Antonio sun





*************************************************************

Sam Mockbee and his rural studio. This scene just about makes me pack up and leave.
Check out Citizen Architect.

Something Lost

Chapel 

High Life Textile Factory

Confidence. One is reminded of the, perhaps less impressive but still infamous,
story of Wright's audacious structural demonstration for the authorization
of the Johnson Wax Building's "lily pad" columns.
I fuckin love this picture and wish I were in it.

Los Manantiales restaurant

This is work of Félix Candela, "The Builder", a pioneer of thin-shell** design and made extremely successful by its relative efficiency: thin-shell construction was cheap, sustainable, and quick. The tradition has been lost, for uncertain reasons, though probably through a series of willfully faddish choices. Candela- who refused to call himself an architect- built structures of overall form not amenable to the 20th century's obsessive vision of "progress". Even I find plenty of his work aesthetically ignorable as pure objects, but this is to miss the point; Candela's buildings are not objects, they are spaces to be inhabited. And the quality of his spaces was/is great. Just as importantly, they were feasible. 

During a recent seminar at TheUofM, Juan Ignacio del Cueto posed an interior picture of a Candela work next to one of Mies van der Rohe's and I almost laughed. Of course Mies's forms have always garnered more vogue, as they manifested our collective sense of progress through their orthogonal arrangements of steel and glass, but this literally describes the whole of his design virtue. I'd much rather find myself held by Candela's curves than merely enclosed by Mies's walls.


Check out Eladio Dieste, too. (These dudes had the coolest names.)

Or Maillart:

**For Candela (and Maillart), "thin-shell" construction roughly meant the process of filling out the negative space of the structure with wooden formwork, and covering the surface- always mathematically derived, and often utilizing variations of the hyperbolic paraboloid which, mathematically though not necessarily practically, can be defined using only straight lines/boards- and covering this surface with a thin layer, sometimes as thin as ~2 cm, of cement reinforced by steel wiring. What resulted were structures of almost pure compression. (The steel reinforcement can be substituted with any number of local, renewable materials, many of which have surely yet to be discovered. Also, the necessity of reinforcement is, theoretically, only a response to human error and is not innate to the designs; reinforcement is a safeguard against potential tensile forces.) For Eladio Dieste, "thin-shell" meant substituting reinforced cement with reinforcement materials sandwiched between two layers of very thin brick. This method is arguably more sustainable and socially amicable, due to the nature of brick compared to the nature of concrete. There are many more architects who have endeavored such ideas, both before and after the ones I've mentioned. 

Silent Architecture

Yesterday morning I woke from a wonderful dream. I was running from someone - whom and for what reason I don't know - through a vast and interesting architecture, I think what was supposed to be a University Campus. At one point that I remember particularly vividly, I came to a wide staircase made of travertine with unusually strong purplish and pinkish tones. The staircase was gradual in slope and deeply treaded and when I ran down it I started also spinning, like I was dancing, and I remember the feeling of the hard steps beneath my feet. I remember slipping a bit, the echoing squeak of my soles against the smooth lips followed by their sharp slap against the flat treads, and readjusting as I continued to spin down their extent. Kinetically and kinesthetically it was distinct and realistic. Sensually it was as robust as my experience at this moment.

Beautiful stairs.

That space in my dream, I lived and felt it. That space literally exists in me. Indeed, every moment we experience lays a brick for our own silent architecture. Spaces, good ones, unlock the rooms of this architecture. We make keys to unlock keys. These ethereal castles, stony accoutrements, follow us like seraphim, wings, always attached to us. Bachelard speaks of intimacy. In my words: it is obvious that we build homes to feel at home in the greater world, to create a cosmos which is tailored for us; to feel like the universe was made with us in mind. But I agree with Bachelard that, more fundamentally, the best spaces bring us to silence, intimacy - they make us feel at home in ourselves. These spaces configure themselves with their ghostly teeth, they slide into us and we feel the tumblers of our soul move gratefully and then...click...the door pops open and there you are, presented with yourself. 

Things which take care of me, on an overcast day. Despite the hype, we want to be thought 
of as things ourselves, as to be delimited, so that we may be embraced entirely.

Poetics of Space

And, though its beauty lay in quiescence, it was of course a living thing,

as each well considered cut there was imbued with and thus was the creation of intent; 

every action upon its charitable flesh an expression of what is basic in our souls, 

the human's need to approach silence, the comfort of a womb. 

For this treasure box's duty was the most sacred: 

whatever intricate charms were stored in its depths - and they were great - 

it was the gestation place for our imagination, our waking dreams.

And so the carpentress finally came to the task of the box's cover and felt unkind to leave it flush

with the top, so she set it in a fair bit to conceal its edges, which many would find impractical,
and that felt better. 

But still, having developed a relationship of sympathy with this small, graceful creature 

lain before her maternal hands, she looked at the cover there and remembered being a child, 

trespassing on haunted properties with a curious gang of friends, 

each member continuously and furtively vying for the innermost position of the formation 

(a school of baitfish assailed by phantom yellowfins, 

ebbing continuously into itself - an eerily taciturn ballet between self-preservations),  

and the terrible feeling of any aspect exposed to caprices of the dark, housing what imagined thieves, 

and so she found and attached a nice leather flap to be pulled over the cover, hiding it so that it too might sleep and dream its own dreams.

*********************************************************************************

And, have you heard this trivia?, The Kilogram is locked in a safe somewhere secret and dreamy,

in a secluded french chateau among an airy field of baby's breath and lavender.

Long since dead, behind a rustic door and under the cataract clouds of an old zen warrior,

because it is important that we keep it safe.

And, have you heard this trivia?, they're sad because that beloved old cylinder

"is mysteriously losing weight - if ever so slightly."

And, they say, why must everything change?

why must everything not want to stay the same,

not care to be kept safe?

We are not silly! they scream, to want to be kept safe.

And that block of alloy contentedly withers away,

as does everything -

except space.

*********************************************************************************

A galaxy is but a pocketwatch for a pocketwatch, our Earth pocketed in one as the same, used for the same. These squirrels tussling across the grass, clenched head-to-tail like some furry yin-yang, are but one exquisite gear (made of smaller gears) in what is a finely crafted, intricate machine. And of course it is completely solid, fitted together tightly and yet constantly churning within and about itself; space and light, those evanescent things, its most substantial components. Not filled with but built of space. Space within space upon space, but none of it free. There is not room for one more grain of sand in the universe. That is how precisely we, space, were made. Space cannot go unused. And these warm blooded gadgetries which I watch apart of me, set there out in "space" apparently oblivious to me, still reaching into me through what spectral levers and sheaves, with what delicate fingers, and making my heart go click...click...click.

And some might say "but new grains of sand are created every second, by the will of winds and waters," and I say that they have always been there and are merely carved away, re-placed, tabulating the passing of moments. For moments themselves are carved out of space but we also need things to unlock the silent architecture of our memories and toward this end have been given the deserts as reliquaries.

Architecture Without Architects

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: 

http://www.archive.org/details/ChristopherAlexanderAtcLecture, or his A Pattern Language) 

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."

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.

addendum

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.

The Tall Office Building, Reconsidered

(C) 2011

Cleaning out my trunk this afternoon, I found a conceptual drawing for a tall office building. I'll post up an explanation and justification soon.

Alps

Books? Ideas? Pffft, Just More Stuff.

I've noticed a trend to stack one's books vertically. It seems like the ultimate exemplification of the objectification of literature. I see pictures of hallways lined with precarious towers, from the floor to eye-level, of the standardized fare and, even worse, proper bookshelves on which reading materials have been meticulously arranged in vertical pods. Here's one of Ralph Lauren's homes:

C'mon Ralph, we know you're not reading that junk. You don't have to make it more obvious by organizing them so awkwardly. What if I want a book second-up-from-the-bottom?

It's just silly. Arrange your books in the, long-since-known-to-be-certain, most practical way. 

Trinity College Library

Speaking of book storage: enlivening hallways by turning them into a library is a good way to reclaim space. Corridors which are nothing but places to walk through as quickly as possible are bad, bad, bad. Avoid them at all costs. Read A Pattern Language for more thoughts on the matter.

A Pattern Language

"The Handshake, The Smile"

The entry on the left looks quite nice, but probably isn't practical. It lacks any place to sit and remove one's shoes, right inside the door; any place to set a briefcase, grocery bag, or a purse right within reach. Perhaps stitching on something like you see on the right would solve the issue. I wonder about the idea, though, of a staired entry. The second floor of a home is typically the more private domain of a family and so stairs seem like a stifling adjunct to what is generally the most public space. I've found this to render a lot of entries with a vague sense of unease, for those upstairs as well as those in the entry, and they are thus marginalized -- part of why we normally enter through a side/garage door, into the kitchen. The problem with this, though, is that these entries aren't made up to be entries. They're drab, ugly, utility corridors.

Wouldn't entering through a proper entry, leading directly into a sunny kitchen/living area give one the most proper sense of welcome? "Here, you are welcome to our family as a social entity, come and go as you please, in and out of the activities which comfortably bring us together."

somewhere in minneapolis

funny/strange. musta been a bad neighborhood.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux -- Something Lost

l'Étoile

In my last architectural history class, concerned with the period 1750-present, I remember being most taken by our studies of Ledoux. My back straightened as my professor clicked through the first slides of this man's works. My sympathy for that state has somewhat diminished, but it's probably because I lack the contextual understanding. Still, he's fascinating. Pictured is his Barriere l'Étoile, one project among a series of toll-houses erected along the border of Paris. They were tasked with representing The Monarchy architecturally and there was probably no person more equipped to succeed than Ledoux, originator of architecture parlant, or "speaking architecture". (This is all just before the French Revolution and Ledoux was dubbed a "revolutionary" architect.)  Ledoux's idea was that a building should communicate its purpose to everyone who was destined to interact with it, not simply those select graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts. Not such a disagreeable idea, I think.

I wanted to share this particular work as one of his most fascinating and most obscure. The powerful, oppressive columnar patterning can also be found in the portico of the master's house of his more famous "Saltworks". Approximately half of his work remains in existence, including a few toll-houses, each of which is highly experimental and divergent from the last.

That Thatch

This piece employed a time-tested material, decidedly unmodern, in an interesting fashion. Thatch outperforms most all of our contemporary cladding material in terms of durability, renewability, energy efficiency, and overall cost effectiveness. Regardless, this Dutch house is simply gorgeous. Its fine surface is a good example of evocative texturing, or irreducible complexity. Check it out here.

O House

While I don't think Hideyuki Nakayama's "O House" is an example of good residential architecture, it is an example of architectural art. Beautiful architectural art. Find it here.

On Order, Inscrutability, and the In-Between

Recently, flipping through a design magazine, I was stricken by an advertisement for sun shades:

The pictured element does not look "right". In fact it looks bad. The problem with these shades is that they find themselves at an undesirable mid-point between two desirable modes of patterning. (Now these particular sun shades are not themselves important. They merely serve as an example and, potentially, not a very good one.) The two aforementioned desirable modes of patterning are:

1. Rational order

and

2. Irreducible complexity/textural evocativeness 

These sun shades are somewhere in-between. They appear to misbehave (and probably are, to the designer's credit), defying an intended order, yet not with enough complexity to defy comprehension, à la the pleasant irreducibility of nature. Their haphazard behavior would be excusable if, perhaps, they were rendered instead as a great number of thin strips, a more convoluted arrangement appearing as texture rather than object, effecting pure visual interest, an evocation of sensual-memory. If this is not to be achieved, then the shades should be reigned in and brought to behave. Ordered, controlled, deliberate, designed.

Again, this is only to serve as an example in making a point. The guidelines I've presented are obviously not to be "proven"; their validity is no more than a matter of intuition. I can hope only to make them clear and explicit so that others, already in subconscious agreement, may be served by bringing the preference to consciousness. 

Nevertheless, I assume that I am appealing to self-evident psychological constructs: If not order, then beautiful and true incomprehensibility. 

Once and for all, how to center your blogger posts:

Click to enlarge.

The world wide web had no answers for me. So I found my own and am instead offering them to the world wide web. I feel like gloating; I couldn't tell you the first thing about html 10 minutes ago and yet here we are, viewing a beautifully centered and cleaned-up layout. To access the pictured screen go to Design (in your navbar) --> Edit HTML, and scroll down until you spot this section. You can tinker with the various numbers to fit your preferences, but these are what worked to get my posts centered.

Take THAT, blogspot.

ADDENDUM:  As you see my webpage now, the outer-wrapper "padding" = 30px. Changing this value to 30px moved everything 30 pixels to the right and down 30 pixels from the bottom of the navbar. It did not change how the different sections relate to one another.

How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.

Louis Kahn

Truly, a work of art is one that tells us that nature cannot make what man can make.

Louis Kahn


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Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.


Aristotle