Sunday, 16 November 2025

LUPA LONGING - ARTFUL KNOWING

What should one know about an object before one can enjoy it, let alone understand it? Is art a private, intellectual game that requires learning, or does it delve deeper into the haptic emotional world? Can one merely feel art or does one need knowledge of the artist and the intent of the concept before one can participate in and enjoy the piece; ‘appreciate it’? Is one wrong to be confused, unimpressed with what can be seen to be an abstruse, obscure, perplexing exercise?

Master weaver Saffron Gordon at work on Longing (Camilla).

The winner of the design prize that ‘reimagined’ Robin Boyd’s house in tapestry has been announced: see – https://architectureau.com/articles/2025-winner-of-tapestry-design-prize-announced/. Troy Emery with Cox Architecture won with a piece woven by Saffron Gordon, named enigmatically Longing (Camilla). The jury justified its choice with the usual fanfare: The work reimagines the potential of tapestry as an art form: its materiality, tactility and artistic nature. The result is a piece that could only exist as tapestry, not painting or print. Interestingly, the jury did not mention that the work could not exist as a sculpture. Why? Maybe it is, in low relief?

Short version?

The work was a puzzle. What was one looking at? The jurors' blurb was not useful, reading as something like hyped, artistic puffery: Thoughtfully positioned within Walsh Street’s living room, its location, scale and textures harmonise with its architectural context, engaging with the materials and tones of Boyd’s design. Yet strangely, one was eventually able to make some sense of the piece, but only once the work had been explained and the house had been seen seen. Here, in Boyd’s residence, one was confronted with cables, experiment, boldness, and clever invention, the very same things the woven work espoused in threads.

Initially one saw a pile of threads massed as a bundle woven into a black background, and made no sense of the presentation other than as a ‘modern’ weaving. One has come to expect anything in art these days. The quantity of dangling filaments was exuberant, impossibly overdone, oozing out to an array of clipped lengths lapped as fringes in varying shades of pink, with an underlying skirt of threads. The majority of the fibres were long, oversized, reaching the floor and resting on it as overlying tresses. The darkest hues seemed to terminate in a globular mass, the only somewhat defined piece of the mess - (remember the idea in Catch 22 of being able to make sense of a mess) - being more identifiable as something than the remainder of the hanging filaments that appeared as a flowing muddle, an ill-defined and amorphous shambles that seemed to have been combed to tidy things up a little for presentation, like unruly hair. One was left puzzled, wondering what to do with this voluminous mass of hanging coloured trailings that were strangely presented as a weaving, a tapestry, when they looked like anything but being so organised and arranged into the cohesion of an intertwining. This was the work of a sculptor and a firm of architects, woven by a master weaver, and had just been given the top award by a jury that one assumed had been selected for its experience. The work must have something about that was worthy of recognition. What was one missing? It is a familiar question these days when viewing art.

Longing (Camilla), Tapestry, 2025, Designed by Troy Emery + COX Architecture,

Woven by Saffron Gordon.

The artwork/tapestry/sculpture/invention appeared as a vague jumble of differently hued fibres of varying lengths, awkwardly amassed as a bulky draping from a woven black carpet/wall hanging, all nicely fringed with its exposed warp holding the black weft surrounds. One could make sense of this conventional structural rigour, but the mayhem of the hanging threads left one wondering what the bundling of tassels was all about. The work held something of the image and visual energy of the Niagara falls in a way that confused, making no sense of the acclaimed wonder called Longing. Even this strange naming of the tapestry was not useful as a guide: Longing (Camilla). How? Why? The only Camilla who was known had a history of awkward royal references that seemed askew and irrelevant in this context. Surely the work was not pretentious enough to be dedicated to the queen?

Niagara Falls.

One started to read to learn more. The jury blurb seemed to read as a lot of over the top, indulgent, arty bull - using H.W. Flower’s Modern English Usage as a guide for the word for nonsensical, exaggerated statements rather than the cruder bullshit that the word seems to have developed into: see - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit. The explanatory words only added to the frustrated confusion. Knowing that the Troy Emery and Cox Architecture’s tapestry ‘Longing (Camilla)’ is a two-dimensional interpretation of Emery’s 2024 sculpture ‘Lupa,’ an amorphous animal-like companion; which, In the domestic site of Walsh Street, Camilla echoes Boyd’s family life with their pet cat of the same name with The excess tendrils of yarn drip(ping) down out of the plane of the woven surface towards the floor, stretching the silhouette of the animal figure and evoking emotion and memory, was helpful in one way, but it all seemed to be pompous, elitist nonsense, drivel drawn from the private preferences of the artists’ explained way of seeing; the preferred interpretation applied to a pile of threads.

The work was supposed to relate to Robyn Boyd's, (not Boid – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2018/08/robyn-boid-egg-cellence-in-mind-growing.html), Walsh Street house, so this project was looked up. One recalled it as the cable house, Boyd's own home now standing as a museum maintained by the Robin Boyd Foundation - $25 - $45 per person for a guided tour/event. One perused the place: classic 1950s, with Mies’s sparse array of self-consciously placed furnishings of the period, with large volumes stepping across the site under a roof slung above, supported on steel cables that one usually associated with being a part of a suspension bridge.

Lupa.

Dougal.

The discovery that this representation of Lupa, ‘bracketed Camilla,’ referenced Boyd's cat of the same ‘bracketed’ name - not Lupa but Camilla - with Lupa being a previous sculpture 3D by the artist Troy Emery, allowed one to understand something of this work. The Longing, Lupa, (Camilla) weaving was said to be a ‘2D’ variation of this earlier Emery sculptural work. This was looked up: see – https://share.google/images/hrziVRc0IVJbjtOmn.

One wondered what the architects on the team had to do with this odd concept that seemed to be all about a recreation in 2D version - really? - of a previous Troy Emery concept for an animal form looking like the lovable Magic Roundabout dog, Dougal; a dog/cat-animal-like form expressed in an earlier work as a mass of yellow ochre hanging threads. This work brought to mind the odd blue sculpture of another strange animalistic sculpture that had been in the news recently, with problem eyes and fragile paint: see - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW1R8WUgazs.

Cast in Blue - 'the blue blob' - Mt. Gambier.

Matching black.

Left to right: Saffron Gordon, Marc Raszewski (Cox Architecture), Troy Emery and Rachael Halstead (Cox Architecture).

Did the architects, the two photographed as the Cox team along with the sculptor and the weaver - Left to right: Saffron Gordon, Marc Raszewski (Cox Architecture), Troy Emery and Rachael Halstead (Cox Architecture) - decide on the cat reference story to help give some relevance to the artist’s self-referential idea that seemed to have no relationship to Boyd or his house? What was the shared effort here? Did the rules demand that an architect be involved? What did the architects do? What did the master weaver think of the piece - the long or the short version?

Long version?

Apparently the jury said that the work looked splendid on the wall of a room of the house - which one? - and that it expressed the qualities of the place; re-interpreted or ‘reimagined’ them. Mmmm.

Robin Boyd's Walsh Street house.

One tried to transpose the piece to this phantom context and slowly a feeling for place and work converged. One could see that Boyd’s place was dominated by the ‘hanging threads’ of the cabled roof, a draped hammock of a surface slung above an artfully arranged set of furnished levels that must have been avant-garde for its time as an exhibit, a theatre for living that remains an architectural exhibit today, a museum; an example of how an architect 'lived' - or does one say performed? How does one envisage everyday life in this place? Where is the messy ad hoc piecing together of pieces of habitation that come with its array of ordinary mixed emotions and issues as detritus and clutter? We can admire the place as a pretence, a vision of a possible, ‘maybe’ visionary life and living, a whimsical dream, but is this like watching a play, a stage set? Is it merely an artful self-conscious assemblage for appraisal and acclaim, to be admired for its courage and bespoke invention that can be praised in a slew of pompous words? Is this the connection to the tapestry?

A Victorian lady in distress?

Finally, eventually, one could see how the mysterious Longing/Lupa/Camilla related to this place. The work held an intrigue in the self-conscious referencing of not only the assertive boldness of the house’s gesture, but also touching on that the much-loved house cat, dragging sentiment into longing. What more could one want? One could finally appreciate why the jury chose the work – everyone loves family cats in some way; but one is left puzzled: does an artwork need a lengthy analysis in order to be 'seen;’ understood; appreciated? Why did it take such an effort to get to this position from the viewing of the initial ‘mess’ of dangling, Dougal threads?

One recalls traditional art which was symbolic, rooted in references that stood as an essential base for beauty. Any deviation from these notions could not be beautiful; copying was better than personal invention. One did not have to know these complete details in order to perceive the wonder and sense the relevance. With Lupa 2D (low relief?) – well, Longing (Camilla) - there was a coherent story/referencing that knitted, wove the work and the place together - (pun intended); but there was no ad hoc wonder to be comprehended, only the lingering wondering, puzzling, asking the question as to why such a quantity of thread was self-consciously bundled together to make this cotton ooze, a so-called 2D form that obviously was 3D, into a flood of expectorant-type tresses, or tendrils, stretching all concepts of weaving in the same way that Boyd stretched the concept of structure beyond the perceptions and necessities of the everyday to create an amazement, a bespoke exhibit worthy of an award. Walsh Street was the winning nomination for the RAIA (Victoria) 25 year Award in July 2006, and also the winner of the National 25 year Award, announced in October 2006. One can appreciate how, unlike Seidler’s mother’s house, this Boyd house is a part of suburbia, but it conceals itself cleverly, adopting the true intentions for isolation and originality embedded in Modernism, with its ambitions for singularity: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-rose-seidler-house-private-visions.html.

We really should not have to labour so much in order to see a work of art. Tradition identified both esoteric and exoteric qualities in a work: those internal and the external qualities held integrally in one work symbolically, with one aspect being private, the other public. Our indigenous art has the same quality: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/06/country-outside-inside-place.html. Art today seems to have become merely clever personal whims embodied in a mystery nothingness that has to be decoded before one can 'see'. Wittgenstein called it 'seeing as' and used the 'duck-rabbit' as the example for 'ways of seeing' as John Berger called it. The viewer is left to somehow interpret the work, with its intent becoming obvious only once one learns the facts: who, what, and why, and accepting these as a guide to perception and understanding to locate the desired interpretation. There is no rich immediacy that lingers as a part of the whole that is just a personal preference to be comprehended in the seeing of things MY way, be this be the vision of the artist, the jury, or the nonchalant viewer who is mocked as ignorant if any negative or disparaging comment is made about how the piece is seen, perhaps suggesting that:

"It looks like waste being dumped;" or, of the house, "like a living space under a bridge" - and one thinks of fly tipping and homelessness.

“Crude, foolish, uninformed idiot!”

“Maybe a woven pink poles?"

"Uh?"

"A Victorian lady in distress?"

“Oh! No! Cretin! This is ART! A two-dimensional interpretation of Lupa; art inspired by art reimagining the potential of tapestry as an art form: its materiality, tactility and artistic nature.”

“Did you say ‘loopy’?”

""It's a cat."

"Ya kidding?"

"Boyd's kitten."

The grim reaper?

THE ARTICLE

Winner of 2025 Tapestry Design Prize announced

The 2025 winner of the Tapestry Design Prize has been revealed, transforming Robin Boyd’s iconic Walsh Street house into a canvas for contemporary textile art and reimagining architecture through texture, colour and the craft of weaving.

by InteriorsAU Editorial

Artist Troy Emery and Cox Architecture have been awarded first prize in the Tapestry Design Prize (TDP), presented by the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW).

This year’s prize focuses on one of Australia’s most significant modern homes – Boyd House II / Walsh Street designed by Robin Boyd. Since its inception in 2015, the TDP has been a celebration of the meeting point between architecture, design and contemporary textile art – a space where creative disciplines entwine and reimagine how tapestry can transform built environments.

This year’s iteration invited designers and architects to respond to the intimate domestic spaces of Boyd’s Walsh Street residence. From over 150 applications, five finalists were selected, each interpreting a different room within the house. Their proposals were handwoven by ATW’s master weavers, translating digital sketches and architectural concepts into rich, tactile surfaces of wool and cotton.

The resulting works — five distinct tapestries, totalling 1,487 hours of weaving and over 39 kilometres of yarn — were unveiled during a special exhibition at Walsh Street on 14–16 November 2025.

Troy Emery and Cox Architecture’s tapestry Longing (Camilla) is a two-dimensional
interpretation of Emery’s 2024 sculpture Lupa, an amorphous animal-like companion. In the domestic site of Walsh Street, Camilla echoes Boyd’s family life with their pet cat of the same name. The excess tendrils of yarn drip down out of the plane of the woven surface towards the floor, stretching the silhouette of the animal figure and evoking emotion and memory.

Commenting on the winner’s work, the jury – consisting of Kennedy Nolan principal Patrick Kennedy, Nexus Designs director Sally Evans and InteriorsAu editor Cassie Hansen – said the piece was selected for it “authentic innovation and deep resonance with Robin Boyd’s Walsh Street house.”

“The work reimagines the potential of tapestry as an art form: its materiality, tactility and artistic nature. The result is a piece that could only exist as tapestry, not painting or print. Thoughtfully positioned within Walsh Street’s living room, its location, scale and textures harmonise with its architectural context, engaging with the materials and tones of Boyd’s design. Evoking the domestic intimacy of the site, the work draws inspiration from the home’s former resident cat, Camilla. Distinctive, conceptually rich and masterfully realised by weaver Saffron Gordon, this tapestry represents a significant and contemporary evolution of the medium,” said the jury.

The winning team received $5,000, while all finalists receive $1,000, along with a People’s Choice Award to be decided by public vote.

The 2025 finalists were:

Jack MacRae, Wilson Architects
Troy Emery and Cox Architecture
N’arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs AM and Greenshoot
Yvette Coppersmith and Anouska Milstein, A.mi
Mouriya Senthilkumar and Ian Tsui

Thursday, 13 November 2025

ON SLOPES – THE INTENT TO INCLINE

If there is one phrase that might sum up the current architectural trend, it is ‘the intent to incline.’ This is the ambition to twist, skew, slant, slope, pitch, ramp, bank, tilt, angle, veer, incline, spiral, cant, curve, tip, bend, turn, slew, arc, swerve – do anything except construct a horizontal surface, a vertical plane, or any flat datum. The article on Rethinking the Flat Datum: Designing Space with Incline and Intent by Jonathan Yueng – see below – chooses these words, incline and intent, in its title, but concerns itself only with the fashion to deviate from the horizontal plane.

Yeung writes poetically about the experience of the sloping surface using grandiloquent, rhapsodic terms, and provides numerous examples of inclined planes in recent projects, itemising the subject into sloping roofs; sloping interiors; and sloping public spaces. He uses lyrical words to present the case for sloping surfaces in projects instead of maintaining the historically favoured horizontal surface for habitation, pointing out that many so-called ‘horizontal’ surfaces are really sloping planes to enable drainage. It is a moot point, because one could argue that the earth is spherical; that all surfaces that we inhabit are curved: that horizontality is only an idea.

What Yeung is praising is the slope that is obvious, readily perceived and experienced as a visual and physical intrigue, not the subtle variations for water flow, be this for everyday functions or merely safety purposes. He is interested only in the gradient that is noticed, observed to be different, felt: roofs that become . . .curved paths and sloped planes that choreograph distinct spatial and bodily experiences; and indoor sloping floors that are seen as . . . contoured treatments that can resonate more closely with a site's character.

The question that Yeung asks is: How are these projects improving the experience of moving through architecture? – as if they might. Yeung sees the slope as relating to the different movement of the body through space, having a significant impact on this motion - to produce a faux-natural, meandering journey, suggesting that this might not be possible on a horizontal plane. The concept eventually becomes political, with the movement: giving visitors shifting vantage points and a way to engage space that feels less authoritarian than an unyielding flat floor. Here one recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s story about walking with his uncle: in a straight line, noting how he learned of the rigour involved in intent. For Yeung, slopes hold a power over the body and the mind; they are transformative: Indoors, gentle gradients and micro-terraces define thresholds without walls, carve pockets for personal agency, and invite new ways of encountering art, furniture, and surfaces. They are different, a truism that he uses later to relate to constant change, although this might really be the repeated difference in the diversion from the horizontal with 2D inclines.

One is left wondering why we even bother with the horizontal, given all these marked benefits with different gradients. It is Yeung’s seemingly endless hyperbole that eventually makes one question his enthusiasm for inclines, when he continues describing the roof as . . . embracing required slopes as a gently calibrated terrain that aligns with climate, drainage, and context. . . . As a walkable weave, the roof invites visitors to script their own routes—rising, dipping, and reconnecting. The description gets just a little too deliberately exotic; but still there is more, with: the subtly undulating ground is not only a way to negotiate the site's vast topography; its shifting elevations also help organize programs both beneath and above the surface . . . creating . . . a civic carpet that serves a wide spectrum of visitors. Here there is the suggestion that slopes are special and offer the ‘red carpet’ treatment for people – something like a transfiguration.

Eventually Yeung becomes vaguely abstract, almost mystical in his exaggerated enthusiasm for the incline: By treating sloped circulation as social infrastructure—an armature for exercise, chance encounters, and outdoor programs—the project turns movement into public space. Just what Yeung means remains to be discovered, but it sounds grand.

His exuberant words define the experience of walking on a slope, creating and changing the ‘curated’ story of the path, even grasping Heraclitus’s concept of not being able to step into a river twice, as an analogy for movement over a gradient that Yeung seems to assume is always a variable 3D rather than a consistent 2D surface. This assessment and analysis might be fine as an intellectual exercise, or an aesthetic appraisal, but what is the impact on the everyday, when one is confronted with the challenge of coping with the slopes? One immediately knows when one is on an inclined surface, be it 2D or 3D. There is that awareness, that self-conscious change of movement in the wholeness of the body’s poise that takes one’s attention away from meandering, distracting one from the private considerations of personal engagements as one goes about one’s daily grind; quietly contemplating the casual perusal of ponderings that linger in the mind. One is immediately alerted to the possibility of a fall or a slip and adjusts appropriately. Here one can recall that sudden shock of moving over a ramped floor in a shopping centre; or that jerk into a different understanding of place as one moves off the street into the plaza of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The change in movement alarms one; there is no choreography or creation in the meandering; one senses the change and makes a conscious variation to the gait to manage one’s equilibrium.

Pompidou Centre, Paris: the sloping plaza.

Entering Pompidou, one immediately is stirred with the awareness of the discovery of the unexpected slope. From that point on, one is alert to how one steps. Consciousness is concentrated, not on the urban space or the 'architecture,' but on moving down or up, or along the slope. One might self-consciously even choose a diagonal path to better manage the gradient, with curating a path for aesthetic purposes being a luxury not made available by the challenge of necessity.

One is doing everything other than considering the slope aesthetically out of the sheer physicality involved. It was Ananda Coomaraswamy who noted the philosophical/intellectual issues in aesthetic viewing itself, beyond ordinary experience, highlighting its problematical concerns.# Even without considering Coomaraswamy’s point in any detail, one forgets that the individual moving through place/space is otherwise engaged with life, not curating a pathway, choreographing distinct spatial and bodily experiences, or scripting their own routes. One merely walks, taking the path planned nonchalantly to get to where one is going, while thinking of the current events in one’s life and nonchalantly observing the world. Instead of being a meaningful, poetic intervention, the sloping surface is more a hindrance to wandering and pondering than a calculated, observed experiential journey of discovery.

One has to ask the question: Is this interest in sloping surfaces grabbing attention only because it is different? We have seen fashions promoting forms that are distorted by bends, curves, etc. in all types of quirky ways. Is it a case of, when there is nothing else to skew, try twisting the world? This is 'architecture' by ME, for the ME; to be considered and noticed for its clever variations; its surprising differences that declare: LOOK AT ME! Experience is rooted in one, the individual, and can be spoken about in this way, but society/culture relies on a shared experience. Teung’s special way of seeing is an acquired position; slopes have no inherent necessity in regards to the everyday other than being exhibitionist when manipulated self-consciously, for clever display. We have conventions like language that enable us to share, with meaning lying in agreement. The problem with concentrating on MY peculiar experience is that one gets that statement: “I know what I am saying,” as though another’s lack of comprehension is irrelevant; it is your problem that you fail to understand or experience in a particular way; MY way.

Sitting on a slope - Pompidou Centre, Paris: everyone sits in the same way.

One has to ask: Will everyone enjoy relaxing on the slope when something rolls off downhill, or when one's orientation for balance is disturbed? One sits on a slope in a particular manner in order to properly and comfortably manage the body’s stresses and balance. This settling on a slope raises issues that need attention – how to locate, and where to be placed for stability and equilibrium. The slope will define the angle of repose of the body that is sensed as being the most stable. Flat or near flat - read horizontal - surfaces were not developed and used for no reason. Today's interest in skews seems to be yet more of ‘How can I be totally different’ – a one-off Grand Design.* One might suggest that the world is being McClouded – entertained with quirky difference, and a lack of deference that creates a cloud of uncertain experiences, each struggling for attention.

And as I struggle with the loaded shopping trolley across a sloping footpath, I wonder about creating my path just to make moving forward possible, instead of sliding sideways. This is no aesthetic choice; the slope forces me to manage the trolley appropriately, awkwardly, not ponder any vague poetic path: the incline becomes a true nuisance. Then it hits me: what about all of these wondrous bespoke slopes and disabled access? Has everyone forgotten about these folk now that they have achieved general recognition with codes and legal requirements being enforced? One now recalls all of the special barriers, warnings, and rails, etc. required to make disabled access possible and safe; but now all this seems to have gone out of fashion, careless of experience and performance other than curated aesthetic visions for ME; something different every minute of every day, like new architecture: the ‘grand’ design theory. How might these admired slopes be managed by the disabled?

The Sanno Office image has all of the character of an LS Lowry painting.

For Yeung, slopes seem to be something to grasp for a PhD study, or for ME to have a completely new view of the world, never before seen: WOW! – perhaps both? It’s not like stepping into a river; it might be said to be “ever new,” but the experience lacks the flow of life, that reality of permanence in changing change: the Eternal Present. We should never become just too clever with our words and belittle meaning for our own benefit.

The layered experience of moving through these buildings makes repetition unlikely, if not impossible; the path you curate for yourself is rarely identical from one visit to the next.

The sloping surface, beyond curating the experiential journey and creating pockets of space, also alludes to the continuity of the environment and site.

The text has something of the flavour of Eliot’s lines:

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Alas, with slopes, this could very well become a reality as a fact.

The Mobius strip: a continuity of ends and beginnings.

Yeung’s reference to the Sydney Modern – now named Naala Badu: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/05/more-on-sydney-modern-ai.html - highlights the exaggerated exuberance of the text that glosses over the reality of the everyday.

The classic drone image of Naala Badu: no waterfront.

. . .

in the case of the Sydney Modern Museum, cascading architectural volumes respond to the site's unique slope. Through the careful articulation of non-flat entry surfaces, the building invites visitors to roll in and roll down into the museum, testing the limits of inclined planes and the tolerances of furniture. More importantly, it reminds visitors of the site's particular condition: one arrives from the hillside and moves toward the waterfront. The ground is not flat, and that simple agenda is clearly and powerfully articulated, curated, and enacted at the museum's threshold.

The 'Sydney Modern' context.

One has to point out that the museum is separated from the harbour by a string of apartments; that the waterfront has no essential intimacy with the art gallery extension that is again illustrated by the drone shot. One struggles to hold any image of this building as a passerby, the individual who will experience this ‘cascade.’

The 'interesting' drone shot: what does the passerby experience?

While spoken of as the new Opera House – no more needs to be said about this building, such is its iconic status – this $344 million art gallery expansion holds nothing memorable in its imagery other than the aerial view – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/02/thoughts-on-sydney-modern.html - and Yeung’s intellectual explanation of it as a cascade: a place for one to roll in and roll down: the words suggest drunkenness. The slope always takes over, such is its power of difference that has become the new intrigue in architecture, as the copious number of projects referenced by Yeung in his text proves. We find ourselves swept up in this enthusiasm for ‘design’s newest obsession.’*

Naala Badu street frontage.

To equate the love of art with a love of fine sensations is to make of works of art a kind of aphrodisiac. The words “disinterested aesthetic contemplation” are a contradiction in terms and a pure non-sense.

“A Figure of Speech, or a Figure of Thought?”

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Design is constantly seeking things new to keep being different: see -

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/caveman-core-design-trend

Headline: Design’s Newest Obsession Goes Back—Way Back.

Sanno Office by Studio Velocity.

15 NOV 25

NOTES

THE HORIZONTAL

It is interesting to observe that the incline is always referenced to the horizontal, with its deviation from the horizontal being identified in degrees.

THE CENTRE OF THE ROAD

The problem with slopes was highlighted for me by the guide in a wheelchair who took me around the campus prior to my commencing the review of the whole university that resulted in a report outlining all of the access issues that needed attention, both inside buildings and outside. This guide was skilled in the operation of his wheelchair, and proudly showed how he could bounce down flights of stairs in plaza areas; but it was the challenge with slopes that proved to be the greatest bugbear.

While attempting to traverse a sloping surface, it was pointed out how the natural forward path for the wheelchair was a zigzag, with the movement down the slope constantly being corrected to maintain the route. It was this problem that explained this guide’s preference for choosing the centre of the road for travel, with the crown of the road providing an arc that did not manoeuvre the wheelchair off to one side or the other. Here one could truly move forward in a straight line.

THE ARTICLE

https://www.archdaily.com/1035411/rethinking-the-flat-datum-designing-space-with-incline-and-intent

Rethinking the Flat Datum: Designing Space with Incline and Intent

Office in Sanno / Studio Velocity. Image Courtesy of Studio Velocity

Written by Jonathan Yeung
Published on October 27, 2025

Historically, architecture and the built environment have insisted on creating flat, hard surfaces. In earlier eras, walking without paved ground meant mud-caked shoes, uneven footing, tripping hazards, standing water after rain, and high maintenance. Hence, as we shaped cities, we prioritized a smooth, continuous, solid horizontal datum. The benefits are real: easier walking, simpler cleaning, and straightforward programming—furniture, equipment, and partitions all prefer a level base. This universal preference for building on flat ground remains the norm and, for many practical reasons, will likely continue to be.

What's less recognized is that making a truly flat surface is surprisingly difficult—and many well-executed "flat" floors aren't perfectly flat at all. They are often gently sloped, calibrated to precise gradients for drainage. While interior spaces do not always require this, many ground floors and wet areas do incorporate subtle inclines as a safeguard—whether for minor flooding or to manage water that overflows from the street or plumbing when one of the discharge systems is malfunctioning.

Quietly, a number of ambitious projects are challenging the tyranny of the perfectly flat floor. Architects are reclaiming roofs as walkable terrain: because roofs typically can't be perfectly level for drainage, they become logical testbeds for curved paths and sloped planes that choreograph distinct spatial and bodily experiences. The idea has extended beyond rooftops to exterior ground surfaces, where drainage needs likewise justify—and inspire—more contoured treatments that can resonate more closely with a site's character. Even indoors—though far less common—some projects now sculpt floor plates with gentle gradients and micro-topographies, contoured treatments that can resonate more closely with a site's character.

How are these projects improving the experience of moving through architecture? Designers have pursued several tactics. Some align topography and building into a seamless whole, letting required slopes read as natural extensions of the site. Others deliberately sculpt both façade and ground plane to produce a faux-natural, meandering journey. Many enlist the roof—already sloped for drainage—as a public promenade, giving visitors shifting vantage points and a way to engage space that feels less authoritarian than an unyielding flat floor. Indoors, gentle gradients and micro-terraces define thresholds without walls, carve pockets for personal agency, and invite new ways of encountering art, furniture, and surfaces.

Yoshino Nursery School and Kindergarten / Tezuka Architects. Image © Katsuhisa Kida

Elevated Commons: Occupying the undulating Fifth Elevation

What would it take to turn a building's subtle necessities into distinctive experiences—amplifying them to invite new ways of use, even a sense of freedom? One powerful tactic is the occupiable roof: embracing required slopes as a gently calibrated terrain that aligns with climate, drainage, and context. More than a gesture, opening the roof to people does add cost, but it repays that investment by expanding how users inhabit the architecture and engage the surrounding environment.

A widely cited precedent is Tezuka Architects' Fuji Kindergarten (2007), which pioneered a liberating roofscape where children run freely, weave around existing trees, and discover nooks formed by skylights and plantings. The softly sloped loop becomes both playground and arguably, an outdoor classroom. Less known—but arguably equally empowering—is their Yoshino Nursery School and Kindergarten, where steeper roof inclines physically connect to the ground plane. By merging roof and site, the building extends the landscape itself, allowing children to move seamlessly between levels and experience the architecture as an open, continuous field rather than a set of bounded rooms.

Yoshino Nursery School and Kindergarten / Tezuka Architects. Image © Katsuhisa Kida

At the Site Verrier de Meisenthal, SO–IL and FREAKS Architecture wrap the new cultural center extension in a continuous, occupiable roof. The undulating surface does more than cap an addition to the 18th-century glassworks; it stitches otherwise separate buildings and grounds into a single, legible campus. As a walkable weave, the roof invites visitors to script their own routes—rising, dipping, and reconnecting—to rediscover the factory from shifting vantage points a conventional flat datum could never offer.

Site Verrier de Meisenthal / SO-IL + FREAKS Architecture. Image © Iwan Baan

Less commonly explored is merging structural performance to the roof's uniquely non-flat form. In Studio Velocity's Office in Sanno, a deliberately curved, walkable roof does more than shelter the office below: it becomes a liberating terrain where staff can step away from desks, engage the surrounding context, and curate their own niches through loose furniture, the roof's natural gradients, and punctuating plantings. Structurally, the roof and timber beams are held in a calibrated equilibrium by vertical members that act in tension when the roof is lightly used—subtly "pulling" the surface into shape—and shift to compression as people gather, supporting the load. The result is a layered dynamism: geometry tuned to the site, occupation that grants users spatial agency, and a quiet, constantly adjusting balance of tension and compression that holds the roof's silhouette in place.

Office in Sanno / Studio Velocity. Image Courtesy of Studio Velocity

Office in Sanno / Studio Velocity

Civic Carpets: Non-Flat Surfaces as Public Program and Civic Agency

Beyond roofs, many offices are testing expansive outdoor planes that gently slope and shape themselves to cultivate community. At Mecanoo's National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying), the subtly undulating ground is not only a way to negotiate the site's vast topography; its shifting elevations also help organize programs both beneath and above the surface. By liberating the ground from an unyieldingly flat datum, uses of different heights and performance needs can be flexibly tucked under or set upon the terrain. The approach aligns with the building's formal expression while turning the surface into a civic carpet that serves a wide spectrum of visitors—at times a market plaza, at others a picnic field, and, when needed, an amphitheater. The undulations stitch together multiple edges of the building and site, making an otherwise monumental arts center more porous, welcoming, and empowering.

National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts / Mecanoo. Image Courtesy of Mecanoo

A more structured example is Jiakun Architects' West Village—Basis Yard, where a network of long outdoor ramps activates, loops, and connects the campus to form an elevated promenade for the community. The intertwined ramps become the project's most porous façade, opening an otherwise inward-looking complex to its larger urban context. By treating sloped circulation as social infrastructure—an armature for exercise, chance encounters, and outdoor programs—the project turns movement into public space, inviting rapid engagement while binding the site into a coherent, walkable whole.

West Village - Basis Yard / Jiakun Architects. Image © ArchExist

National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts / Mecanoo

National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts / Mecanoo. Image Courtesy of Mecanoo

West Village - Basis Yard / Jiakun Architects

West Village - Basis Yard / Jiakun Architects. Image © ArchExist

Four Car Parks / Christian Kerez

Four Car Parks / Christian Kerez. Image © Maxime Delvaux

Grace Farms / SANAA

Grace Farms / SANAA. Image © Iwan Baan

The Interior Landscape: Elevation Shifts that Define Space

When discussing sloping architecture, the most legendary example has to be Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. Its distinct form, strikingly white façade, continuous interior ramp, and the painstaking task of installing artworks along a constantly tilted promenade make it an icon of the type. Arguably, though, Wright's slopes are about continuity and the longevity of a single route rather than the varied, empowering experiences seen in other examples. The ramp remains largely consistent, opening slightly toward the atrium and the exterior; most of the time, walking it on the fifth floor feels much like the second. That was the intent—and the magic—of the museum: an unending journey of art in a spatial condition that remains steady through the sloping surface.

By contrast, later projects by SANAA and Ryue Nishizawa push the ground plane to the opposite extreme, aiming to create as many distinct spatial moments as possible so the sameness never settles in—much like a river you can't step into twice. In the Hiroshi Senju Museum and the Rolex Learning Center, the sloped surface embraces site conditions while empowering a spectrum of nooks and territories. Separation is achieved not only by walls or furniture but by subtle shifts in elevation height and section. The layered experience of moving through these buildings makes repetition unlikely, if not impossible; the path you curate for yourself is rarely identical from one visit to the next.

Hiroshi Senju Museum / Ryue Nishizawa. Image © Iwan Baan

Rolex Learning Center / SANAA. Image © Iwan Baan

The sloping surface, beyond curating the experiential journey and creating pockets of space, also alludes to the continuity of the environment and site. Different from Grace Farms—where the interior remains largely flat while the exterior follows the surrounding topography—in the case of the Sydney Modern Museum, cascading architectural volumes respond to the site's unique slope. Through the careful articulation of non-flat entry surfaces, the building invites visitors to roll in and roll down into the museum, testing the limits of inclined planes and the tolerances of furniture. More importantly, it reminds visitors of the site's particular condition: one arrives from the hillside and moves toward the waterfront. The ground is not flat, and that simple agenda is clearly and powerfully articulated, curated, and enacted at the museum's threshold.

Sydney Modern Museum / SANAA. Image © Iwan Baan

AD Classics: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / Frank Lloyd Wright

AD Classics: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / Frank Lloyd Wright. Image © Creative Commons

Zaishui Art Museum / junya ishigami + associates

Zaishui Art Museum / junya ishigami + associates. Image © ArchExist

Sydney Modern Museum / SANAA

Sydney Modern Museum / SANAA. Image © Iwan Baan

Hiroshi Senju Museum / Ryue Nishizawa

Hiroshi Senju Museum / Ryue Nishizawa. Image © Iwan Baan

Rolex Learning Center / SANAA

Rolex Learning Center / SANAA. Image © Iwan Baan

Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)

ON GARDENING

I am strongly of the opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention. Merely having them, or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a box of paints from the best colourman, or, to go one step further, it is like having portions of these paints set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and it seems to me that the duty we owe our gardens and to our own bettering in our gardens is so to use plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exulted criticism; to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best. Gertrude Jekyll Colour in the Flower Garden Mitchell Beazley London 1998 – Introduction (first published 1908)

MORE IS LESS

Significantly, in the era of the ‘information revolution’, the same process is now affecting disinformation: whereas in the past it was lack of information and censorship which characterized the denial of democracy by the totalitarian state, the opposite is now the case. Disinformation is achieved by flooding TV viewers with information, with apparently contradictory data. The truth of the facts is censured by over-information, as we have seen from the press and television discussing the Balkans. The globalitarian state, built out of economic-strategic alliances, is no longer old ‘Anastasia’ with her scissors: it is Babel. Now more is less. And in some cases, less than nothing. Deliberate manipulation and unintentional accidents have become indistinguishable.

Paul Virilio Strategy of Deception Verso 2007 p.48

(first published Editions Galilee 1999)

‘That which precedes the event is not necessarily its cause,’ claims the wisdom of the ancients. p.76

As Negroponte has rightly remarked, with the ‘liberation of information’ on the Web, what is most lacking is meaning or, in other words, a context into which Internet users could put the facts and hence distinguish truth from falsehood. On the Web, where, as everyone knows, the terrorist temptation is constant and where depredations of hackers are committed with impunity in a strange state of legal indeterminacy, the difference between (true) information and (false) deception fades a little more each day. In entering the looking-glass worlds of television and home computers, we are in the end left in the position of Kinglake’s old ‘English soldiery’. As they saw it,

insofar as the battlefield presented itself to the bare eyesight of men, it had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no size, no shape and was made up of nothing . . . In such conditions, each separate gathering . . . went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of the action; nay, even very often in ignorance of the fact that any great conflict was raging.

As Albert Camus asserted: ‘When we are all guilty, that will be true democracy.’ p.78

ENCOUNTERING CONRAD

Ryszard Kapuściński The Other Verso London 2018, p. 92

At the end of his book, Kapuściński asks whether, in our encounters with others in the future:

Will we jointly wish to refer to what – as Conrad puts it - ‘speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity of dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’?*

* J. Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, New York: W.W.Norton, 1979.

Architecture stands in between of all of these circumstances of encounter, but how does it explain itself beyond being a bespoke ‘grand design’ of a potential genius?

ON THE CULTURE OF OTHERS

Herodotus . . . wanted to know them because he understood that to know ourselves we have to know Others, who act as a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; he knew that to understand ourselves better we have to understand Others, to compare ourselves with them, to measure ourselves against them. As a citizen of the world, he did not believe that we should isolate ourselves from Others, or slam the gates in their faces. Xenophobia, Herodotus implied, is a sickness of people who are scared, suffering an inferiority complex, terrified by the prospect of seeing themselves in the mirror of the culture of Others.

Ryszard Kapuściński The Other Verso London 2018, p. 19

CLEVER PEOPLE SELF-DOUBT

I last met him when Philomena came out back in 2013. Back then, Coogan was a bracing, combative interviewee. He saw every question as a potential ambush and moved to thwart any perceived journalistic angle. Today, though, he seems more comfortable with the process, more at ease with himself. It used to be that he felt he always had to have his guard up. Now he accepts that he can sometimes afford to let it drop. He’s middle aged and a mass of insecurity and contradictions. He suspects that, on balance, that’s not such a terrible thing to be.

“And actually I think acknowledging your own fallibility makes you a better artist and a better person,” he says in a rush. “It’s fairly obvious to me that the real wisdom lies in seeing people’s failings and trying to understand them. Because the alternative is that very childlike, Donald Trump thing of believing that admitting any weakness is fatal. What was it Bukowski said? All the clever people are full of self-doubt and all the stupid people are very confident. That’s the era we’re living in now. That’s the era I don’t want to be a part of. So all you can do is try to go about things differently. Do interesting work and don’t be a cunt.”

Coogan gulps for breath. His eyes widen and then he rocks with laughter. “There you go, that’s my big artistic statement,” he says. “Do interesting work and don’t be a cunt. Took me the best part of an hour. Got there in the end.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/04/steve-coogan-interview-stan-and-ollie

HILLS

The hills bespeak a healing power and closeness to unseen help now lost in the security of modern welfare. Those who befriend the silent peaks in a lifetime's work know well their embracing strength. (p.91)

For only once is it given to man to lie in the arms of the eternal forces which give all matter form. (p.98)

Iain R Thomson Isolation Shepherd Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2007

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

Psalm 121 King James Version (KJV)

SPAN

17 August 2012

This blog began as a co-operative concept. While the idea and the stimulus was generated through discussion, the blog has turned out to be an individual enterprise. SPAN stands for ‘Spence and’ in the context of others. As a word, it fitted in nicely with the idea of voussoirs - parts and pieces, complete with keystones, that could ‘span’ the gaps in understanding and communication. The word SPAN also allowed for a shared input into a blog.

Spence Jamieson is an architect and the author of these articles. The blogs show the scope of his interests.

THE IDEA

chapters and verses as architectural commentary:

the wedge to isolate, array and shape ideas; the keystone to highlight core, supporting issues. voussoirs is a concept to start an architectural discussion to span the large gap in the debate on things architectural; a bridging of the void in architectural issues by exploring considered bits and pieces. The state of the profession today is highlighted by silence and self. It is introvert and protective. Educational centres remain isolated within their own constructs, being run primarily as businesses. They put very little back into the community. They indulge themselves in their own interests and exclude contrary and different ideas and ideals. They constantly avoid any challenge on concepts or strategies that might change the plotted course. Rarely does comment ever come from this academic world into the public or any arena. Very few publications help direct the public interest. Rarely do newspapers grasp the issues and explore them. One aspect may be given space in the popular press, but architectural debates and concerns are rarely given attention. The professional institutes are doing much the same as the educational institutions. Private practice is doing likewise, offering, if anything, only its own pushy propaganda to the public. Yet there is a discussion and debate in these silences that needs a larger and more open platform. Discussion is alive and well amongst a few in at least one curry house, but the debate needs to be a broadened. voussoirs is the place for this discussion. It is a site for ideas, comment, articles, and critiques on things architectural and associated issues. It is here that matters can be aired and ideas discussed and debated without fear of the neglect and disdain that institutions and private groups and publishers give to open speaking and differing ideas.

There can be no true understanding of any idea if discussion and debate are curtailed in favour of a preferred position.

ON COMMUNICATION

. . . there has been a growing feeling of concern to solve what is now commonly called “the problem of communication.” But if one observes efforts to solve this problem, he will notice that different groups who are trying to do this are not actually able to listen to each other. As a result, the very attempt to improve communication leads frequently to yet more confusion, and the consequent sense of frustration inclines people ever further toward aggression and violence, rather than toward mutual understanding and trust.

David Bohm On Dialogue Routledge, Oxon, 1996 (2004) p.2

ON ART & METHOD

Even in relationships with inanimate objects and with nature in general, something very like communication is involved. Consider, for example, the work of an artist. Can it be properly said that the artist is expressing himself, i.e., literally “pushing outward” something that is already formed inside him? Such a description is not in fact generally accurate or adequate. Rather, what usually happens is that the first thing the artist does is only similar in certain ways to what he may have in mind. As in a conversation between two people, he sees the similarity and the difference, and from this perception something further emerges in his next action. Thus, something new is continually created that is common to the artist and the material on which he is working.

David Bohm On Dialogue Routledge, Oxon, 1996 (2004) p.4

THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE

The early 50's and 60's is a period that is gaining interest in architectural ideas. Perhaps this is why Princeton chose to republish The Tao of Architecture. It is a beautiful little book that discusses the implications of traditional wisdom in architecture. Given the astonishing lack of direction in current architectural theory, the publication is very timely.

Amos Ih Tiao Chang, The Tao of Architecture, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1956, reprinted 2017.

p.26

Laotzu's idea of formation is heavily concerned with emptiness or non-existence. To him who regards nothing as persistent, what is essentially important in things is the possibility of becoming something, not the opportunity of remaining as something confronting deterioration. Consequently, meaningful incompletion is taken as the most desirable state of tangible being.

p.22

. . . the full meaning of existence is beyond the power of any manifestation. What appears tangible, architectural or natural, is only a means to suggest that which is lacking in appearance and existing in man's intangible understanding and aesthetic feeling.

LIVING IN IMPERMANENCE

Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

see: THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE in the sidebar

THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY

I prefer, by far, real islands to imaginary islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That's because the real is richer than the imagination. The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge, whereas the imaginary is more often than not just a collection of stereotypes, a soup of clichés offering an infantile kind of satisfaction. Then, a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying, it leads to a transformation of the self. Whereas imagination is nothing but compensation. There's even something horribly autistic about sitting in one spot and spinning out invention by the yard. How much more interesting an open and poetic process involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition.

Kenneth White Across The Territories Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa Polygon Edinburgh 2004 p.86

VISION, CIVILIZATION & SPIRIT

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time - - - is he who shall create poems in stone.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit.

Louis Sullivan

AN UNCHANGING PROFESSION

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

. . . no one can relieve (the architect) from the need to rely on his own discretion, for that discretion is linked to a responsibility which belongs to no one but (the architect). It is the exercise of discretion hampered by considerations of cost, of risk, of exact justice, of conflicting interests, of uncertainty as to facts, of misunderstandings and of diverse individualities and dishonest or incapable agents, which is the chief care and preoccupation of architectural practice. To design a building, to draw and specify every part of it, and to direct its construction and see it completed with no other anxieties and dilemmas than belong to the exercise of those duties, is unknown.

H.B.Creswell The Honeywood Settlement Faber and Faber Limited London 1967 (fourth edition: first edition 1930 Architectural Press) p.128

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

CATHEDRALS and SYMBOLISM

Everything is the symbolical representation of an idea. p.28

The same artists, who had to follow a strict rule when treating the history of God, could use all of their imagination when treating the ornamental: whence the blossoming of the grotesque and the original. p.38

In those days religion, drama, and art had the same aim and sought to provoke the same thoughts. They did not pretend to amuse the people; they endeavoured to teach them. p.51

This way of thinking and reasoning takes sometimes a very subtle turn. p.53

Hélène Fouré The French Cathedrals Their Symbolic Significance Bruce Humphries Inc. Publishers, Boston, 1931

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 2

ON DEMOLISHING BUILDINGS

Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps, and the weight of the following very simple argument. You allow that it is wrong to waste time, that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste other people’s; for you have some right to your own time, but none to their’s. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living, it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for those works they gave the best of their time, intending them for immortality.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture George Routledge & Sons Limited, London p.109

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 1

How to avoid insult

But how much of nature have you in your Greek buildings? I will show you, taking for an example the best you have lately built; and, in doing so, I trust that nothing that I say will be thought to have any personal purpose, and that the architect of the building in question will forgive me; for it is just because it is a good example of the style that I think it more fair to use it for an example. If the building were a bad one of the kind, it would not be a fair instance; and I hope, therefore, that in speaking of the institution on the mound, just in progress, I shall be understood as meaning rather a compliment to its architect than otherwise. It is not his fault that we force him to build in the Greek manner.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture and Painting George Routledge & Sons Limited; New York: F.P.Dutton & CO - p.64-65

ON EDUCATION

'. . those who are responsible for giving instruction in the theory of architecture should be practising architects. The warning is necessary because, strange though it may seem, English schools of architecture to-day tend to be run by men who either do not practise at all, or whose practices are for them a very subsidiary spare-time occupation. Often a teaching appointment is a means by which a clever student avoids the humiliation of entering an office as a junior assistant, thus depriving himself of the only opportunity he will ever have of learning something of the practical side of his profession from the bottom upwards. There can be no doubt whatever that the teaching of theory has suffered severely as a result of this habit: and this leads me to the conclusion that no man should be permitted to teach until he is recognized by his Faculty as a Master of Theory and Practice. In other words, he should be not only a practising architect but also, what is unfortunately a much rarer specimen, a good architect.'

W.A. Eden, The Process of Architectural Tradition, Macmillian & Co. Ltd, London, 1942, p.p. 86-87

ETHICS

Thus Pugin laid the foundation stones of that strange system which dominates the nineteenth-century art criticism and is immortalised in the Seven Lamps of Architecture: the value of a building depends on the moral worth of its creator; and a building has a moral value independent of, and more important than, its esthetic value. We must not consider this emphasis on morality peculiarly Victorian. Whenever esthetic standards are lost, ethical standards rush in to fill the vacuum; for the interest in esthetics dwindles and vanishes, but the interest in ethics is eternal.

Kenneth Clark The Gothic Revival - An Essay in the History of Taste, (1^st edition Constable 1928); third edition John Murray 1962, reprinted 1974, p.149.

MODERNITY

The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity. News stories and the turbulent affectations of art, fashion, and event veil without ever eradicating the everyday blahs. Images, the cinema and television divert the everyday by at times offering up to its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of the distinctly noneveryday; violence, death, catastrophe, the lives of kings and stars – those who we are led to believe defy everydayness. Modernity and everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover.

Henri Lefebvre, The Everyday and Everydayness, in Stephen Harris and Deborah Berke, Architecture of the Everyday, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1997, p.37.

NAMING

The simplest act of substitution is to put the name of a maker in the place of his or her work, which amounts to a paraphrase in itself. . . . All paraphrase sets aside the original: To put the name in place of the painting is to remove it from immediate consciousness; to narrate the life of an individual is an act profoundly different from looking into a painting and one that cannot be conducted simultaneously with it. To substitute a temporal narrative, already present in a name, for the physical work of art is to give up those features of the thing that were transient and unrepeatable, bound to a moment that is irrevocably ended; the unique insistence is, for the moment at least, sacrificed on the altar of continuity.

Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p.1.

ON BRANDING

Branding is now the art of getting people to think what something might be rather than what it necessarily is. It's about the manipulation of the virtual reality in which so many live. The manipulators include anyone with an interest in what we might think of them - not just big companies with products to sell but political parties with votes to win, design gurus with clients to attract - anyone, in other words, acting in some kind of market. They all have an interest in controlling their appearance to make us believe it is the reality.

John Humphrys Beyond Words How Language Reveals The Way We Live Now Hodder and Stoughton. Great Britain 2006, p. 86-87

see:

http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/faking-provenance-misuse-of-meaning.html

PRECONCEPTION

Leone Huntsman Sand in Our Souls The Beach in Australian History Melbourne University Press 2001, p.16:

Thus first impressions were filtered through existing preconceptions, starkly revealed in Sir Joseph Banks's description of the people seen from Captain James Cook's Endeavour when it first touched on the Australian continent in 1770:

In the morn we . . . [discerned] 5 people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier's account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.

Here Banks refers to William Dampier's unfavourable accounts of the West Australian aboriginal people in published accounts of his landings in 1688 and 1699, and reveals his own awareness of the extent to which perception was influenced by expectation.

see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/seeing-what-we-believe-idyllic-visions.html

THE MUSE - GETTING IT RIGHT

"It can be in the morning, any old time, I wake up with an idea and it starts following you around.

"You go, 'Ah that's good' because you know when it's going to work, it's going to be fruitful.

"Other times you'll get the edge of an idea and maybe it fades away or there's just no way it can be made to serve, you know?

"Then you just, it takes its time and you work on it and if necessary you work on it more than once. I'm known to work on it two or three times before you get it right."

Les Murray

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-02/les-murray-latest-volume-reflects-on-bunyah/6816714

http://www.lesmurray.org/

JARGON

The world seems to find it necessary to use more and more jargon in general reporting and conversation. It is especially noticed in accounts and discussions on the arts. The ABC TV arts programme presented on 7 January 2017 at 6:15pm had more jargon than usual; indeed, had more unusual expressions than previously encountered, ones that had not been heard before:

"unpicking the tapestry" of one's life;

and

looking at "the fan deck of what you do."

These reminded one of other popular fashionable expressions:

“to unpack an issue,” meaning to analyse it in some detail;

and

“to segue,” meaning to shift to a new topic or activity.

This last term is a favourite of radio announcers. The Italian word is often misspelt as ‘segway’ because of the similar phonetic sounding that is more commonly understood as Segway, the brand of a human transporter.

The parallel is interesting, as the idea of being ‘transported’ is common to both words, but it seems to hold little interest to the radio voices that appear just too cleverly happy with the use of this different, interesting expression.