voussoirs: THE VICTOR GRUEN VISION – FALSE HOPES AND ILLUSIONS?

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

THE VICTOR GRUEN VISION – FALSE HOPES AND ILLUSIONS?

The Gruen vision

Victor Gruen promoted them as the new villages, places that replicated the qualities found in small, historic market towns. They were described as pleasant, agreeable places free of vehicles, like the old town centres of Europe; with spaces where folk could shop, socialise and sip coffee in a humane and sensitive place shaped for people. It was a reaction to the congested city centres of the fifties and sixties that saw the old buildings demolished to be replaced with the new 'International'-imaged structures that promoted slick height and gleaming glass. The inner city was being transformed into a no-man's-land, with busy, congested streets framed by stark, anonymous masses that concealed entries and denied any gesture towards public convenience. The city was interested in statements on streets that were a-buzz with polluting traffic seeking speedy thoroughfares and convenient places to park. This was the period of freeway building throughout the world. Wilbur Smith had prepared the report that would see Brisbane's CBD separated from its river with a massive freeway built over the water. It aimed to solve the inner-city traffic problems, but only created new concerns.

Vehicle-free spaces

Civic place was being destroyed by the blind enthusiasm for the new. Grand old structures were demolished overnight without a thought for any future but that perceived for the moment. Little wonder that the dream of a quiet, green and sunny shopping centre, where there would be no vehicles to fight, or glass towers to blind, became so alluring. Peace and convenience at last. One could use the new freeways to get to 'Nirvana' quickly and efficiently. This was the era of time and motion studies too. Victor Gruen promoted his vision of a shopping centre so successfully that the model has been repeated throughout the world: but have things changed for the better?

Pedestrian places between retail outlets

It seems that like most grand visions, it is the cheapest and simplest, the most simplistic version of their aspects that proliferate. Complexities and subtleties are abandoned. One can look at le Corbusier's Marseilles apartment block, Unité d'habitation, to understand this. His design managed sound separation, provided through ventilation for each unit with different aspects, and offered social options for shopping and recreation. The world is now full of seemingly similar high-rise apartment blocks that use the model as a broad diagram only, providing just the basic needs in structure and space for residents as cheaply as possible. Anything more is considered a waste of money. The social impacts of these places have been seen in the Pruitt-Igoe development in St. Louis, Missouri that had to be demolished; and in similar developments in London and Glasgow, and many other cities that hope to be demolished if they have not already been flattened.

Has the Gruen shopping centre vision suffered likewise? Such shopping centres now litter the fringes of nearly every town and city in the world. They, like the apartment block concept, have mostly been built to incorporate the ideal as economically as possible. One does not want too much expensive exuberance for an ideal when 'near enough' will do and the profits will be better. Who'll know the difference? So it is that we get shopping areas shaped for private mass commerce located in city precincts to suit the shopping centre rather than the town or the street. Instead of spaces with European town centre quality, we get arcades set out as mazes, filled with shop fronts blaring and blazing, collected and categorised for commercial efficacy. The internal 'squares' become promotional areas for entertainment or sprawling eating areas. Rarely is the place made for simple social convenience and enjoyment: to let folk enjoy just being there. Hype is used everywhere to tell visitors what is expected of them, how to act, and where: getting and spending is good! The ad hoc and informal has no place in this hyped economy.

But this is the interior. The exterior is more of a problem. Gruen envisaged these centres free of vehicles, but this was only after patrons had driven to them and parked. By attracting more and more people with the idea of a pleasant shopping precinct, an event that is now called a shopping 'experience' – see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/architectural-language-problem-of-hype.html , the Gruen model had to provide more than adequate car parking around the idyllic, vehicle-free inner zone. It is this external, brutal blandness that creates the problems for these centres. Some effort is made internally to recreate an 'urban village' feel, but externally, the whole relationship with place is forgotten. These centres are self-centred: they do nothing for the regions around them. They turn their backs to their neighbours and offer literally nothing for the urban character of place. They are desert islands and can be seen to be this in the cityscape with their different scales, sizes, services and materials.

Being commercial enterprises, they are constructed as economically as possible. If an effort has to be made to cajole patrons in some seemingly sensitive manner, then money is spent internally, tarting up the spaces to make them appear 'attractive' – different is good enough. Externally we see blank sheds, a collection of buildings so large that they create their own scale in the pattern of place. They arrogantly ignore every quality of city/town character that the original vision saw as being so attractive. The Gruen-styled centres sought and promoted qualities of shopping space found so alluring in the old Medieval towns, but when it came to constructing these centres, no consideration was given to their broader context, their neighbours. They were and are just interiors, nothing more – stage sets; places for performances. The sad irony is that the vision based its dream on beautiful civic place, but the implementation of this concept completely ignored the city it was to service, its urban character and structure: its place. The land was purchased, cleared and the centres were built – from inside out. The exterior areas only had to offer sufficient, convenient car parking to provide easy access to the interiors, nothing more. The buildings only had to provide shelter to the designer spaces and walls for signage. This is all that was done, to the detriment of the related regions and their contexts.

The interiors all look and feel identical - open, light interiors with various levels and escalators

A couple of smaller centres have attempted to integrate into their regions, but these have their own problems. In Lerwick, the small Toll Clock Shopping Centre uses the shed image of waterside places to try to match its context. Here we see a set of gable forms stretch across a car parking space. These masses are clad in brightly coloured metal and trimmed likewise, to look 'industrial' like the sheds around the harbour nearby. It helps a little, but the open car parking spaces change the scale of place, and make the illusion a more difficult pretense to accept without any questions.

Toll Clock Shopping Centre, Lerwick

Toll Clock Shopping Centre from the harbour

Toll Clock Shopping Centre car park

The shopping centre in Tórshavn in the Faeroes attempts a similar disguise. It breaks its large mass down by fragmenting the roof line into a set of gables too. It is difficult to read as a clustering of small sheds, because the building mass is so large. Tórshavn is a gathering of small buildings. Even the big hotels that have been constructed in town have tried to disguise their mass. Here different finishes and wall colourings try to cheat the eye – usually unsuccessfully. One wonders if good, honest expression might not be better than a failure to cheat, when one sees the large mass highlighted by the ineffective camouflage.

Tórshavn

Shopping centre, Tórshavn

Harbourside building, Tórshavn

Typical 'Gruen' interior space

These efforts to manage shopping centre impacts only point out the serious problem that the 'sheltered, internal streets for people' vision has created. Sadly, it is a vision that suffers from its own inherent problems. Internally the large shopping centres frequently fail to express anything but private place. These 'public' areas never are. There is something essential in a city that holds a vibrancy in its necessary diversity, differences that are there because there are essential divergences everywhere, on all levels and in all details. In shopping centres, there is the one owner/manager over-viewing and policing everything, making demands on all tenants and patrons under the illusion of offering the freedom of the town to all – the right to walk, saunter or to run down a street in a city or town whenever, in my public space, the only shared space that I can call mine in the city or town: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/the-importance-of-street.html

The Gruen vision can be seen to hold a fatal flaw in its concept that offers false hopes and illusions. It might seek to provide a more wholesome environment for shoppers, but in doing so, developers have adapted matters to maximise profits as exteriors are economically and blandly clad, and interiors are decorated just enough to make it seem as though a caring effort has been made. The world has seen enough of these places to know that they are careless of matters urban and social. They strip the heart out of little places, starving the old centres of vital energy, turning them into ghost streets. Armidale, in New South Wales, Australia comes to mind here. The old department store, a beautifully detailed Art Nouveau decorated building, stands starved of activity like the eastern end of the main street that has been a mall for many years. A large shopping centre has been constructed on the western end of the town, complete with large parking areas below. The drive-in simplicity of mass shopping leaves the poetry of the local street struggling for its rhythm. The new kills the old; it does not reinforce any of the vitality that was once there, qualities that the Gruen vision saw as its inspiration.

What can be done about this? One knows instinctively that 'tarting up' exteriors by remodelling them or camouflaging them in any way will do nothing but distract from the core problems of scale, urban structure and city vitality. Maybe it will not be until our modes of transport have been reformed that the era of the 'Gruen' shopping centre will meet its demise. Once the extremes of car ownership turn out to be seriously problematical, and other more friendly, accessible modes and scales of public transport have been developed, perhaps fully automated and integrated, then the city and town might regain its importance, its civic respect and richness. This cannot happen quickly enough; but it might. Cities and towns are resilient. They have survived the onslaught of the Gruen vision. Now we need to spend more time aiding place rather than destroying it with false visions and careless, crude illusions that never evade the scrutiny of the eye or tentacles of the feeling body. This change will demand a new transparency; a new honesty, free of hype and commercial interests. This is the everyday world that we need to care for much more, for we are involved with the everyday, everyday.

Faversham, Kent - market town

Commercial Street, Lerwick

P.S.

Yet another sad irony is that while the Gruen vision promoted the rich vitality and diversity of old streets, it has turned out to do otherwise. When travelling the world, one soon learns that shopping centres are the same everywhere – exactly the same. Be they in Dublin or Dubai, Glasgow, Geneva or Goa, Penang or Paisley, they are identical. The richness inherent in the Medieval public street that can still be seen in, say, Commercial Street in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, and, more informally in the souks of Dubai, disappears in the rigours of the privately owned shopping centres that, no matter how hard they might try to replicate old forms and features, fail to provide anything but corporate place, with corporate identification and corporate security, with corporate, international tenants promoting their wares complete with their corporate brandings. A street has a life and significance that dies in the hands of any one manager. Cities and towns discover this when councils decide to implement their civic visions too rigidly. Diversity needs to be complete in every aspect if it is to be revealed in all of its true depth and richness, not as a pretend game of decoration and disguise. So a city needs big and small; old and new; insignificant and grand; clean and dirty; cheap and expensive; every variation possible if it is to embody the subtleties of life that made Gruen so enthusiastic about his places for people: but when implemented, these Gruen centres provide places that are not for people, and never will be. They are desert places, voids around an 'oasis' stage set in an urban complexity that now needs healing.

NOTE:

The city hills and the scar

This piece was stimulated by the scarring appearance of a development in Sydney's cityscape. In amongst the suburban settlements on the rolling hills behind Freshwater beach, just north of Manly, there was what one might call a scar, something uniquely awkward in scale, colour, form and massing, completely different to everything else that could be seen from the remarkable vantage point that provided a 360 degree vista of the city. What was this unusual urban mark on the land?

Detailed view of the scar

The general scale, texture and colour of suburban Sydney

It turned out to be Warringah Mall. A couple of days later we visited the mall as shoppers. Entering the complex was a rude insult. Access ways through and around tight car parking areas and service yards eventually led us to a dark, grim and grimy car parking space from which we were guided along narrow painted paths to grubby tunnels and through fire doors into the decorated mall spaces cluttered with an extravaganza of shops. It was a depressing experience, just as the civic appearance of the complex was in the city hillscape. There was no concern at all for the urban context of this exotic interior. It merely forced its own demands onto its neighbours and the city as a whole. This was not a centre that seemed to care for people or place.

The shopping centre marks its presence with its stark difference

Sydney, Australia - city views reveal a relatively even texturing and colouring

THE GRUEN EFFECT

Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go into a store looking for socks and come out with a new shirt, it's only partly your fault. Shops are trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the items so enticingly displayed and in such vast quantity, that the consumer will start buying compulsively.

This is the Gruen Effect.

The Gruen Effect is named after Victor Gruen, born in Vienna in 1904 to a Jewish family. Gruen, born Viktor Grünbaum, left Austria in 1938 for New York city, where he made a name for himself designing shops and retail spaces. This was a particular challenge during the lean years of the late 30s. People had no money. They just wouldn't go into shops. However Gruen figured out how to lure customers inside with amazing appealing windows displays.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-gruen-effect/

Was this cunning trickery the beginning of the dream to create false hopes with illusions on a larger scale?

NOTE

14 February 2016

In The Guardian, 14 February 2016, Mark Townsend has written a report titled Will Self joins London ‘mass trespass’ over privatisation of public space: see -


http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/13/will-self-mass-trespass-london-protest

This is precisely the problem with 'Gruen' space.

21 February 2016

See also:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/11/granary-square-privately-owned-public-space

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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.

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

THE VICTOR GRUEN VISION – FALSE HOPES AND ILLUSIONS?

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