voussoirs: ON DECORATION – ITS MEANING, PAST & FUTURE

Tuesday 21 February 2017

ON DECORATION – ITS MEANING, PAST & FUTURE

In Loos' essay, Ornament and Crime, "passion for smooth and precious surfaces" he explains his philosophy, describing how ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. Loos introduced a sense of the "immorality" of ornament, describing it as "degenerate", its suppression as necessary for regulating modern society. He took as one of his examples the tattooing of the "Papuan" and the intense surface decorations of the objects about him—Loos says that, in the eyes of western culture, the Papuan has not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man, who, should he tattoo himself, would either be considered a criminal or a degenerate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

'degenerate'?

If one ponders the history of architecture and its decoration, (see Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for a broad overview), one is humbled by its diversity and wonder, and becomes embarrassed by today’s cheek that seeks to justify the slick blandness of our era with its flashy, smartly-distorted, different forms that lack any ideas from relevant theory, by mocking this past, as if this approach might be useful, even clever. The visions and concepts that have been framed by the twentieth century have all sought to make a virtue out of the sheer, stark void of our naked designs, whatever unique form they might be given, even suggesting that the lack of any decoration is superior to what is seen as the past’s frivolous, nonsensical whimsy: ‘more honest’ is the term used, ‘functional,’ suggesting that there is some guile in decorating that gets close to cheating, being immoral: a wasteful, useless indulgence, a perversion of expression, as if our efforts are not. This sermonising has nothing to do with the subject, nude bodies or otherwise; rather it involves only the methodology of past eras and their beliefs that are said to have ignored the simple purity of basic material form in favour of things flippantly excessive, misguided, ‘decorative’ and useless. The descriptive terms have become synonymous with the word ‘decoration’ itself. That there might be some rigorous symbolism in the works of other times means nothing to the ‘new’ thinking. There is something of the work efficiency factors here: time and motion relevance. The latent message is the cliché ‘less is more.’ In time and motion studies, this equated to ‘less time/effort, more output/profit.’ Architecturally, it referred to a minimalist approach, at least the stylistic appearance of things sparse and elemental. Was this Miesian term invented to legitimise the mockery, to justify it, in a similar fashion to the Hertzog analysis of his firm’s work that established a schedule to rationalise its bespoke, avant-garde quirkiness?: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/herzog-de-meuron-architecture-with-no.html

Vitrahaus Herzog & de Meuron

Our age seems happy with ad hoc, what might be called ‘decorative’ fantasies, those ‘visionary’ forms pieced together by Gehry and Hadid, et.al. These huge icons of random, self-centred, self-expression are used as if in the self-promotion of genius that is really just offbeat difference, unusual and unexpected distortions of forms once known as the ‘International’ style, now adopted, adapted and manipulated otherwise by computers: ‘morphed’ to surprise the eye. The concerns with this development that ironically dismisses historic decoration and seeks out its own bespoke characteristics in brazen, de-materialised, de-formed identity, have been sketched in other pieces, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/zahas-architectural-car-design-strategy.html ; http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/ha-ha-ha-hadid-designs-for-world-class.html ; http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/new-gehry-projects-in-aleppo.html ; and http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/pairs-16-gehry-inspires-hadid.html The approaches are all based on attitudes like that expressed in Adolf Loos’s pronouncement, ‘Ornament is a Crime.’ They all appear to adopt the narrow, cliché interpretation of Louis Sullivan’s dictum, ‘Form follows function,’ and use this as a basis for diversions and inversions; deviations and variations. Sullivan scoffed at the stupidity of the awkwardly huge, heavily sculptured, ‘non-functional’ Victorian parapets, preferring things rigorously ‘Gothic’ and rationally ‘Greek.’ Yet he decorated his buildings. The difference with his approach was, as he explained, that the parapet expressed itself as an unwieldy chunk of frivolous, unnecessary decoration with no essential function beyond being there as an additional, clumsy replica, a theatrically-styled copy to give an ‘historic’ image: a true irrelevance.

Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats should remain required reading for architects of all eras. It remains an inspirational work. Every concept of ‘progress,’ that apparent perpetual movement of things inexorably becoming ever better and better than any past, and anything in any past, should be abolished, dismissed as an irrelevant and misguiding concept. There is nothing in any future that requires that it must be better than any past other than when accompanied by those concepts and beliefs rooted in the dull notions of self-centred blind hope and rude optimism that sees things ‘new’ as always being better, superior. Our era rushes ‘forward’ with the idea that everything will be and must be improved in the future, if we only ‘move forward’ away from things past as quickly as possible: a movement we describe as ‘progress.’ The whole notion holds an irrationally expectant presence, labelling things ‘past’ as inadequate, inferior, prior to any future being envisaged, let alone experienced. All that is wished for is that these ‘past’ things will go, fade away into history, as history, the very minute they appear, to make way for the ‘next’ whatever. That the new technologies make everything today look so perfectly slick, and that of the past so clumsy, crude and crass – like the appearance of freehand graphics and hand writing – does nothing to help change ideas of and the demand for perpetual advancement that pass rude judgement on these ‘inferior’ formats and expressions whatever their real substance might be.

“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.”

John Ruskin The Stones of Venice

There is no value given to the notion of learning from experience, the past; the immediate past or any of its eras. In technology, this reforming, anticipatory attitude means things becoming ever smaller, bigger, thinner, lighter, cheaper, faster, smarter, slicker, etc., anything different, even though we still have very little understanding of the impact that these gadgets and their instant obsolescence have on our lives. We carry this prompt redundancy attitude, this expectation of needed fast change, with its continuous, almost immediate dilapidation, degeneration, into every aspect of our existence, even architecture, only to frequently discover silent gaps, dark unknowns that we appear happy to ignore rather than explore. Indeed, our gadgets help us disregard these concerns, these doubts, intellectual chasms, with their entertaining distractions that lead to ever-new attractions and growing expectations: the next model; the upgrade; tomorrow’s anticipated, transformative secret. Technology supports our naive enthusiasm for a grand, ‘Star Wars’ future, the ever better and better, as it is in its own interests to do this; and we support technology in this game by allowing it to seek to achieve, even to promote this expectation without really knowing why, other than as some broad notion of advancement, improvement - ‘progress’: “as if this were necessarily so,” as Wittgenstein once said of ‘10-year’ scientific predictions. It may not be necessarily so at all. When might we be content? - see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/are-smart-cities-numb-to-possibilities.html

So it is that, with this same dismissive attitude to things of the past, Kindergarten Chats has been allowed to disappear from the reading lists of the young today, to become part of a forgotten ‘past,’ history, understood as an ‘old and irrelevant’ out-of-print publication. That Sullivan was addressing the ‘young architect’ as an educator makes no difference to the young or old today. This is not the only book to be so rudely treated. There are many, very many that have been shoved aside by the hype of the new. Trystan Edward’s Manners in Architecture has suffered the same fate. Manners no longer seem to matter in any field of interest today: they present as a show of weakness. Social media makes this clear; and Howard Robertson’s The Principles of Architectural Composition gets laughed at for its 1924 naivety by those who consider themselves superior in every and any way, without knowing why. The annoyance is that the young always believe that they all know better, that their opinion alone is ‘gospel.’ We have all been there in one way or another. One admires the new ambitions, visions, and the energy, but there is no guide today other than social responses to their ‘selfies’ - their self-expression and self-impression. If the books or works of past times do ever happen to be ‘rediscovered,’ they are perceived to be a part of the genius of the discoverer – ‘I recognised this’ - and are used for self-promotion, al la Gahry/Hadid-style: and why not? - c.f. Andrew Kudless at the Abedian School of Architecture, Bond University talk; and Dagmar Reinhardt, also at Bond, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/exploring-definition-edge-condition-of.html who both speak of their work with the apparent attitude: “clever me, extending the work started by others whom I have ‘discovered’ and reinterpreted in my new and exciting work” - as just more ‘selfies’ praising ‘selfies.’

Louis Sullivan decoration

Sullivan might have mocked gaudy excrescences under his dictum ‘Form Follows Function,’ as he argued for a functional poetic in his work that was itself beautifully, eloquently decorated, as he noted, with florid work that was integral and relevant, expressive of the whole, touching on nature and its ideas and origins while enriching the expression organically. His understanding was never a single, limited, practical notion of essential purpose. It embodied the inverse to this cliché in the lesser known, even forgotten phrase, ‘Function Follows Form,’ a notion that spoke of a unique integrity and wholeness, a poetic synthesis (see Kenneth White poem in http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/experiencing-things-poetic.html and THE AIM OF ART in the sidebar), where “the function of the rose is the form of the rose; the form of the rose is the function of the rose.” Surprisingly, it was Sullivan who predicted the death of decoration, but only for an era. He saw that time was needed to re-establish the rigour; to re-discover the purpose; to be able to see things more clearly yet again. This era has now passed, or is coming to its conclusion, but decoration does not appear to have any resurgence. Why? What is going on? What might be needed for decoration to once again flourish with its own power and coherence, inner strengths, enrichments that lie beyond bland and bold, clever self-expression, no matter how many distortions and surprising differences this might involve?

One does indeed become embarrassed with today’s attitudes to the beauty and wonder of the past; for example, the classical forms with their complexities of inter-related decoration: see George Hersey The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Meaning-Classical-Architecture-Speculations/dp/0262580896 Over many eras, from ancient times to those recently modern, things classical have been built, and built again, never losing their power or authority. Why is it that we, today, (apart from Prince Charles et.al.), see this expression as a flippant farce, but have nothing similar to this coherence and authority in our architecture? Are we merely making sense out of our poverty of expression because we know and can do so little else? Are we placating our lazy ignorance with fabricated theory that excludes the complications of decoration, demeans it? One cannot but stand on the edge of the gulf, the void, and despair without some rationalisation that boasts a new understanding, a new hope, even if generated out of such doubt and poverty, despite the risks involved. But tattoos are now seen everywhere as body decoration. Is this the new beginning? Are we scared of the question: ‘What do I put where?’ in our architecture, and 'Why?' There appears to be little doubt with the marking of our bodies, given the remarkable diversity of images on display and their variety of locations. Do the architectural ‘tattoo’ decisions scare us; challenge us too much?

Papuan tattoos

Can decoration help us regain some mental rigour; help us cope with the complexities of life that might be baffling us into excusing ourselves? The Gothic world knew how such stories and coherence in buildings could enrich, as did the Greek rigour too. When might we seek out a similar ‘life support’ beyond drugs and personal ‘selfie’ expression? Do other things have to come into place first?

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”

John Ruskin The Stones of Venice

A culture needs to have and to know its stories before it can celebrate them. Have we lost these and become as singular, lost souls meandering around in a fragmented solitude (see Kenneth White THE AIM OF ART in sidebar) screaming at the world, becoming stimulated by difference, claiming genius in anything strange, odd and unusual just to mark our place, MY place, as self-expression in a chaotic void of uncertainty? Does this mesmerising mess generate the interest in the tattoo – the markings, the makings, of ME, on ME?

Where are we? Who are we? What can we celebrate as a society, a culture? Consider Rosslyn Chapel and ask: ‘What is man?’

Rosslyn Chapel

‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ (Psalm 8:4)

What is decoration?

What might it be?

What might it become today beyond an excused blandness, a baldness of bold form?

'spiritual strength'?

Loos concluded that "No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level ... Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

TATTOOS

Hopefully tattoos don't represent a new beginning in architectural decoration

25 March 2017

NOTE:

The architects featured in the show (Rejected Architects) relied upon function rather than symmetry, with an emphasis on flexibility, lightness, and simplicity. "Ornament has no place," the pamphlet explained, "since hand-cut ornament is impracticable in an industrial age. The beauty of the style rests in the free composition of volumes and surfaces, the adjustment of such elements as doors and windows, and the perfection of machined surfaces.”

Hugh Howard Architecture's Odd Couple Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson Bloomsbury Press New York 2016

p.75

No comments:

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.

Tuesday 21 February 2017

ON DECORATION – ITS MEANING, PAST & FUTURE

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