voussoirs: October 2017

Sunday 15 October 2017

SHETLAND'S CHALLENGE ?

While travelling to Shetland recently, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) News was read on-line. One report told that Lord Howe Island residents had just rejected all wind-turbine development on their land, on aesthetic grounds, pure appearance alone.^

When driving north to Unst, the familiar turbines high above Tingwall brought the news item to mind. Later, on the approach to Gutcher, the set of five, stark wind structures standing tall over North Yell was seen for the first time. Looking back at this array of elevated spinning blades from Belmont, one soon becomes aware of the aesthetic intrigues stimulated by these prominent machines.

Belmont House, Unst

Aerial view of Belmont House

It has taken many years and much careful and committed effort for Belmont House to be renovated. All materials, indeed nearly every single stone, each precise detail, and the exact hue of the finishes were meticulously researched, recorded, reviewed, and authenticated so that this beautiful building could be respected, and responsibly restored to its original grandeur: made authentic again. While this effort has achieved its intent, the authenticity of the landscape, the original context of the old house beyond its garden walls, has been significantly altered by a development that apparently remains oblivious to its domineering impact. Belmont House now stands on its formal axis gazing out over Bluemull Sound, looking across to the hills of Yell on which the set of five turbines stand, protruding cyclically into the scope of the sky that forms part of the broad prospect of the historic house, its distant address.

The wind turbines at North Yell with new access road.

Wind turbines always come with a service access footprint.

Belmont House

The Biblical poet's 'lift up mine eyes unto the hills,' comes to mind as one ponders the 'help' that Belmont House might gain from this hilltop development. It becomes obvious that there is something askew in the search for things 'green' and sustainable, with the maintenance of a strategy that appears so careless with the aesthetic qualities of landscape in these treeless islands, of the experience of place, and the subtleties of the heritage of the region. Shetland needs to decide whether it finds such significant impacts on its stark beauty, described by MacDiarmid as 'the infinite beauties of the bare land,' to be of any relevance to its identity that it promotes without any apparent irony or embarrassment as 'Pride of Place.'

Hugh MacDiarmid

Ferry crossing Bluemull Sound (Belmont House in centre)

Weeks later, on the ferry crossing from Gutcher to Belmont, while admiring the vista of graduated, grey, misted hills, and the startling, diving flight of gannets in the late, hazed brilliance of the setting sun, the distracting dominance of the towers alerted the eyes and demanded attention. Their hedge-hogging of the sky, pricking the spirit of place with the perpetual, awkward, asymmetric agitation of their geometric rigour, made them the centre of attention; a distraction; an unwanted attraction.

Yell hills and sky without turbines

The five turbines, North Yell

View of North Yell from ferry (with wind turbines kept just of of frame left)

Shetland promotes its naked beauty, its 'green,' natural, island credentials, and its splendid landscape, perhaps best illustrated in those J.D. Ratter photographs of old, all with a certain nostalgic pomp and panache.# Shetland really has to decide if it wants the first characteristic, rationalised in the production of 'green' wind power, or the latter, the Ratter wonder, the love and care of bare, native place, as presently there appears to be a collision of intents, a raw clash of ambitions.

Hugh MacDiarmid wrote about his time on Whalsay with its 'rare interludes back in Edinburgh or Glasgow or Manchester,' as 'these comings into relationship again with minds keen, alert, attuned to beauty.' He added that he had no intention of being unfair to Shetland, since 'If there are no such people in Shetland, there are exceedingly few in Scotland or England either - not more than one per 100,000.' (Quoted by Michael Grieve in MacDiarmid in Shetland, edited by Graham and Smith, Shetland Library, Lerwick, 1992 -Foreword.)

Sadly, given Shetland's population, and using these MacDiarmid figures, the odds of Shetland acting on aesthetic grounds alone as Lord Howe Island has done, does not appear to augur well, in spite of the hyped promotional programmes that suggest otherwise. The maintenance of Shetland's unique beauty remains a challenge that is obvious to the visitor who brings great expectations, all generated by the mystique of the tourist blurb that slyly ignores the aesthetic implications of the generation of 'green' power with wind, and its disturbing impact on the experience of place* and its past, a circumstance that creates such a bold and unsettling, irrational conflict revealed so clearly on Unst, at historic Belmont.

What happens to us

Is irrelevant to the world's geology

But what happens to the world's geology

Is not irrelevant to us.

We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,

Not the stones to us.

Hugh MacDiarmid On a Raised Beach+

Hugh MacDiarmid

Oscar Wilde comes to mind: ‘Each man kills the things he loves . . . ’

Muckle Flugga Lighthouse, northern Unst

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-13/lord-howe-islands-plans-for-wind-turbines-denied/8613506

"This would affect the spectacular and scenic landscapes for which the world heritage island group is recognised," the spokesman said in a statement.

The strong influence of Shetland's landscape, heritage and culture, can be seen in the creative output of Shetland's craft makers.

Statement made in the introduction of the Shetland Craft Trail & Makers 2016/2017 booklet.

Adam Nicolson, in Sea Room An Island Life, describes the experience of his Shiant Islands as: 'the loved contours of the place.'

MacDiarmid is certainly one of the major figures of all Scottish literature, and I think probably our greatest poet since Burns.

George Mackay Brown

Thursday 5 October 2017

THE NEED FOR STREET VIEW IN ARCHITECTURE

GSD Harvard

Scarborough College, Toronto

Student Housing, University of Guelph

Miami Seaport Passenger Terminal

The building has been known for many years. The large photo-mural of its interior had been passed every day for years when working in the office. It was an impressive structure, a new concept in studio design. The office of John Andrews had completed the project in its heady days in North America. The office had done some impressive work and had earned an international reputation – Scarborough College, Toronto, 1963; Student Housing, University of Guelph, 1968; the Miami Seaport Passenger Terminal, 1970; etc. . . It was work that turned the eyes of the world towards the office of this irrepressible larrikin, the daredevil Australian who was eventually brought back to his home country with the promise of the Cameron Offices, Belconnen, 1973-1976 – then one of Australia's largest and most prestigious jobs on offer at the exciting time when Gough Whitlam was PM.

John Andrews

Cameron Offices, Belconnen

Gund Hall, Harvard

The Harvard Graduate School of Architecture and Design, (GSD), Gund Hall, 1972, like the other John Andrews work, stirred preconceptions of what a building, here a school of architecture, might be: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/what-is-school-of-architecture.html Images of this structure were published throughout the world in glossy magazines. The esteemed project became the idol for new architectural ideas, showing how visions could transform experience; how space and place could define interaction and participate in learning. The GSD was an impressive structure, especially with its surprising social connectivity; a place in which bright young architects were to be raised. What might be a better project to promote ideas and experiments for the new world order; to change the future?

The building became well-known through all of its impressive photographic images. These usually showed the students working in and using the place, highlighting the intended personal interaction with glowing success. One was transfixed. This was quality work, a landmark that held its place in history, in the story of architecture and the life of learning.

Interior Gund Hall (GSD)

It was not until recently that any more thought had been given to this building that had buried itself in one’s psyche. John Andrews had moved away from the architectural world, and, sadly, this world seemed happy to ignore him and his efforts: to almost mock them. It is a great shame that the profession is so rudely bitchy in such a determined, but petty manner. Does it see itself as a group of genius individuals where each is always better than the other; always able to achieve more and different?

Gund Hall (GSD) - the 'art' image

Time passed.

The plan was to visit New York for two weeks: the thought was that Boston could be a day-or-two trip from New York. Might it be possible to get to Boston? Google Maps was opened, then Google Earth. Distances were gauged; railway stations were located. Google's Street View was opened so that the place could be reviewed. The various likely journeys were perused: then back to the maps. In the middle of Cambridge, the distinctive road pattern stood out: ‘Harvard’ was notated in the coloured patch at the centre. Why not look around here?

Street View toured the streets, then returned to the Google Earth aerial view: there was very little that was memorable. Where was the GSD? The name was typed in, the Earth spun, and it appeared. Street View was opened: how did this structure look in its location? The building was well-known, but the images were always trimmed, isolating the wedged concrete mass from its context. What was its place in Harvard? One expected open green, academic courtyards and fields, but no! A dark, banded brick mass appeared from the StarWars movements; then a pair of mirror-matching tear-drop planned buildings came into view. Where was the GSD? The yellow stripe was clicked. As usual, the camera went too far. A magnificent, decorated brick building came into view. The screen was spun around, and the familiar image of the GSD appeared: tall concrete columns carrying a high, long box with its adjacent stepped mass.

GOOGLE EARTH

STREET VIEW

The 'hidden' church

The surprise was that this Andrews building had such neighbours. How might the thinking about this location be approached today? The GSD was built at a time of bold gestures, when architecture dreamed of transforming the old world with new forms; changing it dramatically. There was very little talk of respecting other places then. Again the stripe was clicked and another view of the GSD and its surroundings appeared out of the radial haze. The wedge addressed nothing but a different neighbour, one half of the tear-drop pair. The visions of open green space died. The concrete mass was crowded onto a corner block opposite a superb, historic brick building. A quaint old church appeared as it neighbour. This information had never been printed; never been declared; had never been seen. It was as if only the GSD was important: apparently neighbours were irrelevant. One might argue that the raised open colonnade was a spatial gesture to the old precinct, but this seemed to stretch things into apologetic language rather than explain any existing circumstance. There was really nothing other than the declaration of the concrete GSD: ME! - screaming out ‘I AM!’ with biblical fervour. Oddly, the entry into this mass could not be clearly identified; other formal issues seemed more critical.

How might one have thought about the Andrews GSD if the complete context had been known? Today this boldness would very likely be treated with harsh disdain by some critics. What might have been possible? How have young minds been altered? Looking around the streets nearby, it seems that nothing has changed; that all architects still work to their own visions irrespective of context, completely ignoring the work of others. ‘I am the greatest,’ seems to be the quiet, primal scream of each place. Street View makes this clear, not the magazines that evade the unspectacular; the everyday; the ordinary mishmash of our world.

Street View

A view published on Pinterest by a casual observer

The point is that if the architects and the architectural press are not going to tell the whole story, we must rely on Google Earth's Street View to reveal this. The Drew Heath house and the Glen Murcutt mosque clearly have been managed likewise, using carefully selected images in their self-promotion; Street View tells us this: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/drew-heath-bespoke-details-practise.html and http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/murcutts-mosque-meanings-sources.html If we are going to learn so much through images, we need to know all, or else it is only partial information, misinformation, that we are using to form opinions. Peter Rice has written about the power of the photograph to mislead: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/peter-rice-all-about-details.html We are not all able to see everything in situ, but the world is such that everything can be photographed and reproduced quickly for everyone to see everywhere, anywhere, at any time. Architects in the Shetland Islands drool over the Murcutt houses in front of their cosy fires while gales rage outside; then try to do likewise. It is this distorted 'seeing' that needs to be opened up to show everything, rather than only illustrate, illuminate, what the 'art' camera chooses; or what the architect might prefer to be seen. Harry Seidler used to take the angles for the images of his buildings for the professional photographer to finesse. He defined the ‘what’ and the ‘how.’

Street View

This careful management of identity is all too artfully quaint: too many misguided perceptions are created. Our world becomes known as a series of chosen ‘art’ images, preferred views. Street View does away with this selection process and reveals the real world – the camera moving through it in the everyday, along the street, unannounced.

The adjacent church is usually cropped or concealed

This is not the 'iconic' side of the GSD

If the world is not to be misled, then we need Street View to be used everywhere, everyday in order to overcome this guise. Only, it seems, in this way will we be able to see the true building, not the rose-tinted version of it. Then we can act appropriately rather than continue with our hagiographical bowing to the genius of the architect: consider Hadid’s museum in Glasgow: - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/pedestrian-approach.html

. . . . . .

Piano's 'art' views of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Piano’s new Whitney Museum of American Art was perused on Street View as New York was investigated. This was the first image seen of it. Already one can imagine how the architect might frame it, but Street View showed everything – its context and tricks working just too hard in its messy context, ready to be framed with the zoom lens, or distorted with the wide angle lens for the magazine world to get 'the image.'

GOOGLE EARTH

STREET VIEW

Street Views of the Whitney Museum of American Art

We need to introduce, and to be introduced to all buildings with Street View if we are unable to see them 'in the flesh.' Only in this way might we overcome the illusion of the precious photograph. Those grand images of the GSD will never be able to cheat us again. We must become more honest with each other and stop trying to declare everything as brilliant, if only it can be seen alone. “We are not alone” should be the cry on everyone's lips, not in reference to any mysterious experience of aliens, but as a statement of fact. We create an alien experience with all of these ‘special’ views, images that disguise the existential issues and highlight only what the architect thinks is critical – him/herself; his/her brilliance; her/his pure genius, all revealed in this frame.

The 'art' views are all artfully cropped or shaded

We are a community; we build communities; we never build alone. The street is all we really have – see http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/the-importance-of-street.html We need Street View to show us this world; to reveal the ordinary, the everyday, that can be transformed through accommodation and adaptation rather than exclusion.

. . . . . .

Then the idea was, if Boston could not be visited, maybe Philip Johnson's work in New Canaan could be seen. Earth moved, the idea of the glass box in the green hills was transformed: the area was almost dense suburbia – numerous swimming pools, one per grassy mansion, surround this International icon that has become a tourist destination, a real business. Google Earth has shown this. 'The Glass House' is located directly opposite the railway station, as the promotional Visitor Centre, not the iconic dwelling!

GOOGLE EARTH

STREET VIEW

Entry

House on street in front of The Glass House

Johnson's buildings are fully exposed to the street

The neighbouring house on the street is on the left, just out of frame

The real interest was the repair pattern in the bitumen road outside the railway station. Thanks Google Earth! The surprise was that The Glass House was on full view from the road, and that it had a timber gabled house in front of it. Everyone needs to know the world through Street View. All other images are, to use the terrible Trump-word that has become overused in his strange cause, FAKE! The unplanned world in the Street View vistas sings like Shelley’s skylark, revealing ‘unpremeditated art.’ The world we now have thrives on the selective, premeditated image, its artifice. Only, it seems, Street View will overcome this problem: egos seem too huge to change the canny strategies of self-promotion, of presenting only the 'preferred' vision, perhaps the idea that was never really made manifest.

The view to the street is never revealed

The neighbouring house is never seen.

The Glass Box is promoted as an isolated gem secluded in the woods*

The view back to the street is always ignored in favour of the vista of 'virgin' nature

Who would have thought that this was the view from the street?

For more on architectural visions, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/seeing-what-we-believe-idyllic-visions.html

* NOTE
28 November 2017
It is Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House near Plano, Illinois, west of Chicago that was Johnson's inspiration. The Farnsworth House truly is the isolated gem in the woods. The house uses "the trees as its curtains." Johnson, being more of an extrovert than Mies, probably loved the exposure of his glass box that seems less likely to bring tears to the eyes in the way that Mies's classicism has done to seasoned reviewers.

Farnsworth House

29 MARCH 2019

Alas, it floods:

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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.