- the bugbear of 'Grand Designs'
It was Ananda Coomaraswamy who wrote the essay The Bugbear of Literacy – see:
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Bugbear_of_Literacy_by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.pdf
The modern world has always seen literacy as a positive, an
essential part of learning and being, a truly transformative,
cultural necessity. Illiteracy is seen as an unfortunate, ‘backwards’
circumstance, a little like mud building, basic and bland – a
situation lacking any ‘intellectual’ sophistication or
progressive ambition. Coomaraswamy argued differently;# and one could
argue likewise on the impact and relevance of McCloud’s Grand
Designs* – its
bugbear.
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali.
It was the BBC report on the Great
Mosque of Djenné, Mali -
see; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9
and
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190801-the-massive-mosque-built-once-a-year
- that highlighted the problem. Here mud and people are engaged in
maintaining wonder. There is no dramatic music, or exaggerated hype
here; there is no saga on family breakdowns; no failed materials,
lack of money, progress; or any disastrous impacts of weather and
time: everything that has become fodder for the Grand
Designs programme dramas.
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali.
Ordinary mud and lives can make
marvels without the super-exaggerated buildups - literally - to
generate interest, that then seek to promote an ambition, a need, a
desire to achieve the ‘Grand Design’ definition of architecture
as a personal achievement and expression; as something bespoke,
special, devoid of any link to the reality of costs or contexts;
something just there to be recorded as an entertainment for folk to
stare at - MY creativity and expression: only this is important, and
equates to the ‘literacy’ of design that dramatically contrasts
with the raw necessity of 'illiterate' mud.
Architect Hassan Fathy
We need to learn about the
architecture of things ordinary, like the mud building of Hassan
Fathy, an approach explored by Christopher Alexander who, ironically,
gained a reputation with his clever title, Notes on the Synthesis
of Form. It
must be the book in architecture that is the equivalent of
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
- many purchased, but few read or understood. Sadly the following
writings of Alexander that took an alternative view on things, were
ignored in much the same manner. A Pattern Language,
along with its
associated publications, made a significant point, but became
something like the traditional household bible, a required, big book
on a shelf, rarely opened, and a little overwhelming when it was.
Even the pages of this Oxford publication are beautifully, biblically
thin. The subsequent The Nature of Order series seemed to
exist only for enthusiasts to purchase and peruse, and become
privately excited about as the world became Gehry-ized and Hadid-ed; received somewhat in the same manner as John James’s books on Chartres and
the cathedral builders of the Paris basin were – all truly
significant publications that have never been given the attention and respect that they deserve. Alexander's intrigues seemed to get too personal for
general consumption; too academically rich and fertile; too intimate
and modest for the world interested in articulate, literate, ‘Grand
Designs;’ ignored in the same manner as James’s substantial studies that reported on his years of astonishingly detailed research.
Architect Hassan Fathy
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali.
The BBC Mali mosque report
highlighted how meaning and mud - values and necessity - were not
structured opposites: how simple, everyday things can be magnificent.
Amazement reigned as the idea became explicit: we need to rediscover
mud and hands; to re-learn how simplicity and necessity can create marvels if the
spirit.
The problem seems to lie not only in
the desire for things ‘grand,’ but in knowing what matters of the
spirit can be embodied in our architecture. Is it this unknowing
struggle that seeks its deliverance in the interpretation of the
power of things spiritual as things merely big, bold, and grandiose?
The modesty of the Mali mosque needs to define majesty for us,
and its possibilities, rather than the continuing muddling around
with the entertainments of the self-proclaimed ‘grand designs’ of
Grand Designs, stimulating
those egocentric messes
that we see replicated in our towns and cities everyday.
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali.
The
bugbear of Grand Designs
is not only its manipulative, ‘entertaining’ characteristics, its
repetitive, formulaic programming, but also its assumption that
things are only ‘architectural’ if sophisticated and ‘grandly’
grand: pompously self-conscious and exhibitionist. We need to muddy
such 'literate' concepts
with the clarity and complexity of things ordinary, things
‘illiterate,’ in
order to appreciate their inherent
rigour - their modesty and majesty.
#
A
“literary” man, if ever
there was one, the late Professor G.L.Kitteredge writes: “It
requires a combined effort of the reason and the imagination to
conceive
a poet as a person who cannot write, singing or reciting his verses
to an audience that cannot read … The ability of oral tradition to
transmit great masses of verse for hundreds of years is proved and
admitted … To this oral literature, as the French call it,
education is no friend. Culture destroys it, sometimes with amazing
rapidity. When a nation begins to read … what was once the
possession of the folk as a whole, becomes the heritage of the
illiterate only, and soon, unless it is gathered up by the antiquary,
vanishes altogether.” Mark, too, that this oral literature once
belonged “to the whole people … the community whose intellectual
interests are the same from the top of the social structure to
the bottom,” while in the reading society it is accessible only to
antiquaries, and is no longer bound up with everyday life. A point of
further importance is this: that the traditional oral literatures
interested not only all classes, but also all ages of
the population; while the books that are nowadays written expressly
"for children" are such as no mature mind could tolerate;
it is now only the comic strips that appeal alike to children who
have been given nothing better and at the same time to "adults"
who have never grown up.
. . .
American is already a language of
exclusively external relationships, a tradesman’s tongue – lest
the other peoples should be unable to compete effectively with us.
Competition is the life of trade, and gangsters must have rivals.
NOTE:
Just as the oral literature belonged
to everyone, so too did the mud – it built grand mosques and the most
basic of shelters with equal pride, confidence and contentment.
Architect Hassan Fathy
*
On Channel 4’s Grand Designs, see:
