The author makes architecture sound too dramatic. Kind of sounds like a disillusioned architecture student. Ask any person in their professional field and they will probably say that 90% of what they learned in school was useless in the real world. What I take away from my college education is not the theory or "philosophy," but learning to communicate, articulate and organize my ideas. I think architects learn about how a building really comes together once we start doing schematic drawings and construction documents during internships.
Also I always thought the move away from traditional building styles were from evolving building technology and changing culture. Sure I love the Pantheon in Rome, but I don't think I want to see it anywhere else with cheap materials I think the author really has to think about what "traditional" really means. They didn't have flexible titanium panels and the freedom of steel structure back during the times of Classical architecture.
As a "professional" we also have to assume responsibility and being a professional is based on the premise that we have more knowledge on the matter than anyone else. Sometimes architects really do take this too far and pretend they are above non-architects, but it means that we really do have a say in how something should be built. If not, we would have more buildings with fake plastic columns (something resembling a column of the doric order of course) and sheet vinyl flooring. Oh and don't forget wall carpeting. Yes, they still do exist.
can we call the movements of deconstructivism and modernism and po-mo as 'slave' rebellions against classical "imperial" arch lingos.
he could have a point cos they (deconstructivism and modernism and po-mo) show reflections of a belief in absolute freedom of form stemming from repression of creativity and imposition of oneself in an order which one doesnt agree to or isnt part of.
(akin to ..Only people who have slave mentalities cry excessively for freedom...) thats a perspective.
rebelguy:--I think that salingaros is amazing
and he's making a very valid premise.
while i certainly agree with some of the premises in here -- especially the parts about the studio-system-as-indoctrination-camp allusion -- to me this is somewhat akin to the pot calling the kettle black and most of this article is but pure padding for salingaros' real agenda, which is the admission of "ornament" back into architecture.
"like science, architecture has a vast store of practical knowledge and technical skills that one needs to master before making original contributions."
this is true, but salingaros is likely not just referring to knowing how to size a beam or where to site a building. i think we're talking cornices and stringcourses here. the "store of knowledge" is more likely the abstruse and semi-arbitrary mathematical rules which generated the form of ornamental devices. and i even agree that hey, this is part of our (western) architectural heritage, we should know about it. but salingaros isn't being honest here.
"deconstructivist buildings, moreover, have been shown to remove life from the environment. Life here is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity that is characteristic of biological forms. None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects, or students who would become architects, because the discipline has become entirely self-referential. There is no contact with outside reality, which is arrogantly stated to be the deconstructivist's principal aim."
"life" is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity? uh, no. there is no mathematical definition of life. how is this any less mystical than the mazdaists and olgivanna wright? paging prof. alexander. your patient is bleeding.
"modernism's cult symbol is an empty rectangle, with the concept of emptiness expressed by its interior being just as important as the sharp rectangular edges. Since modernist dogma strictly forbids ornament on the human range of scales 1cm - 2m, there exist no true modernist symbols on those scales to which human beings can connect."
salingaros is (or was) writing from san antonio. if he has ever used the handrail at the kimbell -- or sat in a barcelona chair -- he knows this is pure bs. detailing occurs in modernism but not ornament (or at least, it shouldn't). ornament is detailing without function.
ochona..i beg to differ..In traditional ancient Indian architecture (hindu and buddhist) ..the function of architectural ornament was to express esoteric metaphysical thoughts in an exoteric fashion.
In western classical architecture ,gargoyles would be a good example of small detailing WITH function.
you should have a look at this book
Essays in Architectural Theory/Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Edited and with an introduction by Michael W. Meister. 1995, xxii, 122 p., figs., ISBN 0-19-563805-0.
In his introductory essay, "Architecture as ornament, essential form." Michael W. Meister explores Coomaraswamy's attempts to "test the essential link between principal and necessity" in architecture and posits the dictum that if "form is ornament, therefore form has function.
if architecture were really a cult, we'd be building things like pyramids. hopefully something like this will occur again someday.
greek architecture and everything after was just a slow sprial to the lovely deconstruvist/deconstructionist approach. if nikos wants to start at the beginning, we'll have to start at beginning of a totally new kind of civilization.
I am in fair agreement with you. I originally tracked down some of Salingaros's writings looking for mathematical analyses of architecture a la Space Syntax.
He talks about Alexander's Pattern language as if buildings built from a book of "appropriate" vernacular stylistic cliches would renew our innate human goodness.
What he fails to see is that the ornamental niceties that he promotes have even less relationship to nature or natural order than that which he criticises.
His stance as a mathematician led me to expect him to forward some aspect of (fractal) mathematics in description, if not defence, of Alexander's pattern language. And all he mentions is the relationship to the human scale, and a desire for variety within a fixed framework.
He seems to believe that a secular Architecture is a problem. This, coming from a (god-fearing?) Texan. He also puts science and (some) religions on the opposite side from cults. Religions are socially acceptable cults. I am almost shocked that he does not relate Modernism directly to Sodom & Gomorrah, though he hints at destruction of society as its inevitable result
He would never accept that the empty rectangle could be an awe-inspiring space, one free from the kitsch and trivia of historical / vernacular details. Where Zen?
It is Salingaros' inherent christianity that drives his conclusions, much as the Americans will bomb the middle east and rebuild it with all the hidden language of need for macdonalds, wal-mart and Ford, Salingaros and co. would have the world built to remind us all that we are guilty catholic schoolchildren who must make amends and thank their goodly elders and religious betters. He would have us inescapably tied to the silently chattering quasi-religious details.
The fact that he even goes so far as to say that "traditional cultures don't know how to react in a constructive manner" is not a statement about their technology, aesthetic or architectural sympathies, it is about their lack of (Salingaros') God.
That man should get on his knees and eat me.
Feb 13, 06 4:21 pm ·
·
The Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club is definitely a cult, and a very exclusive one at that. There are people literally dying to get in it.
I'm not sure I agree with architecture being a cult, but during a visit to Taliesen West a few years ago I remember making a mental note to not drink the Kool-Aid.
nevermore, thanks for the references, i have to admit: i come from a eurocentric standpoint vis-a-vis ornament...i'm thinking of finials and capitals and dentil mouldings and the like. and i actually really like and admire ornament if it's done nicely...especially islamic, just a personal liking...but i can't do it and can't see the need for it in the modern project.
ornament was once the only way we could express those exoteric phenomena. buddhist/hindu architecture as far as my memory serves me was constructed on very much a load-bearing-masonry / post-and-beam structural framework that didn't allow for a lot of structural experimentation. now we can use space, light, and form to express those phenomena.
i reference the kimbell again as well as a non-"modern" example, le thoronet abbey in france, which is ornamented -- yes -- but also incredibly expressive in terms of pure space and form.
but in terms of a cult, just about any strong belief system these days can be considered a cult.
To many, a Classical building now stands for something evil,
the best. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an architect who honestly thought that cliassical buildings are evil.
2. It (a cult) isolates its members from the world
isn't architecture and the built environment fundamentally tied to the happenings of the world and society around it/us? the only way i feel isolated from the world is when i have to meet a deadline and don't escape the office for the better part of a week.
ornament was once the only way we could express those exoteric phenomena. buddhist/hindu architecture as far as my memory serves me was constructed on very much a load-bearing-masonry / post-and-beam structural framework that didn't allow for a lot of structural experimentation. now we can use space, light, and form to express those phenomena.
ochona yea i got your point..but the moot point is "what esoteric phenomena" do we express using space light and form ?....and will people bother abt it or get the meaning of it even if we do make an attempt.
as far as most modern architecture goes..it only expresses itself. it becomes a self serving tool.
I guess thats what salingaros was also hinting at....arch is becoming exceedingly isolated ( in itself )..like a self-serving holier than thou cult.
my firend had these reflections on the topic at hand....
where/when does some architecture cult/philosophy/radical isolationalist movement goes wrong ?
1. When it begins to assume and takes 'no facts, only interpretations' to
mean 'no facts in any sense', leading to an anarchic carnival.
2. When it begins to believe in absolute freedom.
3. When it begins to spill the fractured selves all over instead of bringing it into an organizational unity. Its great, that you have a multiplicty of selves, of views, of truths, - that's rich, but when it (like Coop Himmelblau) begins to liberate the manifold aspects neither suppressing nor shackling them, but without forcing the incompatible into a harmony... so that all the remainders, the aggregates just stick out as aggregates like a sore thumb... that is individuality dominating at the expense of a whole.
4. When it begins to misunderstand "there can be many meanings" for "abs. meaninglessness" and therefore spins down into a nihilistic, decadent, abyss.
Classicism actually stopped itself at the surface, because they were so profound at their very bottom. They valued the search for truth higher than the truth itself. They understood digging digging for truth, ultimately, you dig a grave from which at one stage it may not even be possible to climb out. So the meta-phor (transference) took on value. They delighted in the mask.
But with PoMo style arch., they mis-understand this value of surface-depth, and think that by revealing the insides as surface, somehow makes for more honest arch. That's where they act like Gods, and are wrong, and no different from their own critique! Irony.
I think its self-defeating to show the absence of symbols by means of a square and a null void - because that in itself is yet another symbol.
"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity." [Nietzsche.]
Arch. should be a joy to eternity, age without aging. I think that is the bond it should share with religion.
"...as far as most modern architecture goes..it only expresses itself. it becomes a self serving tool..." (Nevermore)
Thoughtful statement. Something I think about a lot. If this statement is true -- and it certainly may be true -- then our 'self serving' creations have little value. If every building is an autobiographical starting over, effectively performed within a 'self-serving' vacuum, then how might these self-indulgent works be judged against one another? What is the critical standard? Further, by then attempting to prove the value, we then typically begin creating increasingly complex rationalizations for anything and everything, and in the process simultaneously help destroy the value. There is no standard, and we are left with our current series of built expressions of groundless relativism. Although he offers no real solution -- other than simply backing up in history -- I think this is part of what Salingaros was railing against.
I'm not saying there is no solution, but I AM saying that we currently have no satisfactorily equal substitute for the power of the hammer of the gods.
nice nietzsche quote there. as far as modern architecture expressing itself, that is exactly correct.
there are many strains of the modern, but one which might be best exemplified by early piano/rogers/foster and the like posits that the "stuff" we tried for millenia to hide -- the insides of the wall, for instance, the ducts and pipes and switches -- had aesthetic value both in its own right and because it expressed the function of the building, making it more complete in the minds of its users. there is a leap of faith in modernism that the internal functions of a wall (a building) is / are worth showing in the first place, but.
that instead of mouldings that don't hold up a wall or dormers that don't provide light to any useable space we distill the essence of the building and then organize it. pompidou is an ok example, the de menil in houston is an excellent one.
another strain of modernism posits the opposite (so there we have our many meanings, not meaninglessness), that the essence of space, material, and texture is the function of architecture -- and that all effort should be made to eliminate anything not essential to that experience from view. from mies to pawson on this one. once again, a leap of faith.
i feel comfortable and even happy in the shifting sea of relativism that is today's architecture. i dunno, i hate "modernism" done wrong as much as i hate "classicism" done wrong. i think a lot of us who tend to design somewhere between one of the two poles i mentioned don't dislike history or historical architecture ... we just see no need to repeat it note for note.
Feb 14, 06 2:43 pm ·
·
Historically speaking, "ducts and pipes and switches" are very new to architecture, and certainly haven't been around for millenia.
"...(so there we have our many meanings, not meaninglessness),..."
That was a bit of a leap. Repeating positions doesn't make them any more valid, but, as Salingaros might agree, does make you a prospective cult candidate.
Exactly. Classicism was born out of the technology and (social) fabric of the time. The buildings represented as much the stasis of social class as they did the bodies of social constraint.
The fact that remaining classical buildings are still / now the preserve of the wealthy does not mean that they offer better value or serve a higher purpose.
Salingaros and Prince Charlie (with his poundbury village) forget that we no longer have the abundance of cheap labour or material to develop the style that they hanker after. Do they still believe that the early hand-built motor car is the way forward, or sartorial fashions from the renaissance should be revived ?
A good friend was quoted thus "I have seen the past, and it works" (Google tells me a lot of people have been quoted saying this). I have to disagree. If we knew the answers to the future, we would be there already. Make it relevant to today and there's a chance it will work tomorrow. Start building for yesterday and forget all your tomorrows.
To tie this into the thread, Classicism is the destructive cult. I admit that, like hard drugs, it is addictive and can be beautiful but what social programme can it be grafted onto today? Prison? Religion?
psyarch..you are being too literal by saying that the early hand-built motor car is the way forward, or sartorial fashions from the renaissance should be revived.
let's narrow the argument down to only architecture...I would say that classical architecture was more "rich" in "genuine" meaning and metaphors than what we see today.
(Im narrowing it down further to religious architecture.)
and by religious I dont mean concepts of god,heaven or hell..the word religion comes from the latin religere -meaning : to reconnect.
reconnecting with a source higher than oneself to enable oneself to climb higher metaphysically and evolutionary.
What can be defined as "higher "...
I quote the Italian Right-wing traditionalist ,Baron Julius Evola:-
"For us, "Tradition" is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,' i.e. of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one."
-------
to put it very succintly..I can safely make the broad assumption that MOST modern architecture and architects ( and I am including myself ) .....play with form,space ,art colour etc to define and redefine and redefine those only (form,space ,art colour etc ).
classical arch mastered the use of space,form,art, colour etc etc and used them to define something "higher".......
In the past ..they mave have been less creative than us ..(working within creative boundaries , within social structures)..but they were going upwards mentally...we seem to be spinning around a circle ,occassionally taking tangential paths off the circles and landing back into the same circle.
dont know if Im making sense..thinking faster than I can type.too many things to express .
and to explain my earlier post I just found these....
It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling which chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture - drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live.
----H.P. Lovecraft
"I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding."
Once you start working in the real world for smaller firms doing real projects all of this fades...It's architecture's ugly marriage with the world of academia that produced this wierdness...30 years after I've been in school, it's the outsiders and the "good ol' boys" who have their own firms. The supplicants and the sychophants have faded away into obscurity.
The tragedy of architecture in this age is that people are sometimes forced to live with another person’s “creationâ€â€”and in those common situations, architecture, unlike art, demands a moral consideration of other people, and thus self-restraint.
"Homes built by big-name architects for individual clients are the hardest to price and to sell, because they were built for a specific client and reflect that person's individuality."
-today's real estate section, los angeles times link
This is the same trick that political pundits (of both stripes) use to paint the "other side" as evil: use the the pejorative terms generally associated with a group that is poorly regarded and apply them to the new bad guys."Brainwashed" modernists living in "compounds" (how very Branch Davidian).
He also conveniently forgets to mentions that Itten's religeous belief's main influence on the Bauhaus was getting the cafeteria to go macrobiotic. His proselytizing was one of the primary reasons Gropius wound up sacking him.
Mar 17, 06 2:18 pm ·
·
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Architecture As A Cult
Frighteningly, I think there is a great deal of truth to this.
'The point where architecture turned into a cult can be identified with the abandonment of traditional building culture.'
'The studio method of architectural training lends itself perfectly as a technique for cult indoctrination.'
reflections are appreciated...
"It's all Greek to me!"
the mathematician and architectural thinker Nikos Salingaros is a Blowhard.
"Its partially all greek to me too"
The author makes architecture sound too dramatic. Kind of sounds like a disillusioned architecture student. Ask any person in their professional field and they will probably say that 90% of what they learned in school was useless in the real world. What I take away from my college education is not the theory or "philosophy," but learning to communicate, articulate and organize my ideas. I think architects learn about how a building really comes together once we start doing schematic drawings and construction documents during internships.
Also I always thought the move away from traditional building styles were from evolving building technology and changing culture. Sure I love the Pantheon in Rome, but I don't think I want to see it anywhere else with cheap materials I think the author really has to think about what "traditional" really means. They didn't have flexible titanium panels and the freedom of steel structure back during the times of Classical architecture.
As a "professional" we also have to assume responsibility and being a professional is based on the premise that we have more knowledge on the matter than anyone else. Sometimes architects really do take this too far and pretend they are above non-architects, but it means that we really do have a say in how something should be built. If not, we would have more buildings with fake plastic columns (something resembling a column of the doric order of course) and sheet vinyl flooring. Oh and don't forget wall carpeting. Yes, they still do exist.
Department of Mathematics??? Obviously this person hasn't stepped into a real architect's office.
Salingaros is a serious twunt.
i.e. somewhere between a twat and a ...
i don't see evidence of any mass suicides, unless prince charles should decide to do heself in because he 'hardly dare say anything at all'
[thanks for that great quote abra]
i'm takin my mazdanan and goin home. you all are meanies...
Hahahahaha
can we call the movements of deconstructivism and modernism and po-mo as 'slave' rebellions against classical "imperial" arch lingos.
he could have a point cos they (deconstructivism and modernism and po-mo) show reflections of a belief in absolute freedom of form stemming from repression of creativity and imposition of oneself in an order which one doesnt agree to or isnt part of.
(akin to ..Only people who have slave mentalities cry excessively for freedom...) thats a perspective.
rebelguy:--I think that salingaros is amazing
and he's making a very valid premise.
Cult Classics
Artifacts of Ottopia No. 24 through 44
beginning at www.quondam.com/12/1153.htm
The Architect's Wife Style
3 November 2000
beginning at www.quondam.com/31/3018.htm
while i certainly agree with some of the premises in here -- especially the parts about the studio-system-as-indoctrination-camp allusion -- to me this is somewhat akin to the pot calling the kettle black and most of this article is but pure padding for salingaros' real agenda, which is the admission of "ornament" back into architecture.
"like science, architecture has a vast store of practical knowledge and technical skills that one needs to master before making original contributions."
this is true, but salingaros is likely not just referring to knowing how to size a beam or where to site a building. i think we're talking cornices and stringcourses here. the "store of knowledge" is more likely the abstruse and semi-arbitrary mathematical rules which generated the form of ornamental devices. and i even agree that hey, this is part of our (western) architectural heritage, we should know about it. but salingaros isn't being honest here.
"deconstructivist buildings, moreover, have been shown to remove life from the environment. Life here is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity that is characteristic of biological forms. None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects, or students who would become architects, because the discipline has become entirely self-referential. There is no contact with outside reality, which is arrogantly stated to be the deconstructivist's principal aim."
"life" is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity? uh, no. there is no mathematical definition of life. how is this any less mystical than the mazdaists and olgivanna wright? paging prof. alexander. your patient is bleeding.
"modernism's cult symbol is an empty rectangle, with the concept of emptiness expressed by its interior being just as important as the sharp rectangular edges. Since modernist dogma strictly forbids ornament on the human range of scales 1cm - 2m, there exist no true modernist symbols on those scales to which human beings can connect."
salingaros is (or was) writing from san antonio. if he has ever used the handrail at the kimbell -- or sat in a barcelona chair -- he knows this is pure bs. detailing occurs in modernism but not ornament (or at least, it shouldn't). ornament is detailing without function.
i could go on but time to do some more ornament.
ochona..i beg to differ..In traditional ancient Indian architecture (hindu and buddhist) ..the function of architectural ornament was to express esoteric metaphysical thoughts in an exoteric fashion.
In western classical architecture ,gargoyles would be a good example of small detailing WITH function.
also ochona..
you should have a look at this book
Essays in Architectural Theory/Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Edited and with an introduction by Michael W. Meister. 1995, xxii, 122 p., figs., ISBN 0-19-563805-0.
In his introductory essay, "Architecture as ornament, essential form." Michael W. Meister explores Coomaraswamy's attempts to "test the essential link between principal and necessity" in architecture and posits the dictum that if "form is ornament, therefore form has function.
if architecture were really a cult, we'd be building things like pyramids. hopefully something like this will occur again someday.
greek architecture and everything after was just a slow sprial to the lovely deconstruvist/deconstructionist approach. if nikos wants to start at the beginning, we'll have to start at beginning of a totally new kind of civilization.
Ochona,
I am in fair agreement with you. I originally tracked down some of Salingaros's writings looking for mathematical analyses of architecture a la Space Syntax.
He talks about Alexander's Pattern language as if buildings built from a book of "appropriate" vernacular stylistic cliches would renew our innate human goodness.
What he fails to see is that the ornamental niceties that he promotes have even less relationship to nature or natural order than that which he criticises.
His stance as a mathematician led me to expect him to forward some aspect of (fractal) mathematics in description, if not defence, of Alexander's pattern language. And all he mentions is the relationship to the human scale, and a desire for variety within a fixed framework.
He seems to believe that a secular Architecture is a problem. This, coming from a (god-fearing?) Texan. He also puts science and (some) religions on the opposite side from cults. Religions are socially acceptable cults. I am almost shocked that he does not relate Modernism directly to Sodom & Gomorrah, though he hints at destruction of society as its inevitable result
He would never accept that the empty rectangle could be an awe-inspiring space, one free from the kitsch and trivia of historical / vernacular details. Where Zen?
It is Salingaros' inherent christianity that drives his conclusions, much as the Americans will bomb the middle east and rebuild it with all the hidden language of need for macdonalds, wal-mart and Ford, Salingaros and co. would have the world built to remind us all that we are guilty catholic schoolchildren who must make amends and thank their goodly elders and religious betters. He would have us inescapably tied to the silently chattering quasi-religious details.
The fact that he even goes so far as to say that "traditional cultures don't know how to react in a constructive manner" is not a statement about their technology, aesthetic or architectural sympathies, it is about their lack of (Salingaros') God.
That man should get on his knees and eat me.
The Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club is definitely a cult, and a very exclusive one at that. There are people literally dying to get in it.
I'm not sure I agree with architecture being a cult, but during a visit to Taliesen West a few years ago I remember making a mental note to not drink the Kool-Aid.
nevermore, thanks for the references, i have to admit: i come from a eurocentric standpoint vis-a-vis ornament...i'm thinking of finials and capitals and dentil mouldings and the like. and i actually really like and admire ornament if it's done nicely...especially islamic, just a personal liking...but i can't do it and can't see the need for it in the modern project.
ornament was once the only way we could express those exoteric phenomena. buddhist/hindu architecture as far as my memory serves me was constructed on very much a load-bearing-masonry / post-and-beam structural framework that didn't allow for a lot of structural experimentation. now we can use space, light, and form to express those phenomena.
i reference the kimbell again as well as a non-"modern" example, le thoronet abbey in france, which is ornamented -- yes -- but also incredibly expressive in terms of pure space and form.
but in terms of a cult, just about any strong belief system these days can be considered a cult.
wow... he sounds... angry. i personally liked
To many, a Classical building now stands for something evil,
the best. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an architect who honestly thought that cliassical buildings are evil.
2. It (a cult) isolates its members from the world
isn't architecture and the built environment fundamentally tied to the happenings of the world and society around it/us? the only way i feel isolated from the world is when i have to meet a deadline and don't escape the office for the better part of a week.
ochona yea i got your point..but the moot point is "what esoteric phenomena" do we express using space light and form ?....and will people bother abt it or get the meaning of it even if we do make an attempt.
as far as most modern architecture goes..it only expresses itself. it becomes a self serving tool.
I guess thats what salingaros was also hinting at....arch is becoming exceedingly isolated ( in itself )..like a self-serving holier than thou cult.
my firend had these reflections on the topic at hand....
where/when does some architecture cult/philosophy/radical isolationalist movement goes wrong ?
1. When it begins to assume and takes 'no facts, only interpretations' to
mean 'no facts in any sense', leading to an anarchic carnival.
2. When it begins to believe in absolute freedom.
3. When it begins to spill the fractured selves all over instead of bringing it into an organizational unity. Its great, that you have a multiplicty of selves, of views, of truths, - that's rich, but when it (like Coop Himmelblau) begins to liberate the manifold aspects neither suppressing nor shackling them, but without forcing the incompatible into a harmony... so that all the remainders, the aggregates just stick out as aggregates like a sore thumb... that is individuality dominating at the expense of a whole.
4. When it begins to misunderstand "there can be many meanings" for "abs. meaninglessness" and therefore spins down into a nihilistic, decadent, abyss.
Classicism actually stopped itself at the surface, because they were so profound at their very bottom. They valued the search for truth higher than the truth itself. They understood digging digging for truth, ultimately, you dig a grave from which at one stage it may not even be possible to climb out. So the meta-phor (transference) took on value. They delighted in the mask.
But with PoMo style arch., they mis-understand this value of surface-depth, and think that by revealing the insides as surface, somehow makes for more honest arch. That's where they act like Gods, and are wrong, and no different from their own critique! Irony.
I think its self-defeating to show the absence of symbols by means of a square and a null void - because that in itself is yet another symbol.
"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity." [Nietzsche.]
Arch. should be a joy to eternity, age without aging. I think that is the bond it should share with religion.
what a load of crap !!!
oye hero....
kya re ?..shaana banta hai ?
oye sporadic
masti kar raha hu..dil pe nahi lene ka.kya ?
( woh bhi valentine's day pe )..samjha ?
Nova,
I laughed.
"...as far as most modern architecture goes..it only expresses itself. it becomes a self serving tool..." (Nevermore)
Thoughtful statement. Something I think about a lot. If this statement is true -- and it certainly may be true -- then our 'self serving' creations have little value. If every building is an autobiographical starting over, effectively performed within a 'self-serving' vacuum, then how might these self-indulgent works be judged against one another? What is the critical standard? Further, by then attempting to prove the value, we then typically begin creating increasingly complex rationalizations for anything and everything, and in the process simultaneously help destroy the value. There is no standard, and we are left with our current series of built expressions of groundless relativism. Although he offers no real solution -- other than simply backing up in history -- I think this is part of what Salingaros was railing against.
I'm not saying there is no solution, but I AM saying that we currently have no satisfactorily equal substitute for the power of the hammer of the gods.
nice nietzsche quote there. as far as modern architecture expressing itself, that is exactly correct.
there are many strains of the modern, but one which might be best exemplified by early piano/rogers/foster and the like posits that the "stuff" we tried for millenia to hide -- the insides of the wall, for instance, the ducts and pipes and switches -- had aesthetic value both in its own right and because it expressed the function of the building, making it more complete in the minds of its users. there is a leap of faith in modernism that the internal functions of a wall (a building) is / are worth showing in the first place, but.
that instead of mouldings that don't hold up a wall or dormers that don't provide light to any useable space we distill the essence of the building and then organize it. pompidou is an ok example, the de menil in houston is an excellent one.
another strain of modernism posits the opposite (so there we have our many meanings, not meaninglessness), that the essence of space, material, and texture is the function of architecture -- and that all effort should be made to eliminate anything not essential to that experience from view. from mies to pawson on this one. once again, a leap of faith.
i feel comfortable and even happy in the shifting sea of relativism that is today's architecture. i dunno, i hate "modernism" done wrong as much as i hate "classicism" done wrong. i think a lot of us who tend to design somewhere between one of the two poles i mentioned don't dislike history or historical architecture ... we just see no need to repeat it note for note.
Historically speaking, "ducts and pipes and switches" are very new to architecture, and certainly haven't been around for millenia.
"...(so there we have our many meanings, not meaninglessness),..."
That was a bit of a leap. Repeating positions doesn't make them any more valid, but, as Salingaros might agree, does make you a prospective cult candidate.
"we just see no need to repeat it note for note"
Exactly. Classicism was born out of the technology and (social) fabric of the time. The buildings represented as much the stasis of social class as they did the bodies of social constraint.
The fact that remaining classical buildings are still / now the preserve of the wealthy does not mean that they offer better value or serve a higher purpose.
Salingaros and Prince Charlie (with his poundbury village) forget that we no longer have the abundance of cheap labour or material to develop the style that they hanker after. Do they still believe that the early hand-built motor car is the way forward, or sartorial fashions from the renaissance should be revived ?
A good friend was quoted thus "I have seen the past, and it works" (Google tells me a lot of people have been quoted saying this). I have to disagree. If we knew the answers to the future, we would be there already. Make it relevant to today and there's a chance it will work tomorrow. Start building for yesterday and forget all your tomorrows.
To tie this into the thread, Classicism is the destructive cult. I admit that, like hard drugs, it is addictive and can be beautiful but what social programme can it be grafted onto today? Prison? Religion?
check out the moulding -- very architectural
Lol .... nevermore ..
I was talking about the article .. not your (or your friend's) comments .. :)
psyarch..you are being too literal by saying that the early hand-built motor car is the way forward, or sartorial fashions from the renaissance should be revived.
let's narrow the argument down to only architecture...I would say that classical architecture was more "rich" in "genuine" meaning and metaphors than what we see today.
(Im narrowing it down further to religious architecture.)
and by religious I dont mean concepts of god,heaven or hell..the word religion comes from the latin religere -meaning : to reconnect.
reconnecting with a source higher than oneself to enable oneself to climb higher metaphysically and evolutionary.
What can be defined as "higher "...
I quote the Italian Right-wing traditionalist ,Baron Julius Evola:-
"For us, "Tradition" is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,' i.e. of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one."
-------
to put it very succintly..I can safely make the broad assumption that MOST modern architecture and architects ( and I am including myself ) .....play with form,space ,art colour etc to define and redefine and redefine those only (form,space ,art colour etc ).
classical arch mastered the use of space,form,art, colour etc etc and used them to define something "higher".......
In the past ..they mave have been less creative than us ..(working within creative boundaries , within social structures)..but they were going upwards mentally...we seem to be spinning around a circle ,occassionally taking tangential paths off the circles and landing back into the same circle.
dont know if Im making sense..thinking faster than I can type.too many things to express .
and to explain my earlier post I just found these....
It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling which chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture - drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live.
----H.P. Lovecraft
"I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding."
- George Bernard Shaw
Once you start working in the real world for smaller firms doing real projects all of this fades...It's architecture's ugly marriage with the world of academia that produced this wierdness...30 years after I've been in school, it's the outsiders and the "good ol' boys" who have their own firms. The supplicants and the sychophants have faded away into obscurity.
Arkitecture? Cult? So that's I always wear that damn cape!
The tragedy of architecture in this age is that people are sometimes forced to live with another person’s “creationâ€â€”and in those common situations, architecture, unlike art, demands a moral consideration of other people, and thus self-restraint.
It is and Architectural Thing: "Always carry a big stick and speak softly." Teddy Roosevelt
drink my koolaid.
it's good for you.
"Homes built by big-name architects for individual clients are the hardest to price and to sell, because they were built for a specific client and reflect that person's individuality."
-today's real estate section, los angeles times link
"Give me a well-built traditional or a great Spanish house to sell any day"
-same article ^
Better to turn the house into an architecture cult museum.
Thinking about it, I am into cult film, cult comics, other sub-culture, why not cult architecture?
Culturbana.
screw the mainstream.
the greatest cult of all ...
This is the same trick that political pundits (of both stripes) use to paint the "other side" as evil: use the the pejorative terms generally associated with a group that is poorly regarded and apply them to the new bad guys."Brainwashed" modernists living in "compounds" (how very Branch Davidian).
He also conveniently forgets to mentions that Itten's religeous belief's main influence on the Bauhaus was getting the cafeteria to go macrobiotic. His proselytizing was one of the primary reasons Gropius wound up sacking him.
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