Dr. John got it from an old radio mystery serial called "The Shadow" -
played in the 30s. My father would say that phrase - "Only the Shadow
knows" - about anything mysterious.
The most important writing of a poet on architecture that I know of is
Mandelstam's short essay "Humanism & the Present". In it he tries to
reconcile what he recognizes as the need for a universal "social
architecture" - as opposed to "flat" 19th-cent. individualism - with
safeguards against the "Assyrian" social architecture of the coming 20th
century. His answer draws on his notions of Acmeism, "domestic hellenism",
and humanism - the "teleological warmth" of the free human household as
a standard.
"The monumentality of the approaching social architecture is conditioned
by its calling to organize the world's economy according to the principle of
universal home economy to meet man's greater demands, broadening the scope
of his domestic freedom to universal proportions, fanning the flame of the
individual hearth to a universal flame.
"The future appears cold and terrifying to those who do not understand
this, but the internal warmth of the future - the warmth of efficiency, home
economy and teleology - is just as tangible to the contemporary humanist as
the heat of the incandescent stove of the present.
"If the social architecture of the future does not have as its
foundation a genuinely humanistic justification, it will crush man as
Assyria and Babylon did in the past.
"The fact that the values of humanism have now become rare, as if
taken out of circulation and hidden underground, is not a bad sign in itself.
Humanistic values have merely withdrawn, concealed themselves like gold
currency, but like the gold reserves, they secure contemporary Europe's
entire circulation of ideas, and control them more competently for being
underground.
"The transition to gold currency is the business of the future, and in
the province of culture what lies before us is the replacement of temporary
ideas - of paper banknotes - with the gold coinage of the European
humanistic tradition; the magnificent florins of humanism will ring once
again, not against the archeologist's spade, but when the moment comes,
they will recognize their own day and resound like the jingling coins of
common currency passing from hand to hand."
*
This confident essay of 3 pages was published in Soviet Russia in 1923.
Soon Mandelstam would be silenced. Though I think if he were writing
today, this concept of humanism would be tempered by ecological
considerations, the image of "domestic teleological warmth" & freedom
as a goal of social (as opposed to purely individualistic) architecture
still seems valid & stirring to me. "Vernacular architecture".
Henry
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