I think the problem is that the dominant architecture is corporate and of a
workplace that is not a domus space. To me, the borderlines of barbarity lie
in the (truly) authoritarian source of the workplace, on harsh angles of
light, in power centres as brutal as Norman castles, to which domestic
vernacular is no more than a segregated, conditioned retreat.
The rest of the cityscape, its malls, markets, libraries, tudor police
stations, private homes for the elderly shadows guaranteed, parks slowly
turning private like a summer drought's browning, confraternity halls,
hospitals that are very often scrubbed places to die in, all these
paraphernalia of necessity stem from the dark commerce at the hub, the
call-centres and offices il faut absolutement modern.
Like an art of surfaces. International as music, or a pandemic.
Or some such.
david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: Henry <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 4:47 AM
Subject: Re: Only the Shadow knows
> 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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