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A customer of mine has been clearing her house of a lot of old stuff over some months. While there to replace some doors recently, I snagged from her latest pile of outgoing junk her late husband's 1949 edition Ginn & Co. algebra text. I thought I'd keep it in the truck, with the idea of boning up a little, since I want to take the GRE later this year. When I finally took a look at it this week, I was delighted to discover that it contained as frontispiece a facsimile of a sixteenth-century English algebra — in fact, it seems, the very first English algebra, The Whetstone of Witte of Robert Recorde.

In the mid-sixteenth century one wouldn't publish even an algebra, apparently, without some verse to put things on sound footing. Here's that metrical matter rendered in today's less noble & arbitrary orthography:

Though many stones do bear great price,
The whetstone is for exercise
As needful, and in work as strange:
Dull things and hard it will so change
And make them sharp, to right good use:
All artsmen know they cannot choose
But use his help; yet as men see,
No sharpness seemeth in it to be.

The ground of arts did breed this stone;
His use is great, and more than one.
Here if you lift your wits to whet,
Much sharpness thereby shall you get.
Dull wits hereby do greatly mend,
Sharp wits are fined to their full end.
Now prove and praise as you do find,
And to yourself be not unkind.

Lovely!

If you're wondering what 'the cossicke practise' might refer to, and whether the term as used here contains a pun, see the bottom of this page.

Cul de Sac

 

 
Now they're reading it in Italy.
 

The shepherd's voice

Who is the shepherd here? It is not the good, faithful, orthodox pastor; Jesus is the shepherd. And there is a fundamental difference between Jesus and all Christian pastors. Jesus is the God-man, God in the flesh; and as such, He is our Savior. The pastor is not the Savior; the pastor points to the Savior. So the point of this text is not good pastors vs. bad pastors; it is that no one can love the sheep like Jesus loves them, because only He owns the sheep. ...

[L]ook at Jesus! ... He lays down His life for sheep who love to wander. There is no selfishness in Him, but love. That is the one who says, “Follow Me; listen to My voice.” He says it not to dominate you or control you, but because He knows what it best for you.

So that is what it means to be a Christian — to hear Christ’s Word and follow Him. You can’t do that on your own; He has put us all into one flock, one Church, and there is where He has promised to be. The Church is found not where things are hippest or smokiest, not where things are biggest or oldest, but where the Word is rightly preached and where that Word is joined to water, bread, and wine as Christ instituted it. The Church is institutional because Jesus instituted preaching and Sacraments; and the human aspects of that institution — meeting and bylaws and hierarchies — must always and only serve those things, the ways in which sheep hear the voice of Christ the Good Shepherd.

So what does the voice of your Good Shepherd say to you? He says,

Repent, and be baptized for the remission of your sins;

Repent, and sin no more.

I do not desire your death, but that you should turn from your wicked way and live.

Rejoice, your King comes to you!

I forgive you all your sins;

On this mountain I will prepare a feast of the choicest cuts of meat and the finest of wines;

I will wipe away every tear from every eye;

I will never leave you nor forsake you;

Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life;

Lazarus, come forth from your grave!

Little girl, I say to you, arise! Young man, I say to you, arise!

Take and eat, this is My body given for you;

Behold, I make all things new!

These are the things your Good Shepherd says to you. Those words are your life. All other words are innocuous but temporary and un-saving; or, they are devilishly deceptive and damning. Do not listen to them. Keep your ears tuned to the voice saying to you continually, “Repent! Follow Me!” and “I forgive you! Do not fear!”

From a recent sermon by Christopher Esget of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia — published on his blog. Read the whole thing.

American conflict

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee 40 years ago today. We owe a great debt of gratitude in this country for his extraordinary commitment to the healing of a crippled public conscience, still on-going, and for the personal sacrifice it came to.

In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.

Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.

The new consumption – take 2

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

From the March Atlantic, an article called "The next slum?" (Might've caught this sooner if I'd been paying attention.)

Author Christopher Leinberger goes on:

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.

There's certainly truth in that. (Though I wonder what he means by "little upkeep" on those older houses — especially in an era of high inflation in energy costs.) If you work on houses of varying ages, as I've been doing for some years, you know well enough about the relative solidness of a pre-WW2 house.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on the whole, American residential construction has always gone more for short-term value than long. And on this question of general decline in quality, at least, (like a good writer) he paints conditions a bit more dramatically than they warrant. His last line in that paragraph comes near absurdity: "Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall — their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up." Actually, American-style wood framing is a good construction system, and methods of today achieve increasingly impressive structural performance in those "thin wooden frames" — when the methods are followed, that is. And drywall is never relied on for structural value, because it essentially has none.

Supersized houses & the new consumption

From a Hartford Courant article (via 'Residential Tuesday') on the apparently accelerating 'not so big house' market shift — some cautions and a trend projection for the longer-term:

But there is also plenty of evidence that Americans' appetite for large homes continues. The average size of new homes built in recent years is still edging upward, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president for research at the National Association of Home Builders. He expects the average to level off soon around its current figure of about 2,500 square feet.

"They are not choosing smaller homes," he said. "People are not choosing mansions because of the capital cost, the running costs, but they're still choosing bigger homes."

Home buyers increasingly want higher ceilings, open floor plans, more fireplaces and windows — all features that require more energy to heat and cool the house, Ahluwalia said. And, he said, many Americans are still willing to live far from work and shopping.

Arthur C. Nelson, who has studied housing trends for 20 years, expects that to change in coming decades, with sweeping repercussions for American society.

Nelson projects a surplus of between 3 million and 22 million homes on large lots — built on one-sixth of an acre or more — by 2025. This will be driven by a swelling tide of empty-nesters, young professionals and young families who choose to live in cities or in the first ring of suburbs outside them, Nelson says.

He foresees these big homes in the exurbs eroding in value, and then becoming homes to a much different clientele than today.

"I think what's going to happen, and I'm seeing it anecdotally already as I talk with people, is that these large homes are now being occupied by multiple families, extended generations of immigrants, low-income households, typically family-related," Nelson said. "The trend is so new, but my guess is we'll begin to see this kind of outcome coming out statistically in the 2010 census."

The Big Chart

(No, not that Big Chart.)

You probably think you know a thing or two about things, as things go — I know I did — but I can pretty much guarantee you're going to find it's a whole different thing to know about things the way you know about them before you've understood the Big Chart® and after. Go to el dorado inc. and watch their presentation. It takes about twenty minutes; and as these will be twenty minutes of perfect illumination, you'll only wish it were longer.

I think I'm moving to Kansas City.

Villa Nurbs

Apropos of the mention of my coursework intro to computer-based 3D modeling, check out this slick NY Times web special about architect Enric Ruiz-Geli and his Villa Nurbs*, a house designed with use of related computer-based modeling. It was commissioned for property near Barcelona and is under construction now.

While I don't think the notion of house as 'machine for living' is any more convincing today than when Le Corbusier & those like him first promoted it early in the last century, and while I think architects like Ruiz-Geli and publicist-critics like the NY Times's Ouroussoff misunderstand something fundamental about well-living when they can talk about a house functioning as 'isolation chamber' and 'luxury car' as though this were a good, or at least an indifferent, thing, it can't be said that the latter-day expressionist-futurist formal exploration and the technological tricks on display in this luxury villa aren't impressive & intriguing for their own sake.

Life of my life, death of my death

Jesu, meines Lebens Leben,
Jesu, meines Todes Tod,
Der du dich für mich gegeben
In die tiefste Seelennot,
In das äusserste Verderben,
Nur daß ich nicht möchte sterben:
Tausend, tausendmal sei dir,
Liebster Jesu, Dank dafür!


Jesu meines Lebens Leben, Ernst Homburg, 1687

School fun

click it
I've been taking a few technical classes at a community college here in the Baltimore area. The program I'm following — just a handful of courses — is meant to qualify you as an entry-level drafter in architecture/construction settings. Sooner or later I expect to have a use for this training.

For the most part, it's been quite basic & predictable stuff in these classes. ('Blueprint Reading' — e.g.) But last term I found a fruitful challenge in the course apparently designated this program's crash intro to the brave new world of BIM, and in this final term there've been some surprises in 'Technical Animation.'

'Technical Animation' essentially means an introduction to 3ds Max, which is one of the software packages supplied by industry giant Autodesk in their sponsoring role with the college's CADD department. It's software much better known at present for uses in the entertainment world than in architecture, though. Besides this, our instructor's education is in fine art & graphics and his technical experience mainly in medical illustration. So we're not really much concerned with architectural modeling & rendering, except to the degree we pursue it ourselves. I'd say it's just as well not to be too application-oriented here, however, because this software really is awfully complicated stuff from a novice's point of view. Knowing where to find things in its menus, alone, is a semester's work.

We're at the middle of the term today, it happens, and just getting started on the individual projects that take up the remainder of the course. As the parameters for this original-concept project necessarily have to do with basic software features rather than with any real-world-like design problem, I've figured there's no reason not to have some fun with it. What I have in mind re-uses the product of a 'mesh modeling' lesson from an early session and works it into a whimsical minute-long (or so) animated fancy. We'll have to see how it comes together between now & early May.


That 'mesh modeling' lesson of a few weeks ago leads step by step to the slightly surreal ash tray in the picture here. You perform certain numerically specified transformations on a flat-ish cylindrical virtual object and you end up, Voil� , with this ash tray shape. (Don't think the instructions that get you there are easy to follow, though.) After I had the ash tray, I couldn't resist adding a cigarette. It just seemed to want that.

And now the afterthought of the cigarette is the center of my plan for finishing out the class. Looking at this image I'd made of apparently solid non-existent objects, I began at some point to imagine the cig crawling across the ash tray like an inch worm; and on that, a whole little dream sequence has taken root.

At top, my first trial study for the motion of a cigarette hopping. I'm pretty pleased with the effect. Call to your mind's eye, if you will, the vision of a partly smoked cigarette scooting off an ash tray and hopping around a table (ideally, with little puffs of extra smoke coming off its 'head' with each hop). I call the pleasure in trying to see such an absurdity become 'real' very sufficient reason to keep showing up in class for the next few weeks.

Costs of War

And the one question I ask here, in terms of the cost of the war, 620,000 deaths in a population of 30 million people. If you standardize that for today’s population of roughly 280 million, that would be the equivalent of about 5 million deaths, or 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
    I look at that, and it’s absolutely horrible; no one would disagree with that. In the book Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman, they do a survey of emancipation in this time period, and they find that dozens of countries, including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French and Danish colonies — dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully through some sort of compensated emancipation.
    Now, of course, the standard argument is that this could never have happened here, we could have never have done this. But I don’t see any reason to believe why British slave owners valued their slaves any less than American slave owners did. They didn’t want this. The British government paid them off 40 cents on the dollar. It might not have been possible in 1861, but I think in terms of the sheer amount of the death and the total destruction of the economy of the country, North and South. The North took a huge economic hit as well as the South. The one big quandary is, why didn’t we do what every other country in the world did during the previous 50 years that ended slavery, and end it peacefully through compensated emancipation?

Thomas DiLorenzo, from a fascinating discussion about Lincoln and the Constitution and the politics of Lincoln's Republican Party's abolitionism. The discussion's a debate, in fact, held by policy group the Independent Institute (what a name!) in 2002, between DiLorenzo and the Claremont Institute's Harry Jaffa.

From later in the session:

TD: Well, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island asserted the right to secede from the Union as a condition of ratifying the Constitution. And they asserted that right for the other states as well, and they were allowed into the Union after doing that, and so, that is one thing that happened.

HJ: That is absolutely wrong. It’s just flat-out wrong.

TD: Well, they did. I quoted the Virginia thing in my —

HJ: They did not speak of secession as a lawful right under the Constitution.

TD: Sovereignty. Sovereignty.

HJ: It was an exercise of the Right of Revolution, which they had recently exercised under the British Constitution. But you simply, stubbornly refuse to recognize that there’s a difference between secession as a Constitutional right and revolution as a natural right.

TD: I disagree with that, and I just —

HJ: No, you’re wrong. [Laughter.]

TD: I think you’re wrong.

HJ: You’re just wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Fun!!

Arrival & abandon – or the town as erotic figure

From Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling, opening to chap. 2:

To settle in the landscape means to delimit an area, a place. We stop our wandering and say: Here! Then we create an "inside" within the encompassing "outside." The settlement is therefore a point of arrival. Still we may somewhere have the fine experience of approaching a settlement which waits for us like a "thing." First we may grasp the main outline and perhaps a dominant element, such as a steeple. Getting closer, the shape becomes more articulate, and begins to suggest something about what is hidden inside. Depending on where we come from, the experience varies. If we come through the forest it is different from coming across the fields or over the sea; but always we have the sense of having reached a goal. Like a magnet it attracts us, and arouses our expectations.
    How, then, does a settlement become a goal? The very experience of arrival implies a relationship to what is left behind. A goal does not exist in a vacuum; it is only a goal in relation to its environment. . . .
    To serve as a goal, a settlement has to possess figural quality in relation to the surrounding landscape.

From Madame Bovary:

Gradually the four benches filled up, the coach rattled along, row upon row of apple trees flashed by; and the road, lined on each side by a ditch of yellow water, stretched on and on, narrowing toward the horizon.
    Emma knew every inch of it: she knew that after a certain meadow came a road sign, then an elm, a barn, or a road-mender's cabin; sometimes she even shut her eyes, trying to give herself a surprise. But she always knew just how much further there was to go.
    Finally the brick houses crowded closer together, the road rang under the wheels, and now the Hirondelle moved slowly between gardens: through iron fences were glimpses of statues, artificial mounds crowned by arbors, clipped yews, a swing. Then, all at once, the city came into view.
    Sloping downward like an amphitheatre, drowned in mist, it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges. Then open fields swept upward again in a monotonous curve, merging at the top with the uncertain line of the pale sky. Thus seen from above, the whole landscape had the static quality of a painting: ships at anchor were crowded into one corner, the river traced its curves along the foot of the green hills, and on the water the oblong shaped islands looked like great black fish stopped in their course. From the factory chimneys poured endless trails of brown smoke, their tips continually dissolving in the wind. The roar of foundries mingled with the clear peal of chimes that came from the churches looming in the fog. The leafless trees along the boulevards were like purple thickets in amongst the houses; and the roofs, all of them shiny with rain, gleamed with particular brilliance in the upper reaches of the town. Now and again a gust of wind blew the clouds toward the hill of Sainte-Catherine, like aerial waves breaking soundlessly agains a cliff.
    A kind of intoxication wafted up to her from those closely packed lives, and her heart swelled as though the 120,000 souls palpitating below had sent up to her as a collective offering the breath of all the passions she supposed them to be feeling. In the face of the vastness her love grew larger, and was filled with a turmoil that echoed the vague ascending hum. All this love she, in turn, poured out — onto the squares, onto the tree-lined avenues, onto the streets; and to her the old Norman city was like some fabulous capital, a Babylon into which she was making her entry. She leaned far out the window and filled her lungs with air; the three horses galloped on, there was a grinding of stones in the mud beneath the wheels; the coach swayed; Hivert shouted warningly ahead to the wagons he was about to overtake, and businessmen leaving their suburban villas in Bois-Guillaume descended the hill at a respectable pace in their little family carriages.
    There was a stop at the city gate: Emma took off her overshoes, changed her gloves, arranged her shawl, and twenty paces further on she left the Hirondelle.
    The city was coming to life. Clerks in caps were polishing shop windows, and women with baskets on their hips stood on street corners uttering loud, regular cries. She walked on, her eyes lowered, keeping close to the house walls and smiling happily under her lowered black veil.
    For fear of being seen, she usually didn't take the shortest way. She would plunge into a maze of dark alleys, and emerge, hot and perspiring, close to the fountain at the lower end of the Rue Nationale. This is the part of town near the theatre, full of bars and prostitutes. Often a van rumbled by, laden with shaky stage-sets. Aproned waiters were sanding the pavement between the tubs of green bushes. There was a smell of absinthe, cigars and oysters.
    Then she turned a corner. She recognized him from afar by the way his curly hair hung down below his hat.
    He walked ahead on the sidewalk. She followed him to the hotel; he went upstairs, opened the door of the room, went in — What an embrace!

Urbanisms

A feature in this month's Architectural Record puts alongside one another six short interviews with architecture critics writing from six cities across the U.S. — Following, excerpts from four of them.

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe:

Campbell views the hot topic of sustainability as perhaps finally putting an end to the debates about arcane design theory, and becoming a new version of what had been considered Regionalism. "Sustainable design is a great opportunity for architects to sell themselves as environmental experts," he says. While sprawl is not as much a concern in Boston — a well-developed historic city — as it is in faster-growing cities, Campbell says the biggest environmental concern for the city remains the prospect of rising water levels, which he sees few architects addressing. "I can’t believe people are still developing big buildings on the harbor near sea level," he muses. He also laments the view that high-rise buildings are the only answer to increasing urban density in the name of sustainability. "The density of Paris is just as high, if not higher, than cities that have tall buildings," Campbell says. "In Midtown Manhattan, where every block is a single building with a single door, it becomes oppressive."

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune:

Kamin surveys the landscape of contemporary American architecture and sees a lot of Modernist projects he considers "one-offs," buildings that visually register within a city but don’t always contribute to street life. Exceptions include David Chipperfield’s Des Moines Public Library, which Kamin sees as part of an overall strategy of enlivening that city’s downtown. "The city is a project that takes generations to realize," he says. "To think that architects alone have the silver bullet that will change a downtown’s fate is ridiculous." But Kamin says more architects need to stop getting caught up in style wars and the obsession with sustainable "gadgets" — to borrow the Chicago architect and urbanist Douglas Farr’s terminology — that have the tendency to marginalize the profession. "Sustainability and architecture are ultimately about how we are going to live," he says. "You can’t ignore the small picture, so, yes, buildings should be green, but the real architects are the planners, politicians, and people who write codes."

David Dillon, Dallas Morning News:

Echoing most critics, Dillon says affordable housing remains a challenge for architecture. "If you ever wanted a real laboratory for developing affordable housing and prototypes, New Orleans is it," he says. "But what I’ve seen mostly is just a lot of New Urbanism stuff that doesn’t seem to get to the real problems of accessibility and affordability." Dillon, in his teaching role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studies affordable housing in the U.S. "It’s not a style exercise; it’s a community-building, economic exercise," he says, explaining why high-design architects don’t pursue the arduous process of piecing together funding for such projects. "Dallas is 40,000 units short in terms of affordable housing, and the houses built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations don’t even begin to touch this need."

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times:

"People are starting to lead more local, circumscribed lives, because it takes too long to drive to the other side of town. Much of the appeal of L.A. has been having access to the whole area — Malibu, Santa Monica, downtown, Pasadena," he says. Traffic jams, more planning, and more regulation "may well change the local myth of architectural freedom." For the past 30 years, architects like Gehry and Thom Mayne have drawn inspiration from industrial construction and the commercial strip, redefining what is ugly and what is beautiful. "We’ve been evaluating architects in Los Angeles on the basis of expressiveness and virtuosity. I don’t know if that’s appropriate anymore." With the new generation of L.A. architects working on tighter sites where freestanding expressions are less possible, "we may need a new way of thinking about these designers and whether they’re succeeding. Their work may be less loud, less in-your-face."

Audio

Book listening possibilities opened up wide for me this Christmas. My dad and my brother & sister-in-law got me an iPod Nano, the first mp3 player I've owned, with an adapter for playing through the tape deck in my truck. Not only can I now draw on the CD collections at the libraries along with the tapes, I can also stick the Nano in my back pocket and listen while I work sometimes. And there's all sorts of downloadable stuff out there to be taken advantage of, of course, besides what the libraries offer. Among download sources, Librivox is something pointed out to me last year by Fisher, and now I've had a chance to give it something of a closer look. Listened to their recording of More's Utopia earlier this month, for example, and have started getting a little poetry into the mix. Very grateful to be suddenly so enriched.

I understand that people put music on their mp3 players, too, but so far I haven't tried this.

In the truck, it happens, I'm staying old school for the moment, still working on (not being on the road to the usual extent in past couple of weeks) a tape set of Madame Bovary — something I should have bothered getting to a long time ago. Here, one of the striking passages from Bovary:

When Emma burst into tears he tried to comfort her, protesting his love and saying things to make her smile.
    "It's because I love you," she would interrupt. "I love you so much that I can't do without you — you know that, don't you? Sometimes I want so much to see you that it tears me to pieces. 'Where is he?' I wonder. 'Maybe he's with other women. They're smiling at him, he's going up close to them....' Tell me it isn't true! Tell me you don't like any of them! Some of them are prettier than I am, but none of them can love you the way I do. I'm your slave and your concubine! You're my king, my idol! You're good! You're beautiful! You're wise! You're strong!"
    He had had many such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language. He had no perception — this man of such vast experience — of the dissimilarity of feeling that might underlie similarities of expression. Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now: the more flowery a person's speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

An excerpt: Holl, on being receptive to daylight

Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the season's change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial. Unexpected changing intensities and consistencies drive sunlight in the counterpoint of moving shadows. Black against white, blurred against crisp, dissolving against knife-sharp edges, the subtle music of light plays out in space. Porous light and shadow, like the dapple of the sun's rays penetrating dense foliage, is often ordered in elliptical shapes. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the sun is not a point; it is like a sun picture on a sheet of paper.
    Shadow, sunlight, and geometry are interlocked in experiential phenomena. Looking at my own shadow on the ground I notice that the shadow of my head is blurry while shadows of my feet are sharp.
    The shadow of a porous plane, like the shadows of wire mesh, can exhibit curious properties. For example, a rectangular mesh at certain sun angles only shows vertical shadows. In his 1954 book Light and Color in the Open Air, the physicist M. Minnaert writes about nature's phenomena, exclaiming, "It is very difficult to see new things, even when they are before our eyes."
    The distance of the shadow to the plane of projection drastically alters its character. To see this phenomenon, simply hold a perforated plane immediately in front of a piece of blank paper then move it farther away gradually. If the architect engages this natural light phenomenon, these very different shadow patterns might be created by a certain architectural space.

From Steven Holl's introduction to House: Black Swan Theory, in which fifteen of his designs for residences and small semi-residential buildings, 1986 to 2006, are presented as studies in phenomenology of place & space, one-offs, discrete and situation-specified.

Fisher news!

Congratulations are due to several-times-previously-mentioned artist friend Jeff Fisher and his wife Jenn, on the birth last week of their son Rowan, the small reddish person pictured at right. See photos and a brief light-hearted account of the events of Rowan's delivery, successfully managed in Jeff & Jenn's home, here. (Just received permission to post the link today.)
 
Jeff & Jenn are a remarkable couple, alike & together gifted & enterprising, and it's delightful to imagine what new effort & accomplishment this little guy will call forth in their lives, as also to imagine what wonderful things we may hope to see, transmitted & transmuted from them, someday in his.

Cul de Sac!!

Dear Reader (er .. meaning all 3 or 4 of you, equally), Richard Thompson himself was gracious enough to pay this blog a visit last night. I assure you, this is a moment of celestial exaltation for my humble blog.

If you click on his name there in the comments, as I quickly did, you'll find that Richard Thompson indeed has a blog. And it's terrific, not surprisingly. But don't take my word for it!

Incidentally, that blog appears on the 2nd page of Google returns if you search "Richard Thompson" today. When I mentioned him here in September, though, having just searched for what material was out there (as I've done on several occasions over some years), there was no blog to find. His inaugural post is dated later that same month.

It would be unseemly, perhaps, for me to praise Thompson's work in a very impassioned way, here, especially since I'm not the book-&-print-collecting, convention-going comics & illustration fanatic that others out there who appreciate his stuff undoubtedly are. But I've long thought him a superb illustrator. I'm really grateful to have more access, now, to what he's doing.

P.S. See particularly the Beethoven's Birthday posts of last month — 1, 2. Hilarious!

Cul de Sac

 
Now a regular weekly feature at WashingtonPost.com! Don't miss it!!

Recommended reading for the building lover

Sharon C. Park, an architect three decades in the preservation field and recently appointed to a directorial post in historic architecture at the Smithsonian, reports on her current reading at the end of a good interview (the "Doer Profile" feature) in the AIA online weekly's current issue:

I’m actually reading Hodding Carter’s Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, about the history of the toilet. When I was working on the dig with the University of Southampton, I was excavating Norman ruins in Southampton and was fascinated by the internal plumbing systems that they had in tenth to twelfth century called garderobes, stone-lined shafts in buildings that emptied out into stone sluits that worked with the tidal waters at Southampton. They had these little guillotine reservoirs where the tidal waters came up the stone sluits and was stopped and trapped by a little closure device, and then excrement was flushed out to sea, which I thought was pretty sophisticated. So, I’ve always been interested in early plumbing systems and how they work. Working in Southampton on early drainage systems piqued my interest in how all of that was incorporated into buildings.
    But the last book I read, the one that is my favorite book, is Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. He wrote the book out of an article that he had done for The New York Times Magazine at the millennium. They asked him to write an article on a single tool or apparatus from 1000 to 2000 that had been critical and he realized that it was the screw and the screwdriver. The screwdriver [to a lesser degree], but the screw had been an amazing and very sophisticated tool to bring items together. He took it back to about 1400 and looked at armament, weaponry, and clocks, [etc.]. It has absolutely changed the way I look at museum artifacts.

Mr. Jones, add those titles to this month's order.

Louis Sullivan — artistic limitation in flower

From Michael J. Lewis's 2001 New Criterion article on a century's evolution in views of the work of Louis Sullivan:

To say that Sullivan’s work was often two-dimensional is not to disparage it. After a truncated education, most of his formative years were spent devising frescoes and ornamental borders for other men’s buildings. This cannot have been satisfying to his ambition but to it he brought the full force of his intellect. Artistically engaged but intellectually underused, he inevitably came to invest his ornament with the profoundest personal meaning. In this process, character traits that might otherwise be handicaps — narcissism, self-importance and a certain obsessiveness — were essential, even advantageous. A less self-involved man simply would not have taken the design of foliage so seriously.
 

    When Sullivan at last turned his hand to the composition of tall buildings, he was the right man for the right time. He saw clearly that modern construction had outpaced the expressive potential of the historical styles. Massive arches, piers, and cornices were conceived in terms of masonry and were sculptural by nature; they were inappropriate for a light steel frame, which needed but a thin cladding of ceramic materials to protect its girders from fire and water. In short, the wall was dissolving into a thin planar screen. Such a screen, mounted across the face of a steel cage, is not a promising field for personal expression, but here Sullivan was on home territory. He invested these taut and lofty planes with almost fathomless feeling. He did not see the curtain wall as an ordered heap of bricks, and therefore inert, but as the physical manifestation of a thought, and therefore a living thing, “designed in a high pitch of sustained emotional tension,” as he once put it. The burst of flowers in the spandrels and the gale of tendrils in the cornice were not an afterthought at all, as modernists insisted, but the thought itself.

Lewis's interesting, though for me not entirely convincing, historical sketch & critique of a current of celebrity culture dominating high-profile architecture today, in the December New Criterion, was featured at ALDaily yesterday. Sullivan features prominently, there, not coincidentally, in his account of the modern rise of the "starchitects."

An excerpt

Who was the wisest person I ever met in my entire life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who, like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, "the geese looked in the windows."
    I said, "Saul, how should I feel about Picasso?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he said, "God put him on Earth to show us what it's like to be really rich."
    I said, "Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he said, "It's very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."
    I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

Thoughts worth pondering from a book I didn't otherwise much like, Kurt Vonnegut's A Man without a Country, 2005.

An excerpt: Brand, on layer ecology in buildings

Pulled old favorite How Buildings Learn off the shelf and have been re-reading parts of it here & there this week. Here's a prime bit, from chap. 2, "Shearing Layers:"

Buildings rule us via their time layering at least as much as we rule them, and in a surprising way. This idea comes from Robert V. O'Neill's A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. O'Neill and his co-authors noted that ecosystems could be better understood by observing rates of change of different components. Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees slow, and whole redwood forests even slower. Most interaction is within the same pace level — hummingbirds and flowers pay attention to each other, oblivious to redwoods, who are oblivious to them. Meanwhile the forest is attentive to climate change but not to the hasty fate of individual trees. The insight is this: "The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along." Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.
    The same goes with buildings: the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the rapid dazzling ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depends on the efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure. You could add a seventh "S" — human Souls at the very end of the hierarchy, servants to our Stuff.
    Still, influence does percolate the other direction. The slower processes of a building gradually integrate trends of rapid change within them. The speedy components propose, and the slow dispose. If an office keeps replacing its electronic Stuff often enough, finally management will insist that the Space plan acquire a raised floor to make the constant recabling easier, and that's when the air-conditioning and electrical Services will be revamped to handle the higher load. Ecologist Buzz Holling points out that it is at times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow.

"Architectural ideas"

Precedents in Architecture, 3/e, p. 258
 
The success and longevity of this work suggest there is a need for this information about architecture. As we started to produce the material for this third edition, we were keenly aware of the initial premise for the study — the commonality and significance of design ideas that transcend time and place. As the work progressed, these assumptions have been reinforced. Architectural ideas are the underpinnings of architecture upon which other concerns — social, technical, economical, cultural, legal, and political — are layered.

An easy enough thing to say!

From the preface to the third edition (2005) of popular graphic-analysis text Precedents in Architecture.

An excerpt

I think it is possible therefore, both historically and phenomenologically, to speak of the human encounter with the sacred as having a "structure" of sacred presence and sacred anticipation, of sacred call and human response. Sacred presence is simultaneously experienced as sacred call; and part of the human response to that call is to seek and anticipate the presence of the sacred. Historically, the most obvious human response to the sacred has been to worship it; and human worship typically entails ritual actions in which the presence of the sacred is invoked. But the experience of the sacred as call and response is not limited to religious ritual. Cultural historian Philip Rieff argues that human culture itself is, in its origins if not its essence, the human response to the sacred. To this I would add (anticipating what is to follow) that cities are the foremost physical form of culture; and that some sort of spatial and formal hierarchy — if only as crude as the simple dichotomy between "sacred" and "profane" precincts — is the distinguishing mark of cities in which artifacts are created for and in response to the sacred. Rieff argues that every human culture is marked by the specific behaviors that it encourages and the specific behaviors that it prohibits. Books and vows, prayers and parading, law and architecture, music and the sciences, dancing and piety toward parents, theater and athletic competition: each and all of such marks of culture originate as an address to the sacred — which also issues forth a variety of prohibitions, of "shalt nots," of things that are not to be done.
    Sacred "shalt nots" may include such "rational" prohibitions as idolatries, profanations, murders, thefts, betrayals, incests, rapes, abortions, and adulteries. But it will also include apparently irrational prohibitions, emblematic of that universal attitude that Chesterton once referred to as "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy," an idea he found represented most prominently in fairy tales, and paradigmatically in the story of Cinderella: "You may go to the ball, but you must be home by midnight." Both in fairy tales, and for those with a sense of the sacred, human happiness requires a primary and fundamental obedience. But this obedience does not preclude (and in fact sometimes both requires and inspires) other rebellions. Rather, the obedience circumscribes the rebellion, in much the same way as the non-rational circumscribes the rational. Thus for Chesterton (an English patriot), the Irish rebel justly opposes English tyranny, which is
 
something he [the rebel] understands only too well; but the true citizen of fairyland obeys something he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeit. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
 
    This insistence on a sense of prohibition as a constituent element of sacred sensibility may strike moderns and post-moderns as odd, but only a moment's attention to examples from both literature and everyday speech will confirm it. "If God is dead, everything is permitted," was the conjecture of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov; and in The Brothers Karamazov, "everything" included parricide. But we often express the same idea in a phrase even more mundane: of a social situation in which anything and everything seems possible we do indeed commonly say "there is nothing sacred." A sense of the sacred therefore necessarily seems to include a sense of prohibition as a pre-condition of that fundamental pleasure of agreement that culture affords. It is within the constraints of sacred prohibitions, tight or loose, that every creative freedom in a culture arises, as well as the very possibility of remission and forgiveness for their transgression. The psychoanalytic terms for this personal and cultural dynamic of prohibition and creativity are "repression" and "sublimation;" and Freud well understood what many of his heirs perhaps do not, that there can be no culture without repression. The social effect of culture, Rieff observes, is that individuals learn through a variety of ritual roles and actions to express fixed wants; and the limitation of possibilities is the first pre-requisite of human happiness.

From Philip Bess, "'Making Sacred:' The Phenomenology of Matter and Spirit in Architecture and The City."

More honesty

Found today that Gregory Baus, congenial controversialist originally from the area of Baltimore where I now live, is back to blogging, after a break of some months. I met Baus through friends at New Hope Presbyterian, the church in Fairfax, Va., I attended for a number of years. His blog was my introduction to the blogging phenomenon, and thereby to a lot of thought-provoking encounter with people — a wide (& gradually still widening) spectrum of personalities and conversations. I'm grateful for it.

His most recent post occasions a brief but interesting exchange, in comments, on questions of treaties and national sovereignty in reading the U.S. Constitution.

Agro-urbanism?

As far as I can tell — not having looked into it in any great depth yet — these two essentially equivalent concepts for urban high-rise dwelling, embodying 'sustainability' to the point of incorporating small-plot agriculture for every residence, have been published about the same time as solutions in two quite unrelated design competitions. The project at left, named Agro-Housing, is a proposal by Knafo-Klimor of Israel for a city in China, winning entry in a contest sponsored by the International Iron and Steel Institute. For further info, see the article here (via ArchitectureWeek's 'Green Wednesday' headline aggregator, last week's edition). At right, Center for Urban Agriculture, proposal for a specific Seattle site by Mithun, this year's winner (in the 'visionary' category) of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council's Living Building Challenge. For further info, see this article from today's 'AIArchitect This Week.' Mithun goes so far, apparently, as to call its project an 'urban farm.' That sounds like a pretty big terminological stretch to me, particularly as no such radical attempt to merge city living with the habits of tending the earth has yet gotten off paper. Still, one wonders if these things will start getting built in some form — and if so, who might want to buy in and make a go of urban-agriculturist lifestyle.

Update: The current ArchitectureWeek feature article covers the IISI sustainable housing competition in greater breadth.

An excerpt: O'Connor, on Christian world view

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.
    There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.
    I find that students are often puzzled by what she says and does here, but I think myself that if I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention. Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. The devil's greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist.
    I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.
    I don't want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that's another story.
    This story has been called grotesque, but I prefer to call it literal. A good story is literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul, and not for the dead bodies.

From the collection of writings of Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners.

Made in Germany

The 2007 Solar Decathlon (see earlier) has been won by the trim entry from Technische Universität Darmstadt. In my inbox this morning was an AIA news bit reporting Darmstadt's win in the big one, the Architecture competition. Local kids University of Maryland took second in Architecture, and the other Euro entry, from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, won third. Darmstadt and Maryland retained their Architecture leads, in the end, to place first and second overall, with third place going to California's Santa Clara University. All three were among the entries scoring a full 100 points in the Energy Balance competition.

The exhibition continues through tomorrow, the 20th. Unfortunately, though the whole thing's just a few miles away from my brother & sister-in-law's in Fairfax (where I'm staying while I work on the house), I've had a terribly busy week and will not get down to the Mall after all. It looks like there's been no shortage of visitor interest, however. Check out the photos at the event site.

From the blogosphere

Respected Lutheran theo-blogger Chris Atwood, prof. of Mongolia history at Indiana U., on Monday posted part 2 of what looks like it'll be a 3-part series on modern views of 'the Joshua event' in Israel tradition, told mainly in the biblical book of that name. The posts are longish by comparison with a lot of usual blog fare, but considering they're coming from an academic habituated to writing about history, they're not so long really. In any case, fascinating history-of-an-idea reading — well worth a look.

From the blogosphere

Sarah Irani, at Nine Tons of Marble, has been posting since roughly spring/early summer, a little sporadically but with continuity, about re-establishing herself in the regular habits of creative enterprise. (Sarah's a sculptor — mainly concerned with large-scale figure in the 'classical' mode.) One of the pleasures of reading her is the opportunity for some insight into being an artist as a problem bound up in the total effort of a life — as something quite different from, in other words, the idea of a profession pursued 'at the office' or 'in the field' and set aside at home on evenings & weekends. Tuesday's posts are especially suggestive, I think, of this totalizing sensibility, the on-running contingencies & conflicts of mind, body, & relationship self-awareness & -adjustment intimately connected with finding oneself operating with a fruitfully artistic mind-'set'.

Audio

Maybe a year & a half ago, now, I began (here & here) something of a recovery from a long disconnection from 'literary' reading, by finally giving books on tape a try. It seems strange, in retrospect, that I didn't bother taking advantage of this possibility sooner. Public radio, for all its charms, has since then been entirely supplanted as a drive-time habit; and I'm making regular trips to the library, a place I'd gotten pretty unfamiliar with over a period of years.