Architecture The New Virtue
posted by on May 30 at 12:09 PM
The article Leaves of Glass needs a few words of explanation. Three things generate its meaning and course of thought. One, the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes. These days, few thinkers give semiotics much value. Marxists and Nietzschians continue to dominate continental criticism. Barthes, like Valery, has practically vanished from the indexes of major works of contemporary theory. But the labor of semiotics is not over; it has much to offer as a demystifying tool. The blending of Marxist sociology with Barthesian structuralism has in it the strength to penetrate the idealogical walls of our currently globalized society.
Now that we have mentioned globalization, we can move to the second of the three meaning makers of the article, which is this wonderful passage by the chief urban designer for New York City, Alexandros Washburn:
The Greeks may not have invented civic virtue, but they certainly branded the idea with architecture… [But] the Corinthian column no longer signifies virtue, civic or otherwise. There has been a paradigm shift away from architecture. What signifies virtue these days is a concern for nature… Just as two millennia ago, a sculptor transformed the biomass of the acanthus plant into a template for architecture, using its stalk, leaves and flower as a model for the shaft and volutes of the Corinthian column, we today must transform the rigidities of architecture into the adaptations of nature.”Two things from the passage. One, the globalization of the Mediterranean plant (the moldings of which can be found from Cape Town to Lima to Seattle) matches the globalization of The New Virtue—a concern for nature.
And two, the beauty of Washburn concept is that this:
…becomes this:
Art becomes life. But the art has not left the life. With the new virtue, art has no line that limits it.
The third meaning maker has to do with Seattle. The New Virtue is an international movement. It is simultaneous; it happens all at once; it has no center from which it radiates. With its green (living) roof, the new fire station, Station # 10, in Pioneer Square is a part of that international moment in architecture.
But Seattle has had its own nature/urban discourse. It’s a discourse that is not tied to global issues of sustainability but, instead, to the local geography. Richard Rorty once spoke of “the mirror of philosophy,” Seattle’s architectural discourse is about “the mirror of architecture.”
In the beginning, this discourse was blunt (if not stupid):
Freeway Park marked the point of its complication. The final goal of this local discourse is the eradication of the distinction between not just nature and urban but the outside and the inside. This discourse believes itself to be honest. It wants the movement between mountains and buildings to be uninterrupted. It wants the city to be a mirror of its surroundings.
Nice post-exposition of a genuine crazy brilliant article, Charles. Know ye this: "Now that we have arrived at the door of this article, let us enter the core" is just about the most Didionesque paragraph opening I've read, at least in a mere alternative weekly, in quite a while. Was that a Barthes cop? A shibboleth, perhaps? Or am I reading too much into a face-value turn of phrase?
And "please take my advice": If Bwana tries to carpet-snark this thread, bite back, Charles, bite back.
Nice pieces, both the article and the follow-up. I don't currently live in Seattle, but another great city, San Francisco. When I think about Seattle, I think of greens and blues. The colors of the landscape, the colors of the buildings that seek to echo it and, of course, the color of the football team. I love San Francisco, a city of golds and reds, but I miss the greens and blues of Seattle.
Beav @2,
Don't forget the psychogeography shared by Seattle and Frisco; namely, our respectively crazy rolling hills. I've heard interesting theories about how wildly sloping urban terrain is what truly attracts and/or breeds abstract artists, lush philosophers, dada-mouth magician-musicians, and other somesuch types who typically make cities such wonderful places to live for the intellectually lusty.
Can I get an urban theory witness?
The most relevant thing I can say about this articles dialog written by the person who I didn't even honor by mentioning while I punched into this spot, is it is a wonderful realization to come into the picture as secret-not-so-secret talker at 0 comments.
I know from experiance that by the time I post this un-relevant extrapolation of off subject topic,that there will be a connection between the emphereal world of dreams and the cold hard assed sobriety of enforced doctrines of sepratist power bases.
For this I am at once un-apologetic and thankful and this is why.
This is yet again the weekend where I missed someones party prior to translation and the separation of body and spirit from temporal to celestial.
You readers who read this all have a different word combination referance file for your lifes experiance, and may not
(obviously) choose to accept testimony from me because you all can't live inside my body, mind and your reality at the same time as I choose to express my reality.
Point less to bring up argument and the ride gets soft and cushy... trust me I know it works that way.
Hmmm.
WWW.elle.com on page 307 has a recent "highlighted" sectional quotation from Kathy Griffin.
The color of the editorial choice may be insignificant to some while others claim it was a set up or a glom-on by me because I have one page torn from a magazine found this morning, and you can't prove without hearsay when the verification of the "satire will" will actually free up the HUGE trust of funding in this shitty world we live in.
Yes I can to say shitty, and I like it like that sometimes.
I think that's the whole point of Kathy Griffins' Hell-raiser.
I reject sophmoric comparisons of spelling aptitude ( no reflection on Tori Spelling please...) on my part as a catch-up adult trapped in a high school diploma with a full hard-on for truth and the end of war and hipocrasy... you know... blowing up countries and children and ....etc.etc.etc.
If you don't like this channels broadcasting of adult themetic content, then read what Kathy wrote in www.elle.com on page 307 and find some perspective.
Just because I don't view internal content or surf inside the Stranger zones does not mean I am squeamish or subjugated or intolerant or sycophatic ( is that an actual word or should I spit out a pun?)
I like the touch and look of the body just as much as anybody... maybe more so than some... yet I choose not to super-impose other peoples sexual liasons and pictures in my head voyuristically because it's easier to deal with leagl stuff for me that way now....( secret readers read I am learning to visualize)
The point is she is right, even if she's afraid of men with ex-penises that hang which ever way their machoismic swagger tells them to point.
And that's the blunt end of it people....
On the flip side... page 308 is Venus.
Now there is a woman with a fist.
Personally because, ( not since I am )... a liberated man with only discourtesy to hide for my friends and family, I can say that www.elle.com and the people participating in the gathering and production of this found page,
(interestingly enough it was found at 69th & Weedin Place... how's that for a play on the word sincronicity???)
are truly by appearance professional and successful people.
On the other hand in the cut-throat world of high fashion, politics, entertainment and death and taxes.... Kathy and Venus have been left to one side of the color power play while the other woman
( Christine Comaford-Lynch and her secret side-kick sail off into my area expertise of secret friends name recognition.)
That kind of phonetics into rhymes with 'instantaneous thought recognition' and even if I dare say is analagous and syncromatic with the spirit of the age we live in....
a new breed of human... electrified and wired... on and off the grid... the new black gold, Seattle seeds etc.etc.etc....
So it is less of a puzzelment to me and should hopefully be to you also that when as an infant, the mother or father or guardian cleans the baby's bottom after a messy diaper, we all coo-cooo-cooo and smile and twinkle-eyes and laugh at the child wiggling on the floor some how less smelly and more-so appealing.
On the other hand, Kathy is right when it comes to potty mouth on stage.
Venus?
....a smile perfected in pictured competition with no swear words.....
...and I guess that's the differance now about the lion dens and col-lise'-eum's we fight in for fortunes sake.
As for me and my kind....
I am a multi-inspirationalist that focuses long range experience through gates of mentor/teacher observations.
The old fable of pluck out thine eye and wash your mouth out with soap is less relevant today for adult's because like it or not, life has always been a free for all....
So if the language of the moment is too hot to handle....
Get the fuck out.
Oh come on, this is a giant wank. Cool it with name-dropping and word salad. Did Mudede have a stroke?
Naturalist design is cool though, designing with plants is great, and native plants are even better.
Hey Fuck wad... it's me and you must not like getting caught surfing in MY copywrite low earth orbiter files.
I wouldn't call the hills rolling. They're murderous. I mean, just walking up Powell street every day will give you an ass of steel. But yes, I'm fascinated by psychogeography and I agree with much of what you say. It's hard to put it into words, but there is some connection between the landscape, how the urban responds to the landscape and how you respond to that response. The best evocations of this, for San Francisco, are in films. Vertigo being the prime example. Hitchcock incorporates the rising and falling of the landscape into the emotion of the film [the Bernard Herrmann score, of course, reinforces this]. I think Seattle filmmakers are beginning to similarly respond to their ladscape but, at least in the films I've seen, I'm surprised at how little they've done with it. Police Beat was a good start, though!
The Egyptians did it first with lotus-bud capitals. It all comes down to the desire to civilize the outside.
Many people don't realize it, but the Greeks, like the Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Persians, etc., and later the Romans, too, always PAINTED their buildings. We think of the Parthenon as this gleaming-white building atop the Acropolis, but in its heyday it was painted brilliant and blazing shades of blue, red, yellow, orange, and, yes, green. The leaves atop the columns were green, and it would have been instantly obvious to anyone what they were imitating, if not from the sculpture itself. Over time, the eroded paint and different climates have obscured that.
Can you imagine the U.S. Capitol painted in authentic ancient-Greek colors, too?
Beav @7,
Jonathan Raban, in his latest Seattle-centric novel Surveillance, wrote at least one nice passage invoking the psycho-slope factor around the protagonist's apartment building, located apparently on the edge between First Hill and the International District (if you remember those hoods). Not a film, but maybe someone'll someday make it so. Raban's long overdue for a film version, no?
Wait, what was the original post about? Maybe we should ask Mr. Long-Winded At Four...
Seattle didn't invent nature dudes. You see more of it here, yes. But making the buildings all glassy and rectangular and making the outside appear inside and all that happens everywhere. Moreover, this is just a lack of style, not a style itself. The design mode is anti style if you've noticed.
It's the farthest possible thing from Classical architecture, too.
Also the Greek columns started with plain Jane Doric, then Ionian (scrolls) and only then Corinthian (leaves). The whole premise of the post is suspect as a factual matter. And the colorful painting didn't make the Parthenon look like a plaything of the Jolly Green Giant, or field of vegetables.
Finally, tying everything to globalization again. So trite.
The classic architecture is based on the golden rectangle and those columns have precise, mathematical standards and ratios for height, width, tapering, height of capitols, height of any cross beams, etc. etc., the number of columns and how many bays this creates.....all laid out in Palladio's books and sent around the world in the 1700s......one reason you find this type of architecture everywhere may be because......
it's damn aesthetic and people everywhere like it.
It's 100% artifical and not natural. Tying it to today's nature-loving anti-style "architecture" is bullshit.
We all know Russian domes and Mongolian yurts now, too, and you don't see that cropping up everywhere.
PC @11,
You are WRONG. Seattle did so invent "nature dudes." You can see them every Sunday morning in Cal Anderson park, drumming, toking, playing hackeysack, the whole Woodstock Zombie bit.
The Jolly Green Giant? I ate his brussel sprouts for breakfast as he writhed in pain in the park, green blood gayly gushing from his crotch.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Jeff, thanks for the Raban cite. I haven't read any of his work, but now that I know he specifically references the Seattle landscape, I'll be sure to get some of his books.
One of the places I lived in Seattle was The Decatur on Boren & Spring and I walked up and down those hills to work and to the gym every day for several years and later, when I lived on Roy, I would walk up and down the hill to 15th to rent a video or go to Sonic Boom or some restaurant or something. So, I thought I was pretty acclimated to hill walking when I moved here but the hills of San Francisco are a whole other magnitude of steepness.
Jeff, I see your rolling hills as breeding ground for creativity and raise you harbor cities as the very first places to be subjected to the diversifying influences of globalization.
IMO, that has a lot to do with the evolution of tolerant civil societies and openness to outside influences, in places like Seattle, San Fransisco, London, etc. Harbor cities are always the coolest.
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