REPOST: Who needs great art?

    Icarus Landing, by Michael Newberry 

WE’VE ALL FELT IT. That moment when a piece of art has touched us.

Paintings, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? – how does it acquire this profound ability to affect us? Simply, because it speaks personally to each of us. It is our shortcut to our very souls. When we experience art that truly touches us, we don’t just feel, “I like this;” if we have souls we feel “This is Me!”

So what gives art this enormous power?

Great art has enormous scope: it subsumes an enormous range of experience and thought and emotion; it offers insight into the deepest questions we can ask about our place in the universe and our own evaluation of that; it and it integrates it all into a mental unit that our particularly human consciousness is able to grasp. It might be a painting, a sculpture, or a play or a building, but if it is done well we can all look at it or walk through it and almost immediately know -- without even being able to put it completely into words -- how the artists see the world around them, and whether or not we agree. By experiencing the art they’ve produced, we should have a pretty fair idea of what they see as important in the world, and whether or not we too see the world in that same way, or not.

Think, for instance, of the lightning-like evaluation you make when you see this painting. Or this one. Or this collection of buildings. Or these. See what I mean? The integration involved in a good work of art subsumes all the experience, thought and emotion that goes into our own view of the world and, if we identify with it, allows us to point and say: “That’s Me!” or “That’s Not Me!” (So on that score, ask yourself about your reactions to those linked pieces, and what it tells you about the way that you see the world.)

San Marcos Water Gardens Proposal, sketch by Frank Lloyd Wright

    The point here is that art isn’t just a way to kick back after a difficult week -- which is one reason elevator music and abstract painting are so execrable. (The first is just background at best; the second might manage to be good interior decoration; but neither has little ability to offer much more.) The point is that great art offers us a shortcut to our very souls; a means whereby we can examine and understand our own implicit philosophy; a way to see and to experience our deepest values, and also to celebrate them.

Art -- good art -- shows us our way of seeing the world, while celebrating that that is the way we do see the world; more particularly, it celebrates our own individual way of seeing the world, and affirms it.

WHY DO WE NEED art to see the world when we’ve already got eyes and ears and fingers and hands with which to experience it ourselves, and a brain with which to organise those experiences? Answer: We need art precisely because of the nature of that brain, and because of the way it organises the experiences.

Look at the way our knowledge of the world is acquired and held: our knowledge of the world around us begins with our senses, which provide us with material that is then organised by our brain into concepts; those concepts in turn are then integrated into propositions and theories. We start with sensations, derived from particular experiences, and these form the basis for all our higher abstractions: all our ideas, from ideas of love, of justice, of rights, of value ... all high-order abstractions; all derived from earlier concretes which are subsumed into concepts, and then subsumed into even wider concepts, and so on.

This process of abstraction-leading-to-further-abstraction creates both the enormous power of the human mind, and its great weakness: both its power to think in vast abstractions, and its inability to see these abstractions as one unit. That’s what art does for us: it gives us each the power to see all of our important abstractions as a single unit.

To ‘fix’ each particular abstraction, as Ayn Rand points out in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, we integrate the concept into a single mental unit: a word. Each word acts as a unit that integrates the constituent units of that particular concept, which brings together and holds for us in our minds the vast material referred to by the particular concept which that word is used to delineate.

But as we integrate these high-end abstractions into even wider abstractions, we run into a problem: the scope becomes too vast and too amorphous to grasp as a whole,even with a word. For that, we need art.  Think for example of the Statues of Justice and of Liberty, and of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” These don’t just sum up the concepts of liberty and justice; they offer a dramatic evaluation of them to boot.

THE RELATIVE POSITION OF our higher abstractions works of art is analogous to the position of a poem to a word; or that of a book to its chapter; or that of a piece of furniture to a building: the greater work orders, makes understandable and gives context to all the units subsumed, and brings into existence a new mental unit integrating them all. In making a work of art, we are offering a new mental unit that is at once a higher abstraction than those it subsumes, and a more concrete one. In making our abstractions concrete, it takes us back to the concretes from whence they came, but in a much more powerful form.

Art allows us to see the totality of our worldview. If we follow Leonard Peikoff’s idea that philosophy is like a skyscraper, we can see that it is a rather oddly-shaped one. Peikoff's skyscraper begins at the lower levels with metaphysics, the nature of existence. It continues upwards with a few floors dedicated to epistemology, how we know what we know. On top of these lower floors and dependent on them are floors describing the nature of human beings and how we should live in the world as it is, i.e. ethics, and then how we should live together, i.e., the field of politics.

Now, if we understand the true nature of art we can see that art does fit on top of the other floors, since it requires all the other floors below to give it support. But in an important sense, the upper floors of art actually lead directly back to the basement, rather like one of those strange buildings in a science fiction story in which we keep going up, yet we end up in the basement instead of the penthouse. Good art is both penthouse -- in the sense that it is a glorious summation and culmination of all that is below it -- and it is also basement, because it is both fundamentally necessary to human survival (witness the cave scratchings of even primitive men, who sought to find meaning in his world) and also intensely explicative of our own deepest metaphysical value judgments.

Deep art really does go deep: right down to the bottom floor.

Why, then, is art so intensely personal? If it’s just a higher form of abstraction, why do we so readily get up in arms over it? Again, it is because of the nature of the human mind. We are endowed not just with a cognitive mechanism, but also with an emotional mechanism. “It is man’s cognitive faculty … that determines the content of both.” The premises and abstractions we form and accept are the programming for our subconscious: based on this ‘subconscious programming,’ our emotional faculty provides us inexorably with lightning-like evaluations of the things we see and experience around us -- the extent of our emotion at these experiences is the extent of the import and resonance they have for us.

We get a very real visceral pleasure when great art goes down and touches our own personal bottom floor.

As Ayn Rand said when identifying the nature of our emotions, they offer a lightning-like evaluation of the things around us. But our emotions do not spring from nowhere; they themselves are “an effect, not a cause.” Every single thing we see or experience is value-laden. It is our previous thinking (or lack thereof) that determines the nature of the evaluation.

If one has finished a hard day’s work and sees a beer, one might feel a fierce thirst and a yearning to sit down and enjoy it; if one’s a poor student and sees an exam paper, one might feel nausea and a desire to escape the classroom; but if one is a human being with a healthy soul, and one hears Beethoven’s Ninth or sees Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, then one feels exalted. The difference in the feelings is determined by what it is we experience. The intensity of feeling is the measure of the extent of the intellectual and emotional abstractions subsumed.

Why does great art move us? Because it speaks to the whole of us, and to everything we know and stand for.

So who needs great art? Why, you do.

Who Needs Great Art?

by Peter Cresswell

    Painting, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, to make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? -- why does it have this profound ability to affect us? Simply, because it speaks personally to each of us. It is our shortcut to our very souls. When we experience art that truly touches us, we don’t just feel, “I like this;” if we have souls we feel “This is Me!”
    Great art has enormous scope: it subsumes an enormous range of experience and thought and emotion, and integrates these three into a mental unit that our particularly human consciousness is able to grasp. It might be a painting, a sculpture, or a play or a building, but if it is well done we can all look at it or walk through it and almost immediately know -- without even being able to put it completely into words -- how the artists see the world around them. By experiencing the art they’ve produced, we should have a pretty fair idea of what they see as important in the world, and whether or not we too see the world in the same way. 
     Think, for instance, of the lightning-like evaluation you make when you see this painting. Or this one. Or this collection of buildings. Or these. See what I mean? The integration involved in a good work of art subsumes all the experience, thought and emotion that goes into our own view of the world and, if we identify with it, allows us to point and say: “That’s Me!” or “That’s Not Me!” (So on that score, ask yourself about your reactions to those linked pieces, and what it tells you about the way you see the world.)

    The point here is that art isn’t just a way to kick back after a difficult week -- which is one reason elevator music and abstract painting are so execrable. Art is a shortcut to our very philosophy; a way to see and to experience our deepest values, and also to celebrate them.
    Art -- good art -- shows us our way of seeing the world, while celebrating that that is the way we do see the world; more particularly, it celebrates our own individual way of seeing the world, and affirms it.
    Why do we need art to see the world when we’ve already got eyes and ears and fingers and hands with which to experience it ourselves, and a brain with which to organise those experiences? Answer: We need art precisely because of the nature of that brain, and because of the way it organises the experiences.
    Look at the way our knowledge of the world is acquired and held: our knowledge of the world around us begins with our senses, which provide us with material that is then organised by our brain into concepts; those concepts in turn are then integrated into propositions and theories. We start with sensations, derived from particular experiences, and these form the basis for all our higher abstractions: all our ideas, from ideas of love, of justice, of rights, of value ... all high-order abstractions; all derived from earlier concretes which are subsumed into concepts, and then subsumed into even wider concepts, and so on.
    This process of abstraction leading to further abstraction creates both the enormous power of the human mind, and its great weakness: its power to think in vast abstractions, and its inability to see these abstractions as one unit. That’s what art does for us: it gives us each the power to see all of our important abstractions as a single unit.
    To ‘fix’ each particular abstraction, as Ayn Rand points out in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, we integrate the concept into a single mental unit: a word. Each word acts as a unit that integrates the constituent units of that particular concept, which brings together and holds for us in our minds the vast material referred to by the particular concept which that word is used to delineate.
    But as we integrate these high-end abstractions into even wider abstractions, we run into a problem: the scope becomes too vast and too amorphous to grasp as a whole. For that, we need art.  Think for example of the Statues of Justice and of Liberty, and of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” These don’t just sum up the concepts of liberty and justice; they offer an evaluation of them to boot.
    The relative position of our higher abstractions works of art is analogous to the position of a poem to a word; or that of a book to its chapter; or that of a piece of furniture to a building: the greater work orders, makes understandable and gives context to all the units subsumed, and brings into existence a new mental unit integrating them all. In making a work of art, we are offering a new mental unit that is at once a higher abstraction than those it subsumes, and a more concrete one. In making our abstractions concrete, it takes us back to the concretes from whence they came, but in a much more powerful form.
    Art allows us to see the totality of our worldview. If we follow Leonard Peikoff’s idea that philosophy is like a skyscraper, we can see that it is a rather oddly-shaped one. Peikoff's skyscraper begins at the lower levels with metaphysics, the nature of existence. It continues upwards with a few floors dedicated to epistemology, how we know what we know. On top of these lower floors and dependent on them are floors describing the nature of human beings and how we should live in the world as it is, i.e. ethics, and then how we should live together, i.e., the field of politics.
    Now, if we understand the true nature of art we can see that art does fit on top of the other floors, since it requires all the other floors below to give it support. But in an important sense, the upper floors of art actually lead directly back to the basement, rather like one of those strange buildings in a science fiction story in which we keep going up, yet we end up in the basement instead of the penthouse. Good art is both penthouse -- in the sense that it is a glorious summation and culmination of all that is below it -- and it is also basement, because it is both fundamentally necessary to human survival (witness the cave scratchings of even primitive men, who sought to find meaning in his world) and also intensely explicative of our own deepest metaphysical value judgments. Deep art really does go deep: right down to the bottom floor.
    Why, then, is art so intensely personal? If it’s just a higher form of abstraction, why do we so readily get up in arms over it? Again, it is because of the nature of the human mind. We are endowed not just with a cognitive mechanism, but also with an emotional mechanism. “It is man’s cognitive faculty … that determines the content of both.” The premises and abstractions we form and accept are the programming for our subconscious: based on this ‘subconscious programming,’ our emotional faculty provides us inexorably with lightning-like evaluations of the things we see and experience around us -- the extent of our emotion at these experiences is the extent of the import and resonance they have for us.
    As Ayn Rand said when identifying the nature of our emotions, they offer a lightning-like evaluation of the things around us. But our emotions do not spring from nowhere; they themselves are “an effect, not a cause.” Every single thing we see or experience is value-laden. It is our previous thinking (or lack thereof) that determines the nature of the evaluation.
    If one has finished a hard day’s work and sees a beer, one might feel a fierce thirst and a yearning to sit down and enjoy it; if one’s a poor student and sees an exam paper, one might feel nausea and a desire to escape the classroom; but if one is a human being with a healthy soul, and one hears Beethoven’s Ninth or sees Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, then one feels exalted. The difference in the feelings is determined by what it is we experience. The intensity of feeling is the measure of the extent of the intellectual and emotional abstractions subsumed.
    Why does great art move us? Because it speaks to the whole of us, and to everything we know and stand for.
    Who needs great art? You do.

Art & Perception

The art you like is a shortcut to your philosophy.  It really is. And you know, each time I say that here it annoys people.  I mean it really annoys people.  Which tells me that their view of art really means something to them: it touches their values – their own personal philosophy --- something deep inside themselves.

Which means the very virulence of the (over)reaction is evidence for the thesis.

You see, every choice an artist makes demonstrates his own values, his own personal philosophy, just as your reactions to what the artist has done demonstrates yours.

There’s nothing to fear about that, it’s simply the nature of real art.  That’s why art is art: it has the power to tell us something about ourselves and the way we see the world.  Not the way we might pretend to others (or ourselves) about how we see the world, but the way we really see it, and evaluate it.

“But how,” I hear you ask, “does an artist translate his philosophy into his art?” Good question.  And fortunately for all of us, artist Michael Newberry is supplying the answers in a new addition to his art tutorials called ‘Connecting Your Philosophy to Your Art.’  His first post in this new series focuses on perception, using this painting below. He asks, and answers, the question: what do you think the artist’s evaluation of the value of perception is?  What do you think it might be?  And what clues in the painting make you think so?  (Try to answer the question for yourself before looking at Michael’s concise explanation.)

Vase of Flowers in a Niche
about 1732–36
Jan van Huysum, Dutch, 1682–1749

So, what do you think the artist’s evaluation of perception is?  And what, dear reader, is yours?

Culture, conservatives and the defining of art

Conservatives are funny people. Challenged to define art, 'Zen Tiger' at the NZ Conservative blog avoids the question for most of a very long page before banging on instead about marriage, homosexuality, and the threat the latter poses to the former.

Conservatives are funny people.

In reiterating the challenge, Paul L spots something Zen hasn't, "I was merely hoping that somebody might say something nice ... about something they enjoyed. That is the problem with conservatism; it is always opposed to everything."

NB: If the question really was a genuine one, and it's more important than the conservatives in the debate seem to realise, then I offer what I think is a pretty good stab at defining art in this post: Art: There's More to it Than Just Meets the Eye - Not PC.

UPDATE 1: It occurs to me that the argument neatly demonstrates what Objectivism calls the instrinsicist-subjectivist divide. What's art? Says, the conservative, "Whatever God says it is." Says the subjectivist, "Whatever we say it is." Exploding the dichotomy, the Objectivist points out that like everything else in existence art has a nature, and the nature of art is neither defined for us by God or by our feelings (nor by the feelings of a committee), but instead by the the nature of art, by the nature of human consciousness, and by the relationship between the two.

UPDATE 2: Great to see the debate engaged here in the comments section. Since I don't wish to interrupt the debate, rather than enter the fray myself may I again invite commenters simply to visit the links I've already offered, in which I point to what I think is the best definition of art so far, explain why definition is so important, and outline what gives art the power to move us so profoundly.

"Art is the technology of the soul." "Art is a shortcut to philosophy." "Art is the concretisation of metaphysics." "Truth is beauty, beauty is truth..." Clearly art is more than just decoration; something that has the power to effect us so profoundly can't be causeless (well, most of us -- Alan Gibbs excluded it seems).

It must be possible to provide an explanation for something that does this. What in the nature of art that give it this power? How does it effect us? That's what these links try to explain:

• Art: There's More to it Than Just Meets the Eye - Not PC
• Who needs great art? - Peter Cresswell, SOLOHQ
• Detecting value judgements in painting - Michael Newberry, 'Newberry Studio Updates'
• Objectivist aesthetics and the nature of art - Peter Saint-Andre, 'Monadnock Review'
• Don't Cry For Me, Aristotle - Peter Cresswell, SOLOHQ
• What is Architecture? - Peter Cresswell, SOLOHQ

ARCHITECTURE DEBATE: Summing up

[A summary of a recent debate at my blog 'Not PC' on architecture, art, and architectural favourites]

Here first up is the post that started it all:

**POST: Con-art in Kaipara

I posted a field full of rusting steel posing as art (that's some of it below), and suggested the buyer had been conned. I'd suggested it is possible to objectively determine that one thing is art and another is just a pile of craftless tat, and Den disagreed. I'd suggested that individual taste is certainly subjective, but that what we like is nonetheless able to be analysed objectively to tell us something about ourselves and the way we see the world -- to which Den disagreed. I'd suggested that art is a shortcut to our philosophy ... and Den suggested I was talking nonsense.

Said Den: "Objectivity does not exist in art. You are a poor arbiter of taste if said taste is to be measured against the art you post (as 'the only true art')... I am incredulous that someone working in a field such as architecture would ever claim to be able to identify objective standards in art - to loftily pronounce that something 'is' or 'isn't' art based on what I see as fairly dubious credentials." And I replied here, including the invitation which began this debate.


Here's some related posts and threads, giving my own arguments on art and architecture:

**ARTICLE: Who needs great art? You do.

EXCERPT: Painting, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, to make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? -- why does it have this profound ability to affect us? Simply, because it speaks personally to each of us. It is our shortcut to our very souls. When we experience art that truly touches us, we don’t just feel, “I like this;” if we have souls we feel “This is Me!”

Why do we need art to see the world when we’ve already got eyes and ears and fingers and hands with which to experience it ourselves, and a brain with which to organise those experiences? Answer: We need art precisely because of the nature of that brain, and because of the way it organises the experiences.

**ARTICLE: Art: there's more to it than just meets the eye.

EXCERPT: Our crucial need for art comes from the nature of our human consciousness, and by virtue of the way we hold and form our ideas. Our conceptual form of consciousness means that our view of the world and our place in it is represents the very widest abstractions our minds are asked to hold, and the integration of those judgements with our emotional assessment of them are visible to us only through art -- it is only art that allows us to see our most fundamental view of the world and our place in it as a single mental unit, and what could be more important or profound than that!

**ARTICLE: 'The Scream ' has been found. Two cheers.

EXCERPT: Here's an example of something that is good art -- very good art -- that I don't like at all. If anything better expresses the dis-ease and dislocation expressed by twentieth-century 'thinkers' -- of the nausea and helpless angst and the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of Jean Paul Sartre; of A.E. Housman "a stranger and afraid in a world [he] never made"; of William Butler Yeats for whom "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold"; of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man*, whose "irritability keeps him alive and kicking"; etc; etc. -- then it is this piece.

How much sordid meaning to pack into one piece of canvas: in it we can see almost the whole of the tortured twentieth-century.

**ARTICLE: What architecture is all about

EXCERPT: “Architecture,” as Aldo van Eyck once said, “is about making a ‘home for man’.” The space we build is space for human life, for us to inhabit, and from which we can emerge to 'do battle.' It is a place that expresses what a home for man looks like, smells like and sprawls like; it is here that we begin to find the meaning in architecture: and the meaning resides in how it makes its home for man.

In the act of making and placing our buildings in the world, we make decisions about what’s important in the world. What values need to be 'built in' and made concrete. What should we include from around us? What should we keep out? Early morning sun is good; later afternoon sun isn’t. Gentle breezes are good inside the house, heavy rain is not; views of the lake and the trees and the beautiful hills about us are wonderful – views of the local slaughterhouse are not..

**ARTICLE: What is architecture?

EXCERPT: "Architecture ... does not re-create reality, but creates a structure for man's habitation or use, expressing man's values," identified Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto. Architecture is primarily about making spaces for human beings to inhabit, and in doing so expresses what it means for man to inhabit this earth.

The work is utilitarian, but not primarily so - in the words of the late New Zealand architect Claude Megson: "The architect is creating, not merely an object, but a whole universe for ourselves to inhabit." The architect creates an integration of structure, function and ornament according to the architect's own implicit values in order to make a home for man. The stuff with which the architect works is space - human space. To paraphrase Protagoras, man is quite literally the measure of all architecture.

This is an important and overlooked point, and much criticism concluding that 'architecture is not art' arises when architecture is considered only in a two-dimensional fashion, as being only a simple skin-deep armature made up of more or less elegant facades and gorgeous surfaces. It is not; it is a space for man to inhabit. Architecture is more than just the raw materials that make up a building - what is crucial is what those raw materials delineate.

**READING LIST: So you'd like to study architecture

EXCERPT: So you want to study architecture?

You want books and readings I might recommend for someone beginning architectural education?

Here’s a ‘top twenty’ list to get you started...

And here's all ten posts in the 'Not PC: Architecture V Architecture' debate:
What Den and I have posted here is not "the ten best examples of architecture from all human history" -- they are our own personal favourites.

PC 5: House for an artist, Wairarapa - Organon Architecture

"So in this case then for my own personal NZ favourite I not so humbly submit one of my own sketch designs, as yet unbuilt, for an artist's house in the Wairarapa. It largely follows my own ideas on the promise of the New Zealand house."

PC 4: John Soane House, London - John Soane

"He was perhaps the pre-eminent Architect of the Enlightenment -- using reason, ingenuity, the limited materials and technology of the day and what was known about the nature of architecture to develop a totally new conception of stylised space, with man at the centre."

PC3: Taliesin West, Sonora Desert, Arizona - Frank Lloyd Wright

"In one of the most inhospitable habitats known to man, in the desert north of Phoenix and sitting just beneath the McDowell Mountain Range. there we find a heightened sense of life writ large; a life built in a particular context that fits SO WELL it could be nowhere else. Whereas with Fallingwater one gets the sense that there man has completed what nature had just suggested, at Taliesin West we realise that in this place man has produced something that make an oasis out of what was before only raw desert; a place with "a view of the rim of the world."


PC 2: Price Tower, Oklahoma - Frank Lloyd Wright

"Here tonight is Wright's only completed tall building: the Price Tower, or as so he often called it, 'the tree that escaped the crowded forest'."

PC 1: Bavinger House, Oklahoma - Bruce Goff

"Goff's best work is this house pictured here, the Bavinger House. Built in 1955 for a young family in Norman Oklahoma, it brings together locally quarried 'ironrock,' mine tailings, coal rejects, glass cullets, airplane wire and a used oil-rig drilling pipe for the mast..."

Den 5: Jewish Museum, Berlin - Daniel Libeskind

"To return to the original point I made, that this building demonstrates architecture's power to speak, think about what Libeskind has done. By taking themes of absence and presence, and working these into the design in a concrete, tangible way, the architecture moves beyond something which must be explained - a piece of art that you have to read a pamphlet before you can sagely nod, grasping your chin - and into the realm of 'speaking' architecture: one forms one's own opinion, but is forcefully guided by powerful, masterful narrative."

Den 4: Peregrine Winery, New Zealand - Architecture Workshop

"The building is sits in an exquisite natural setting, and it resonates with the Murcutt project I posted earlier, in a number of ways. The twisting, translucent blade which is the most striking feature of the architecture, is seen to float over the countryside, forming a visual break between what is 'natural' and what has been 'grafted' on to the site. The relationship between the groundplane and the hovering translucent element is dynamic and uneasy - and exciting."

Supplementary post: Tropical architecture in Darwin

"I'm posting these pics here partly because they help to understand the context of the 'shearing shed' that Den posted below. These are photos of one of Darwin's few remaining original, pre-air-conditioning tropical houses, restored after Cyclone Tracy. I took them about ten years ago. As you'll see, many of the features are replicated in Murcutt's own tropical house."

Den 3: Marika-Alderton House, Northern Territory, Australia - Glen Murcutt

"The above is an Aboriginal phrase used as a design credo by auteur Aussie architect Glenn Murcutt, and one can see the direct translation from principle to built form in his entire body of work. This house combines a sensitivity to local culture and heritage..."

Den 2. Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania - Frank Lloyd Wright

"This is probably not far from the top five buildings of anyone interested in architecture. Gotta be quick! It was designed as the private holiday house for Edgar Kaufmann, in a sum total of three hours..."

Den 1. Rail Switchtower, Basel, Switzerland - Herzog + de Meuron

"This building demonstrates that 'architecture' is not simply for the elite - that there is no distinction between 'architecture' and building. True inspiration can spring from the most banal and mundane requirements."

Tell us what you think. Which are your favourites, and why?

RELATED: Architecture, Art, New Zealand, Philosophy, Objectivism

It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing

'Berlin Bear' disagrees with me. It happens. In response to my musical point here he asks: "What I don't get is this: If we can, as you say "without trouble identify what is good music, and what is not" why do opinions on what is good music and what is not, or indeed what is music and what is not, differ so much from one person to the next?"

Good point, and on reflection I withdraw the words 'without trouble.' If it could be done 'without trouble' we wouldn't need either the philosophical discussion or the research, would we?

First of all let's understand that art per se is of crucial importance in human life. Art, if you like, offers a shortcut to our philosophy; it allows us to say when we see a painting or hear a piece of music, "Yes! This is me!" Art that does that for us helps us to integrate our view of the world; it allows us to hold in one 'mental unit' the totality of our view on the world, and by so doing helps to integrate us.

So as we all hold different philosophies and have a different fundamental outlook, it's quite natural that we will all look for different art to give us that "Yes!" moment.

Having said that, it should be clear that not every work of art can do that for us. A piece that does will have sufficient scope, depth and integration (SDI) to integrate a fundamental view of the world, and it is by these measures that we can form objective standards for what is good and bad. As Duke Ellington explains it, "It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing."

So if a painting or book or symphony or poem or sculpture is good enough, if it has suffient SDI, (and if it swings!) it will be capable of being a 'shortcut to our philosophy'; if not, it won't. That's why we can say of one work of art: "This is good art, but I don't like it," or "This is good, I love it," or "This is crap because it insults my intelligence."

If you're interested, I talk about this with respect to music at greater length here, and Ayn Rand talks about this at much greater length and with much greater style in her book The Romantic Manifesto. As you'd expect. I recommend both to your attention. :-)

The importance of this new research, to conclude (thank goodness, I hear you sigh), is that it helps to further explain what up to now has only really been possible with introspection - that is, up to now it's only been possible to feel the effect of melody, harmony and the like in the 'listening room of our own mind.' It seems it might now be possible to show these effects more demonstratively, a very exciting prospect! :-)

Getting no (musical) satisfaction

Reading a puff-piece the other day about the Rolling Stones' impending tour to these islands, a piece of research was quoted that suggested our 'cultural choices' (or some such phrase) are all made between the ages of fifteen to thirty, following which we all apparently seek to recapture and reprise the thrill first felt in the first flush of adulthood.

This, said the journalist about the research, explains such phenomena as the constant repackaging and re-selling of CDs and albums of arthritic rockers, the $umpteen squillion Jimi Hendrix Rock'n'Roll Museum in Seattle (paid for with Paul Allen's Microsoft winnings), and the bland dreck played on expensive sound equipment emanating from the car windows of too many highly-paid middle-aged middle executives - 'life in the fast lane' - 'I can't get no satisfaction' - 'let's all do the crocodile rock' - bleecch.

This, however and quite frankly, is the sort of 'research' that confuses statistics for explanation. As Ludwig von Mises used to say, "mathematics is silent on causality" -- and without causality you don't have meaningful 'research,' you just have description, just the very beginnings of research.

It's true that many people do seem to make their choices-for-life about things artistic in those early years of adulthood when they are seeking to find their place in the world, and to find art and music that seems to describe the way they themselves see the world. Art and music offer both the mature and the immature brain a necessary 'shortcut to philosophy' that is particularly evident and absolutely necessary in those teenage and post-teenage years when the 'searching ' for that shortcut begins; the offerings of popular culture however are peculiarly ill-suited to offer the significant art and music that really would offer the mature, thinking, brain a lifetime of interest.

The sad thing is that too many are unable to keep their taste maturing and their brains alive as they mature, even as their taste refuses to; rather than seeking out the great artistic heights that could truly touch their mature souls they choose to settle instead for the immature art and music they experience in their early years - the 'shake rattle and roll,' the 'raw power' of their youth -- and sadly, they miss out on art and music that could truly touch those places that 'raw power' alone can never reach. And then they end up listening to the bland nothings of Goldenhorse at dinner parties and find themselves huddled in corporate boxes at Rolling Stones' concerts -- and they find they have souls to match.

Its likely the 'research' thrown up by statistics about people's artistic and musical tastes is correct, but only because too many people chose not to explore any further than those early artistic and musical gropings, when their first questions about the world and their place in it are answered for them by the facile voices they first hear. The loss in their lack of further exploration is all theirs.

[Want more? If you haven't already, try one of my earlier articles on the same subject, but in greater depth: Something Better than Rage, Pain, Anger and Hurt.]

LINKS: Something Better than Rage, Pain, Anger and Hurt - Peter Cresswell

TAGS: Music, Philosophy, Ethics

Architecture v Architecture: Introduction

Commenting on this thread, blogger Den MT told me:

Far be it from me to engage in professional snobbery, PC, but for one who has erected such impregnable walls around their conception of 'art' and 'taste,' I'd be casting my eye a lot closer to home before rubbishing anyone else's aesthetic sensibilities.

Objectivity does not exist in art. You are a poor arbiter of taste if said taste is to be measured against the art you post (as 'the only true art').
[...]
'I see' your credentials as dubious. You demonstrate few intersections with what I enjoy and find engaging and entertaining about the visual arts, but the difference is that I don't claim any kind of intellectual authority for my opinion.
[...]
You post a lot of the classics on your site as examples of good architecture, but very few modern, current architects or buildings. Either you don't have your finger on the pulse as it were, you don't believe any good architecture is currently being produced, or (my bet) you wouldn't know good architecture if it landed on you from 6000mm AFFL.

You see, I'd been suggesting that it is possible to objectively determine that one thing is art and another is just a pile of shit, and Den disagreed. I'd suggested that individual taste is certainly subjective, but that what we like is nonetheless able to be analysed objectively to tell us something about ourselves and the way we see the world -- to which Den disagreed. I'd suggested that art is a shortcut to our philosophy ... and Den suggested I was talking nonsense.

So what's a commentator to do?

Well, in the interests of free speech and artistic and architectural debate (and of getting the fingers of 'Not PC' readers closer to the pulse -- where I know they want to be), I invited Den to join with me over the next week-and-a-bit in each posting here at 'Not PC' five of our own architectural favourites, and with each an argument for why we say it's good, and then let's see where it gets us.

So tonight, Den kicks off with ... well, you'll just have to tune back in tonight and find out, won't you. See you then.

RELATED: Architecture, Art

More on value judgements in art

If art is a shortcut to philosophy, then just how exactly is this expressed in art?

How does art for example portray value judgments about the most fundamental questions of the universe? What values, for example, do you think that painting at the right by Albert Bierstadt expresses? (Click on the painting and scroll down to find out.)

We got a glimpse of how to begin answering that question in our architectural debate recently (summarised here, and then continued with the Winefield Critique of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin), so let's have a closer look at how it functions in paintings.

Ayn Rand argues that art is uniquely placed to express what she calls "metaphysical value judgements," ie., evaluations of the most fundamental questions abuot existence and our place in it. These value judgements, she says, take the form of answers to questions such as: "Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does he have the power…to choose his goals and achieve them…or is he a helpless plaything of forces beyond his control? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil?"

The connection between these questions and painting is anything but self-evident, so tonight here at Not PC I'm posting an excerpt from artist Michael Newberry's wonderfully descriptive piece on 'Detecting Value Judgments in Painting' (that is unfortunately and inexplicably rendered almost illegible at his site by being in yellow text on a white page!) that just might help to make that connection a little clearer.

"Let's see," he says, "if I can show you some paintings that answer those very questions."

He begins with some guidelines for detecting metaphysical value-judgements (MVJs) in painting:

1. Describe what you see.
2. The canvas is the Universe.
Approach each and every artwork as if it is a universe in itself. Simply substitute "universe" for "canvas" and a whole new outlook will become apparent.
a. Look for the size of humanity in relationship to the canvas. This is symbolic of humanity's importance in the universe: is humanity larger than life or tiny and insignificant?
b. How is humanity placed within this universe? At the top, bottom or center?
c. What is the most prominent feature within the canvas/universe and what is the main focus? d. For non-figurative work, what are the outstanding things and how are they placed in the canvas?
3. What is the relationship of subject or person to their environment?
This will tell us how important humanity is in relationship to society or nature.
a. Is there a significant difference of sizes between the setting and the subject?
b. Look for the possible symbolism of the objects and/or their relationships. For example, a barrier to freedom symbolized by a chain-link fence. Or, the state buildings are all-powerful above and humanity is crushed below.
c. Is there more emphasis placed on one thing more than another? For example, is there a disregard for the setting and is all the focus on the main figure?
4. Body language.
a. What are people doing? Are they bent, awkward or upright and elegant?
b. Think about the symbolic implications of their posture: are they approaching life as a servant, a thug, or a hero?
c. What are the most notable facial features?
5. Use adjectives to describe the style, color, and light.
This is not a substitute for the facts that are represented in the painting, but using adjectives first to describe a general impression helps you find the facts. We are not analyzing whether the means of the painting are good or not, merely trying to get at the mood of the piece, just as how you might describe the weather outside as cheerful or crystal-clear.
a. Is the painting distorted, smeared, vague or is it orderly, in focus, complex?
b. Are the colors murky, dull or vibrant, bold? Are they in harmony or do they clash?
c. Is the light in the painting subdued or brilliant?
d. The symbolism of light and shadow cannot be missed: are the objects or persons dim and the unenlightened? Or are they enlightened by a radiant universe?

Our own personal evaluation of a painting (or any work of art or architecture) will depend to a very large extent on what values the painting expresses, and on how important those values are to us. It will also depend on just how well the painting expresses those values -- in other words, whether the painting has sufficient scope, depth, technique and integration to express the artist's intended value judgements.

And remember this: Expressing value judgements in art is not a bad thing, as some of you have been known to suggest here recently. Expressing value judgements is what all good art does. If it doesn't do it, it's not good art.

So with those guidelines as pointers, see what Newberry makes of how two paintings answer a fundamental evaluation of the importance of free will: "Does [man] have the power…to choose his goals and achieve them…or is he a helpless plaything of forces beyond his control?"

7. Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830.

In Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix notice the woman charging forward with her out-thrust arm raising the French flag aloft. Notice her location at the top of the canvas. She is inspiring a rabble of soldiers, dandies, and regular people to carry on even over the obstacles of death, which lie literally at her feet. Though we don't know whether she and they will achieve their goals, it is startlingly clear that they are not the playthings of destiny, they are acting to fulfill their aims.

8. Goya, The Shootings of May 3^rd 1808, 1814.

On the other side of this volitional issue we have Goya's painting of an execution, in which the these poor men have been lead like sheep to their slaughter. Notice that in the background that the State buildings are above the scene, the implication is that the state dictates to the humans below. There is a line of faceless universal soldiers, heads bowed, carrying out their orders. The main victim thrusts his arms out in the gesture of "why". Notice how the light box is turned towards the victims, they are bathed in its sympathetic glow while the soldiers are in the shadow. Also notice that the color of the light box and the main character is identical gold and white, the implication being that he is the light. Goya paints an empathic portrait of these victims plight but victims they are; hopeless playthings of the mysterious State lurking in the background.

Read Newberry's whole piece here for much more on this important subject (and I'll try and persuade him to fix his yellow-on-white text).

I can't recommend it highly enough.

LINKS: Detecting value judgements in painting - Michael Newberry
ARCHITECTURE DEBATE: Summing up - PC and DenMT's combined Top Ten architectural favourites, 'Not PC'
ARCHITECTURE DEBATE: Response to Berlin's Jewish Museum - guest post by Robert Winefield at 'Not PC'

RELATED: Art

Mad Hatter's Tea Party - John Tenniel

Another illustration tonight, this time a classic from Alice in Wonderland: the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, one that many of us can probably remember from childhood.

Illustrations are not art, and nor are they intended to be -- they lack, after all, the scope, depth and integration needed to function as art -- but the best illustrations have more delight than a truck-load of the crap you find infesting today's art galleries.

The function of illustrations is generally not to give us a shortcut to philosophy, as good art will do, but instead to summarise, to condense, to encapsulate a thousand words of a story into a picture that will tell it with all the economy the illustrator can muster. At that, John Tenniel was a master.

LINKS: John Tenniel - Wikipedia
More on value judgements in art - Peter Cresswell (Not PC)

RELATED: Art, Books

'Naked with Pig' - Kira O'Reilly

What's the meaning of art? Is it a shortcut to our philosophy? A concrete vision of our values? A way to present a view of what's important in the world in a single vivid image? Or this:

Kira O'Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig - at the taxpayer's expense.

There you go. Tristan Tzara has a lot to answer for.

(And another big thank you to 'the taxpayer,' wherever he or she is.)

LINK: It's art, says the naked woman who'll hug a dead pig on stage - UK Daily Mail [Hat tip Thomas Lee]
Who needs great art? - Peter Cresswell - SOLO HQ

RELATED: Art, Philosophy, Nonsense

What architecture is all about

Now we're at the halfway point of our architectural debate here at 'Not PC,' here's a brief meditation on what architecture is all about. In five words or less: giving meaning to our lives. To quote the late Claude Megson, "If it doesn't have meaning, then you're just wanking."

For a few more words on the subject, read on...


*** WHEN HILLARY AND TENZING reached the top of Everest for the first time, the story goes that Tenzing fell to his knees and gave thanks to the spirits that had helped their journey; he prayed to each of the four winds, and he carefully placed in the ground a small stake on which prayer ribbons were attached. While he was doing this, Hillary stuck a flag in the ground, unzipped his fly and took a piss.

We each mark our territory in very different ways. But we do each mark our territory.

We make buildings to keep the rain off, and in doing so we raise a crown over our head and mark out from the world our own space below; we mark out for ourselves a place in the world by building a campfire that we keep burning and around which we make comfortable for ourselves, or by raising high our own totem that seems to say “here I am!”; we recognise the important rituals we’ve built into our own lives by making these rituals concrete, literally making them concrete, and by doing so we are saying, “This is important.” We erect buildings to perform some useful function, and in the act of erecting them they unavoidably perform another crucial useful or symbolic function for us: they embody our values. They tell us we exist.

Buildings are a concrete expression of values – the values of the people who designed, erected and occupy them.

Like every art, architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy. In building architecture we erect an armature that will support ourselves and our important values, and offer us as well a place from which to look out on the world around us. Amongst the myriad of ways this can be done , we choose the one that does it for us. It is a shortcut to our philosophy – which is why our choices are often so personal to us. The way it does that is as an extension of ourselves.

“Architecture,” as Aldo van Eyck once said, “is about making a ‘home for man’.” The space we build is space for human life, for us to inhabit, and from which we can emerge to 'do battle.' It is a place that expresses what a home for man looks like, smells like and sprawls like; it is here that we beging to find the meaning in architecture: the meaning resides in how it makes its home for man.

In the act of making and placing our buildings in the world, we make decisions about what’s important in the world. What values need to be 'built in' and made concrete. What should we include from around us? What should we keep out? Early morning sun is good; later afternoon sun isn’t. Gentle breezes are good inside the house; heavy rain is not; views of the lake and the trees and the beautiful hills about us are wonderful – views of the local slaughterhouse are not.

Some of these things are highly contextual. Early morning sun is good in Reykjavik, but not always in Dubai in mid-summer. Later afternoon sun is bad in most parts of the world, but in Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, “late afternoon” extends for several months, and is always a welcome guest. Gentle breezes in Hawaii are welcome; in Siberia they’re called a draught. A view of the local slaughterhouse from your lounge window might be highly prized if you’re … okay, I’m stretching on this last one.

The fact remains nonetheless that the choices we make about how we build our shelter, mark our place and decide what functions our building serves for us define something both about us, and about the place we make -- and about the context in which we make it.

WE NEED TO BUILD. Animals adapt themselves to nature, and they’re already adapted to do that. Humans can’t. We adapt nature to ourselves. We must. Unlike animals with their multiple defences against the world, our means of survival is our reasoning brain: on its own this offers no physical defence against predation, and no guarantee of survival: we learn to use our brain to plan, to invent, to create; to understand the nature of the world around us and to make sense of it and to adapt it to ourselves, to make of it a place in which we are protected, and in which we can feel ourselves at home.

We need buildings to shelter us, and not just in the physical sense of shelter. We need a place that is a home: our place, wherein we see ourselves and our own values reflected back, including the value of the home itself.

Good architecture then is not just functional on the bare physical plane. We've been out of the caves long enough to do much better than that. “A house is a machine for living,” declared Le Corbusier on behalf of today's cave dwellers. “But only if the heart is a suction pump,’ responded Frank Lloyd Wright. Architecture is not just shelter; it is not just ‘marking a spot’: its function is also to delight.

Bread and water nourish our stomachs; we need also to nourish our souls. Thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi offered this wisdom:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

But only if your heart is not a suction pump.

What good architecture does then is to deal with the totality of a human existence, to provide at one level the support structure to make human life possible, and at another much richer level to express back to us what it means to be human by giving a sense of place to all our occasions, by building in all our important rituals, by connecting us to what is meaningful in our lives: To sunrises and sunsets; to the sharing of food together; to relaxing with friends; to having time and space for contemplation and for conversation, and for rest, and for sex -- and for rest and contemplation (and conversation) after (and during) sex.

That’s about as important as a job gets, right?

Writing about Ferraris, PJ O’Rourke expressed it this way: “Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one at 250mph.” THAT is the feeling good architecture should communicate! We take the material that nature provides, and the needs that we have, and those moments where we say to ourselves, “Ah, this is what being alive is all about!” and we give those needs wings and we build in and celebrate those moments, and by doing so we express our lives, and we help bring meaning to them.

What could be more important?

* * * * *

*** You can look forward to more on the architecture debate here at 'Not PC' on Monday, when I'll post the third of my own architectural favourites. In the meantime, if it's thinking about architecture that you want to do, may I humbly offer a piece written a few years back as a book review: 'What Architecture Is.'

It begins by boldly declaring what architecture is not ...

*** And if you're already emboldened to read more about architecture than this humble blogger can provide, here's a suggested reading list on architecture to help you begin your own architecture library. Enjoy the adventure.

Architecture: ‘Making a home for man’–Part 1

“The purpose of architecture is
to make a home for man.”
~ Aldo Van Eyck

The purpose of architecture is not just to look nice in magazines. In five words or less, the primary purpose of good architecture is: giving meaning to our lives. To quote the late, great New Zealand architect Claude Megson, "If it doesn't have meaning, then you're just wanking."

In this three-part post, I argue that architecture ‘marks our spot,’ engages our spirits, and tells us daily who we are.

Read on to begin . . .

*** WHEN MAN FINALLY CONQUERED mountain, when Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of Everest for the first time, the story goes that Tenzing fell to his knees and gave thanks to the spirits that had helped their journey; he prayed to each of the four winds who had remained in abeyance; and he carefully placed in the ground at each compass point a small stake on which prayer ribbons were attached. While he was doing this, Hillary stuck a flag in the ground, unzipped his fly and took a piss.

We each mark our territory in very different ways. But we do each mark our territory.

We make buildings to keep the rain off, and in doing so we raise a crown over our head and mark out from the world our own space below.

We mark out for ourselves a place in the world by building a campfire that we keep burning and around which we make comfortable for ourselves, or by raising high our own totem that seems to say “here I am!”

We recognise the important rituals we’ve built into our own lives by making these rituals concrete, literally making them concrete, and by doing so we are saying, “This is important.”

We erect buildings to perform some useful function, and in the act of erecting them they unavoidably perform another crucial useful or symbolic function for us: They embody our values. They tell us we exist. They show us who we are.

Buildings are a concrete expression of values – the values of the people who commissioned, designed, erected and occupy them.

Like every art, architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy. In building architecture we erect an armature that will support ourselves and our important values, and offer us as a place from which to look out upon the world around us. Amongst the myriad of ways this could be done, we each choose the one that does it for us. Live every artformm architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy – which is why our choices are so often so personal to us. The way architecture does that is as an extension of ourselves.

Architecture, as architect Aldo van Eyck says, is about ‘making a home for man.’The space we build is space for human life, for us to inhabit, and from which we can emerge to 'do battle.' It is a place that expresses what a home for man looks like, smells like and sprawls like; it is here that we begin to find the meaning in architecture: the meaning resides in how it makes its home for man.

In the act of making and placing our buildings in the world, we make decisions about what’s important in the world. What values need to be 'built in' and made concrete.

• What should we include from the immediate environment around us?
• What of oit should we keep out?

Early morning sun is good; later-afternoon sun often isn’t. Gentle breezes are good inside the house; heavy rain is not. Views of the lake and the trees and the beautiful hills about us are wonderful – views of the local slaughterhouse are not.

Some of these things are highly contextual. Early morning sun is great in Reykjavik, but not always in Dubai in mid-summer. Later-afternoon sun is bad in most parts of the world, but in Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, “late afternoon” extends for several months, and is always a welcome guest. Gentle breezes in Hawaii are welcome; in Siberia they might be called a draught. A view of the local slaughterhouse from your lounge window might be highly prized if you’re … okay, I’m stretching on this last one.

The fact remains nonetheless that the choices we make about how we build our shelter, mark our place and decide what functions our building serves for us define something both about us, and about the place we make -- and about the context in which we make it.

HERE’S A VERY BASIC fact from which we start:

WE NEED TO BUILD.

Why so? Animals in general adapt themselves to nature, and they’re mostly already adapted to do that. But humans can’t. We adapt nature to ourselves. We must. We either adapt nature to ourselves, or we die. Unlike animals with their claws and armour, their feathers and strong hides, with all their multiple defences against the world, we human beings have but one: our reasoning brain. On its own this offers no physical defence against predation, and no guarantee of survival: we must learn to use our brain to plan, to invent, to create; to understand the nature of the world around us and to make sense of it and to adapt it to ourselves; to make of it a place in which we are protected, and (as we become more accomplished and learn more about our psychological as well as our physical needs) a place in which we can feel ourselves at home.

We need buildings to shelter us, and not just in the physical sense of shelter. We need a place that is a home: our place, wherein we see ourselves and our own values reflected back, including the value of the home itself and all of us it contains. (When we build a house, in the words of architect Claude Megson, we don’t just build a roof over our heads, “we build a whole universe for ourselves to inhabit” – that place must reflect our whole universe of needs and emotions; the universe of our own soul. In Part 3, we’ll take a tour around our ‘soul’ as reflected in our houses.)

Good architecture then is not just functional on the bare physical plane. We've been out of the caves long enough to do much better than that. “A house is a machine for living,” declared Le Corbusier on behalf of today's cave dwellers. “But only if the heart is a suction pump,’ responded Frank Lloyd Wright.

Architecture is not just shelter; it is not just ‘marking a spot’: its function is also to delight. Our crown might become a dome . . .

Bread and water nourish our stomachs; we need also to nourish our souls. Thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi offered this wisdom:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

But buy them only if your heart is not a suction pump.

What good architecture does then is to deal with the totality of a human existence, to provide at one level the support structure to make human life possible, and at another much richer level to express back to us what it means to be human by giving a sense of place to all our occasions, by building in all our important rituals, by connecting us to what is meaningful in our lives: To sunrises and sunsets; to the sharing of food together; to relaxing with friends; to having time and space for contemplation and for conversation, and for rest, and for sex -- and for rest and contemplation (and conversation) after (and during) sex.

That’s about as important as a job gets, right?

Writing about Ferraris, PJ O’Rourke expressed it this way: “Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one at 250mph.” THAT is the feeling good architecture should communicate! We take the material that nature provides, and the needs that we have, and those moments where we say to ourselves, “Ah, this is what being alive is all about!” and we give those needs wings -- and we build in and celebrate those moments, and by doing so we express our lives, and we help bring meaning to them.

What could be more important?

---

In Part 2, we’ll answer the question: if architecture is about ‘making a home for man,’ then what exactly is man?

And in Part 3 we’ll discover what it is about man that needs a home—and we’ll take a tour of the ‘places’ he needs a home for.

SUMMER SIX-PACK: Architecture, creative destruction & some rules on objective journalism

Another six-pack of gold from the archives to add to your summer reading. Enjoy!

* * * *

Friday, September 07, 2007

"There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion"

    Would-be pundits such as Brian Gaynor et al who offer their opinions on the collapses and troubles in finance houses might want to add to their researches the two subjects "malinvestment" (a misallocation of resources often following a period of artificially excessive credit) and "creative destruction" (that “process of industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”—two concepts every would-be economic pundit needs to have in their kitbag, or else be considered misinformed.
    Without that understanding the various pundits are unable to see the malinvested writing on the wall, and unqualified to realise how important it is to everyone to let the creative destruction rip—not to prop it up. Writing in 1949, Ludwig von Mises might have been talking to today's pundits-of-ignorance:

    “There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as the final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.”

    If only the pundits were listening. There are no shortcuts to the inevitable. Tell failing finance houses "Screw up and we will bail you out," and what do you think that will do to the number of screw ups, and to the amount of extra risk the screw-ups take with your money?

* * * *

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Objective journalism? Non-neutrality is objective, stupid

    What a fantastic cartoon in The Herald on the Clark Government's democracy rationing, following up yesterday's front page effort!

    Now as you might have heard, The Herald has drawn criticism from the commentariat for not being "neutral" in taking against Clark's democracy rationing. But objective journalism does not mean neutrality. That’s just flat wrong. The premise here is that if you have a point of view, then you can't possibly be objective. But as Paul Blair explains, "that's just plain false."

    “An objective report gives the audience all the information needed to draw a valid conclusion... But facts lead to conclusions. Just because one doesn't want to accept those conclusions doesn't make the facts wrong or the presentation non-objective: rather, the person who resists the logical conclusion is the one who lacks objectivity... Being objective means recognizing that not everybody's point of view is equally valid or deserves equal respect.”

     Over to you, critics.

* * * *

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Those dirty Americans

    News just in from BATTLE CREEK, Michigan, USA—the former stamping ground of dirty old Dr Kellogg, doctor at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and inventer of the eponymous corn flakes—that “a man who pleaded no contest to a sodomy charge involving a sheep says he should not have to register as a sex offender...”
    Hah! Time, I think to turn the tables.  Time for some sheep jokes about Americans for a change.

• A Canadian bloke was walking down the street in Michigan when he saw a farmer going hammers and tongs on a sheep. The Canack yelled out, "Hey mate, in Canada we shear our sheep." The American turned around and said, "Piss off mate, I'm sharing none of this."
• Q: What do you call safe sex in Michigan?
  A:Marking an 'X' on the sheep that kick.
• 'A Michigan Nursery Rhyme'
  Mary had a little sheep
  With the sheep she went to sleep
  The sheep turned out to be a ram...
  Mary Had A Little Lamb.
• A Canadian farmer and a Man From Michigan were walking out in the field one day and they spotted a sheep tangled in the wire fence.. "Wow!" said the Canack. "I wish that was a woman all tangled up in that there fence." Said the Man From Michigan, "I just wish it was dark!"
• An American walks into his bedroom with a sheep under his arm and says: "Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache." His girlfriend is lying in bed and replies, "I think you'll find that's a sheep, you idiot." The man says, "I think you'll find that I wasn't talking to you."

     That man from Michigan would be right at home in Brigend, Co. Donegal, Ireland, where a some years ago a publican installed some sheep in a house behind his pub for the pleasure of his patrons. He was convicted of running a brothel. (Yes, that’s a true story). So in honour of that publican:

• Q: What do you call four sheep tied to a lampost in Donegal
  A: An Irish leisure centre
• Q: What do you call an Irishman with a sheep under his arm?
  A: A pimp.
• Q: What do you call an Irishman with sheep under one arm, and a goat under the other? A: A bisexual.

    And finally, just to finish off (so to speak), there's a message to sheep-shaggers at this link.

* * * * *

Friday, May 05, 2006

Robie House - Frank Lloyd Wright

    From the Chicago of 1906 comes Frank Lloyd Wright's house for the Robie family. (As it is today, here). Forward-thinking living room section showing environmental appurtenances here. And the floor plans here adumbrating Wright’s revolution in space planning. 
    In many ways the culmination of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Prairie House' phase in both drama and spatial sophistication, the Robie House of 1908-10 is currently undergoing restoration to restore it to its former glory, before reopening as a fully restored architectural house museum on May 1, 2010. 
    Story here at Prairie Mod, and more details including pictures here at the FL Wright Preservation Trust.
    And even more pictures here, including the original presentation sketch

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Von Sternberg House – Richard Neutra

    I was sure I’d blogged this house before, but for the life of me I can’t find a decent post on it. (Well, apart from this one.)
    This is by far my favourite house by Neutra (pronounced NOI-tra). Designed in 1934 for film director Joseph von Sternberg, director of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.  (Von Sternberg famously insisted that there be no door locks on the bathrooms, in case a temperamental actor or actress or two decided to end it all in the stalls.)

   “’I selected a distant meadow,’ von Sternberg recounted later, ‘in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself, my books, and my collection of modern art.’ 
    “The building’s major space was a double-height living area surrounded by a balcony that was used as an art gallery. Displayed there were works by Gauguin, Kandinsky, Matisse, Léger, de Chirico, Kokoschka, Brancusi and Archipenko. Von Sternberg’s mirrored bath and bedroom, with a view of the rooftop reflecting pool, were the only rooms on the second floor.
    “On the first level, east of the living area, lay a studio and kitchen, followed by staff quarters and the garages, one for regular cars and a larger one for the Rolls-Royce. A specially designed space for the owner’s huge dogs was behind the garage. To enliven the otherwise simple, aluminium-clad façade, Neutra designed—in the best Hollywood manner—a series of remarkable “special effects,” which extended into the landscape. Most prominent was the high curvilinear wall around the front patio, which emphasized the streamlined personality of the house. A shallow moat-like lily pool surrounded the wall and, in broken stretches, the entire house. A long thin wall extended from the west façade, exaggerating the house’s size and dividing the front and rear gardens.”

    Head to the house’s website here to see a stunning slideshow of the Julius Shulman photographs of the house and, if you don’t already know, to discover which influential novelist lived here after Von Sternberg, where she began the novel that has come to define our times – the novelist who described the house as “unbelievably wonderful.”

    “Later, in answering a query from a fan, she [the novelist] described it as being ‘extremely modern—made of steel, glass and concrete, mostly glass. So you see, I’m the kind of ballplayer who endorses only what she really smokes—and smokes only what she really endorses.’”

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Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

What Architecture is All About

    Now we're at the halfway point of our architectural debate over at my main blog 'Not PC,' here's a very brief meditation on what, at bottom, architecture is really all about: In five words or less, it’s this: giving meaning to our lives. Or to use the words of the late Claude Megson, "If it doesn't have meaning, then you're just wanking." 
    Simple, huh? Read on now for the thousand-word meditation...

    WHEN HILLARY AND TENZING reached the top of Everest for the first time, the story goes that Tenzing fell to his knees and gave thanks to the spirits that had helped their journey; he prayed to each of the four winds, and he carefully placed in the ground a small stake on which prayer ribbons were attached. While he was doing this, Hillary stuck a flag in the ground, unzipped his fly and took a piss.
    We each mark our territory in very different ways. But we do each mark our territory.
    We make buildings to keep the rain off, and in doing so we raise a crown over our head and mark out from the world our own space below; we mark out for ourselves a place in the world by building a campfire that we keep burning and around which we make comfortable for ourselves, or by raising high our own totem that seems to say “here I am!”; we recognise the important rituals we’ve built into our own lives by making these rituals concrete, literally making them concrete, and by doing so we are saying, “This is important.” We erect buildings to perform some useful function, and in the act of erecting them they unavoidably perform another crucial useful or symbolic function for us: they embody our values. They tell us we exist.
    Buildings are a concrete expression of values – the values of the people who designed, erected and occupy them.
    Like every art, architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy. In building architecture we erect an armature that will support ourselves and our important values, and offer us as well a place from which to look out on the world around us. Amongst the myriad of ways this can be done , we choose the one that does it for us. It is a shortcut to our philosophy – which is why our choices are often so personal to us. The way it does that is as an extension of ourselves.
    “Architecture,” as Aldo van Eyck once said, “is about making a ‘home for man’.” The space we build is space for human life, for us to inhabit, and from which we can emerge to 'do battle.' It is a place that expresses what a home for man looks like, smells like and sprawls like; it is here that we begin to find the meaning in architecture: the meaning resides in how it makes its home for man.
    In the act of making and placing our buildings in the world, we make decisions about what’s important in the world. What values need to be 'built in' and made concrete. What should we include from around us? What should we keep out? Early morning sun is good; later afternoon sun isn’t. Gentle breezes are good inside the house; heavy rain is not; views of the lake and the trees and the beautiful hills about us are wonderful – views of the local slaughterhouse are not.
    Some of these things are highly contextual. Early morning sun is good in Reykjavik, but not always in Dubai in mid-summer. Later afternoon sun is bad in most parts of the world, but in Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, “late afternoon” extends for several months, and is always a welcome guest. Gentle breezes in Hawaii are welcome; in Siberia they’re called a draught. A view of the local slaughterhouse from your lounge window might be highly prized if you’re … okay, I’m stretching on this last one.
    The fact remains nonetheless that the choices we make about how we build our shelter, mark our place and decide what functions our building serves for us define something both about us, and about the place we make -- and about the context in which we make it.

    WE NEED TO BUILD. Animals adapt themselves to nature, and they’re already adapted to do that. Humans can’t. We adapt nature to ourselves. We must. Unlike animals with their multiple defences against the world, our means of survival is our reasoning brain: on its own this offers no physical defence against predation, and no guarantee of survival: we learn to use our brain to plan, to invent, to create; to understand the nature of the world around us and to make sense of it and to adapt it to ourselves, to make of it a place in which we are protected, and in which we can feel ourselves at home.
    We need buildings to shelter us, and not just in the physical sense of shelter. We need a place that is a home: our place, wherein we see ourselves and our own values reflected back, including the value of the home itself.
    Good architecture then is not just functional on the bare physical plane. We've been out of the caves long enough to do much better than that. “A house is a machine for living,” declared Le Corbusier on behalf of today's cave dwellers. “But only if the heart is a suction pump,’ responded Frank Lloyd Wright. Architecture is not just shelter; it is not just ‘marking a spot’: its function is also to delight.
    Bread and water nourish our stomachs; we need also to nourish our souls. Thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi offered this wisdom:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

    Buy hyacinths to feed the soul . . . but only if your heart is not a suction pump.
    What good architecture does then is to deal with the totality of a human existence, to provide at one level the support structure to make human life possible, and at another much richer level to express back to us what it means to be human by giving a sense of place to all our occasions, by building in all our important rituals, by connecting us to what is meaningful in our lives: To sunrises and sunsets; to the sharing of food together; to relaxing with friends; to having time and space for contemplation and for conversation, and for rest, and for sex -- and for rest and contemplation (and conversation) after (and during) sex.
    That’s about as important as a job gets, right?
    Writing about Ferraris, PJ O’Rourke expressed it this way: “Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one at 250mph.” THAT is the feeling good architecture should communicate! We take the material that nature provides, and the needs that we have, and those moments where we say to ourselves, “Ah, this is what being alive is all about!” and we give those needs wings and we build in and celebrate those moments, and by doing so we express our lives, and we help bring meaning to them.
    What could be more important?

*** PS:  if you want to think about architecture a bit more deeply, may I humbly offer a piece written a few years back as a book review: 'What Architecture Is.'

It begins by boldly declaring what architecture is not ...

*** And if you're already emboldened to read much more about architecture than this humble blogger can provide, here's a suggested reading list on architecture to help you begin your own architecture library. Enjoy the adventure.

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