Notre-Dame: more

Click to enlarge

Gothic may have been a straining upwards towards heaven; but it was also awe, dread, domination. The force that a cathedral sought to concentrate in one place was powerful and sometimes dark. Notre-Dame would have been terrifying, outside and in, as much as uplifting; what light the stained glass admitted was dark red and blue, and veiled by a haze of incense smoke; church interiors were obscure and mysterious.

But it's perfectly true that Gothic was about light, even if that light could be dark and red.

Barry Bell was a good friend who died last year in an accident that seemed designed to illustrate the callous absurdity of the universe – not that he’d have seen it like that. In Ottawa I sometimes sat in on his fourth year architecture course. In one session Barry asked the group, ‘Are you guys familiar with the work of Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite?’ A sea of hands did not shoot up.

Dionysus was an early Christian writer. In medieval times he was confused with St Denis, the patron saint of the first Gothic church, built by Abbot Suger just outside Paris. For Dionysus, there was a continuous graded path between flesh and spirit, not a stark divide; the highest fleshly state that human sensibility could directly perceive was light, which is very nearly pure spirit. So in contemplating light we get closest to the apprehension of God.

Suger accepted Dionysus/Denis’s theory. Hence "the most radiant windows" (his words) of Gothic churches, affording human beings a near-experience of God's light.

But the Gothic cathedral was also about reflected light – building as solar collector:


It was also about the splendour of mathematical (geometrical) order, mathematical forms being ideal and conveying the true nature of the universe, as distinct from messy sublunary contingency and imperfection:

The sheer prolixity of this, on the other hand, seems to be about something different again:

The suggestion of organic growth is unavoidable. I don’t know what the little nodules are called that run the length of the ribs on the angles of the spires, but they too suggest growth to me, in the form of buds. At the same time the proliferation of freestanding upright structures suggests human, or perhaps angelic, figures. (They are normally seen from far below or at a great distance.)

Alternatively: the spires, which seem all to be 4- or 8-sided, have an aedicule on each face, under a pointed arch. An aedicule is a little house, and is said by architectural historians to stand for the whole house, the whole church, or indeed the Church. So (it doesn’t do to be too literal about this) the spires are symbolic buildings, houses of God.

Clearly I need expert help on this. But life’s too short to read everything, and I seem to be interested in more stuff, not less, as I get older.

Buildings with their guts on the outside

It took me a long time to realise this, but the Centre Pompidou is pure Archigram.

Archigram (http://archigram.net/index.html) were a group of 1960s architects who were trying to think outside the conventions, and in particular to embrace technology. Their schemes included a walking city and the plug-in house: when you needed more space, cranes would deliver add-in units to connect up to the service core.

In 1963-4 I shared a flat with three architecture students who used to bring home the free sheets that Archigram used to put out. For years I saved them (sometimes using them in school), and then, like so much else, decided they were of no further interest and threw them away. (Big mistake.)

http://archigram.net/story.html

(The following year, while I started my teaching job, my equally utopian friends, with a sense of mission caught from their hero Le Corbusier, went out to build streets in the sky -- tower blocks -- for local authorities.)

Archigram projects were characterised most obviously by exposed structure and services. That's exactly what's most striking about the Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini (design 1971, opening 1977). These circulation tubes and external walkways could be straight from an Archigram scheme:

as could this exposed structural engineering:

But is this any different?

Those flying buttresses are shamelessly displayed structural supports; the east end of Notre-Dame is a 13th century Pompidou Centre.

But saying they're structural isn't saying they are not expressive. They certainly are that as well; we feel them as well as seeing their purpose. To us (21st C) they perhaps look like the membranes of a web-limbed extra-terrestrial; to an overawed medieval worshipper, what? organic forms, vegetal, straining upward and inward - to support, but also to grasp?

But the Pompidou, too, is expressive. The tubes and pipes and struts and bracings serve functions, but the decision to display them was rhetorical -- they aren't out there because they need to be; there are perfectly good ways of accommodating mechanical functions without making a show of them (and incidentally while protecting them from the corrosion the Pompidou's steelwork is showing).

These elements aren't just being technology; they're saying technology, making a style or language out of its elements. Pretty exciting too, to my mind.

Les Vélos de Paris

To Paris, while the MacBook was having a new logic board fitted (for readers who complain my arguments don't follow).

I can report that the Vélib' scheme (vélos libres, free bikes) is flourishing. Look at all the Stations Vélib' in one central area (detail from free bike map of Paris) (click to enlarge):

Go to a station and this is what you'll find:


If you nicked one you might have a job passing it off as your own. If you stand and watch, this is the sort of transaction you'll see (minus putting your card in the meter, which I failed to catch on camera):
I don't know what a visitor has to do to get a card but it can be done.

Another mysterious school

The District line of the London Underground sends a probe without much conviction from Earls Court into South London, crossing the river at Putney. I took this line from Wimbledon to Kensington High Street to buy a rucksack, since that street has the biggest branches of Millets, Blacks and Ellis Brigham. On the way there I was excited (such is the phase I'm currently in) to see the back and one end of a fine school building from the raised section of track between Putney Bridge and Parsons Green. It was classic School Board for London so I attempted to take photos on the way back.

[All images -- click to enlarge]

Today I found it on the bike and photographed the front. It’s flats now; recent building and security make it impossible to get round the sides or into the playground at the back.


But what is this school? It’s on New King’s Road, Fulham, and as I said is classic SBL: look at its standard 7-part symmetrical construction, each function (classrooms, mezzanine teachers’ rooms and cloakrooms, staircases and halls) separately displayed through the articulation of the elevation to provide interest along the street frontage. (The simple line of the back, as seen in the shots from the train – a line of classrooms on each floor, varied only by the shaping of the gables – wouldn’t have been tolerated by the architects at the front.)

I now have with me the final report of the School Board for London, published in 1904 before they were disbanded, to be replaced by the Education Committee of the London County Council.

It’s a beautiful production of 378 pages with much of the information I've been trying to get from more obscure sources, including a complete list of SBL schools and pull-out maps. Imagine some public body now going to that sort of trouble before being closed down.

The list and maps clear up a number of my puzzles, but not this one. On the relevant map school on New King’s Road doesn’t appear.

You see Putney Bridge. North of that New King's Road curves east. The school is in that first triangle formed by the road and the District Railway.

The school’s absence leads me to wonder whether it was built after the end of the SBL, in the early days of the LCC’s school building programme – the architect was the same, T.J. Bailey.

Bailey designed for the early LCC education authority the surviving 1905 building on the Mina Road site of what is now Walworth Academy and was Walworth (comprehensive) School, where I once worked. There was talk of the new Academy (it took over last September) demolishing this handsome building, but I see from the Southwark Council planning applications website that it is to be preserved. Good!

Here’s the brochure for opening ceremony:

You can see that a wall originally divided the boys' from the girls' playground. They had separate entrances, the girls to the ground floor and the boys to a staircase to the first floor.

Musical comedy: just say no

I enjoyed a comment I caught on the Today programme while briefly within earshot. A man, I don’t know who, was evidently responding to criticism that people didn’t like the serious plays he wrote or directed or supported but preferred musical comedy:

‘I don’t want to see Oliver just as much as those people don’t want to see my theatre that deals with serious issues.’

Or something like that. I admire, perhaps a bit uneasily, that shameless declaration of ‘elite’ cultural tastes.

Neat, eh? Football & Goldsworthy

From the Guardian yesterday. I think they're really clever.

I've never in the past been at all interested in football but for reasons I don’t fully understand I've started taking an interest, to the extent of watching the odd match on TV and switching on for Match of the Day. And reading the football in the sports pages -- often, these days, before the news. I enjoy skilful play, even though I don’t know the rules and can’t play, and I feel some involvement with players I can recognise such as Crouch, Rooney, Renaldo, Gerrard, Teves (they're the ones I can remember how to spell) though I'm not interested in their lives outside the game. I'm also intrigued by managers’ strategies, tactics and personalities and by the debates about whether Capello knows what he’s doing.

I think there are some terrific writers and broadcast commentators on football and am impressed by the expertise and intelligence that goes into commentary; I admire these people's capacity to see patterns and sense in what to me often looks like a meaningless sequence of events and situations. And I admire the analysts, whoever they are, who made the diagrams above which are both illuminating and beautiful. (Colour in newspapers justifies itself with images like these.)

At the risk of pretentiousness: football is a (more or less) discrete and contained zone of operations and cultural expression where some of the forces and modes of activity at work in the ‘real world’ of politics, business and war are echoed, but in a safe form, without potentially devastating effects on lives. But it wouldn’t be right to regard it as a substitute or displacement, a non-real, play-acting, symbolic world. It’s real in its own right, one of the things we do, answering to needs as real as those that make us go to work or form partnerships. A visiting Martian would have no basis for saying that football was somehow secondary and imitative/ symbolic/ derivative while politics and economics were primary and basic – even discounting the considerable economic role played by football.

I love works like those diagrams that result from taking a chunk of reality and applying a procedure to it, so generating something that wasn’t apparent in the original but was in it nevertheless at some level ; i.e. what it presents is true, though though not in terms of banal realism. This procedure removed time from the reality; the tube map removes scale and precise direction.

How’s it done in the football mapping? Does a computer analyse video images? How is the plotting onto the field done since there are no cameras (are there?) with views from directly on top? Does some kid in the backroom have to trace each move manually on a digital tablet?

Whatever, the result is intriguing. The artefact can be read for what it tells of the originating reality, but also engaged with as a thing in its own right. Chelsea’s less adventurous clustering, Liverpool’s more open and economical moves, were realities, I assume. But what wonderful vortices, with those sudden thrusts out of the force-field (often unsuccessful, I note). Like starlings flocking, or like, as I realised in the small hours last night after I'd already scanned the diagrams, these from Andy Goldsworthy:


The image I really wanted I couldn’t find – I've seen it somewhere: it’s just sticks in the air, thrown by Andy G, in a wind. But this one gives the idea:

Hazel stick throw, LYC, Cumbria, 10 July 1980http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/image/?tid=1980_168. © Andy Goldsworthy

I realise from these that in looking at diagrams like the football ones, despite our best intentions to read them as evidence of what happened in a game, we can’t help bringing other imagery to bear, e.g. of clusters of twigs or bird flight, in a way that makes the image semiotically richer, charged with peripheral suggestion.

Bright disadvantaged kids: two perspectives

I've just read a typically insightful article by John Yandell, a colleague at the London Institute of Education (‘Mind the gap: Investigating test literacy and classroom literacy’, English in Education, Vol.42 No.1, 2008). Here I want to note a couple of thoughts it gave rise to rather than discuss the argument (which I find convincing). John represents to us a 14-year-old boy, Billy, of a type familiar to all of us who have taught in comprehensive schools: intelligent, intellectually lively, cheerful and willing and yet seriously inexperienced and unskilled in academic pursuits, and in the favoured forms of written discourse. He’s studying Richard III in an ‘urban classroom’; he enjoys it and makes sense of it, as John demonstrates, at a level far beyond what his written test results reveal.

(‘Urban’ seems a strange qualification for ‘classroom’, as if studying Richard III was different in built-up areas, but of course the expression is really code for a student body of very mixed origins that presents particular challenges to a teacher.)

What strikes me is the radical incompatibility between the two perspectives that a good English teacher (like Billy’s teacher Maeve) is forced to maintain when working with a kid like Billy. In Billy & co. we see potential, signs of life, frequent flashes of perceptive intelligence, brief comments that get the matter just right, willingness to learn. We've no doubt that he has the brains and the attitude to do well. Each of these small manifestations excites us and encourages us to keep on providing the opportunities, suggesting activities, offering stimulating material, promoting dialogue, fostering a climate in which students will feel encouraged to chance their arm in voicing their thoughts; we keep Billy active (or contemplative), engaged, always moving on to new stuff -- and returning to the old stuff he likes – poems, extracts, his own productions -- securing it in his repertoire.

We feel, this is an adolescent who is a going concern, who’s getting an education: his mind is active, he’s thriving, learning, operating on four cylinders, developing, overcoming the disadvantages of where he’s come from (perhaps a poor earlier schooling, perhaps an unsupportive home); he’s doing what’s right for him now, exactly what he should be doing given where he’s at. Other things being equal we’d back him as an educational prospect.

From this perspective we’re delighted by Billy and conscious how substantial are the cognitive gains represented by each apparently small new achievement. Achievement, in fact, is what we’re primarily conscious of; and promise, embryonic resources ready to be developed.

And yet –- the other perspective -- in terms of where he needs to get to, and by comparison with others of his age in privileged schools, Billy still knows so little and can do so little. He’s read few books and has little skill in writing. He’s already 14 and yet it feels as if he’s only just starting. In that perspective Billy’s day-by-day achievements seem a drop in the ocean of what he needs in order to catch up with his educationally more fortunately peers and have their sort of chances in the qualifications stakes. To those in whom this view dominates, banging on about his achievements and potential seems an irresponsible avoidance of the reality of the matter; and a disinclination to impose an urgent forced-march regime looks like a betrayal of Billy's life chances. To which one response may be that education takes the time it takes, and that what such regimes result in can be of dubious value or even harmful.

What does Billy need, ideally? In terms of his own development, some years more of the sort of educational environment that his teacher, Maeve, is giving him; possibly to 18, possibly to 20 or beyond. He and countless others like him in our schools need time and continuity. But in our system the regime in English and the other subjects changes radically at 16 and then again, with university, for those who get there, at 18, in ways I don’t need to spell out. A-level English and undergraduate English are quite unlike English in a good curriculum for 11-16 year olds. With 50% of the population supposed to be going into higher education, it makes me feel that university for many students needs to be more like a continuation of a good comprehensive school, offering an extension of the general education that students need before specialising in a single discipline. (Few of the undergraduates I've taught in linguistics and language studies in two countries have had this preparation; to me they feel unready for the narrowed focus of a traditional university course.)

My other thought is that for all the good research like John Yandell’s that’s going on, no one has yet given us a full description of the longer-term process by which a 14-year-old Billy or his female peer develops into an 18-year-old or 20-year-old with the knowledge, practices and rhetorical expertise to match those of his or her peers who have had a better start. Can it happen? Does it ever? How, by what stages, under what conditions, with what sorts of pressures and freedoms applied, how fast, how smoothly or unevenly? Is progress steady or are there great divides to be crossed? What English teaching and education more generally need is utopian research, research that from a study of what happens now, here and there in exceptional contexts, could provide a vision of a better educational future.