To the shops on a nice autumn morning and decided to extend my outing as far as my wrecked hip would allow. So I went down to Maple Road and past its lovely plane trees, fine houses and a leafy Victorian Square till I heard organ music from St Andrew’s Church. St Andrews I've always thought as a forbidding dirty brick pile with Victorian ornament that’s trapped generations of soot. I’d never been in -- in fact had never noticed it was open.
I went inside: just a verger or functionary was there, busy, and the organist practising his Bach, nicely. I was very surprised by the building: I was in a huge light space with beautiful new oak pews, fine glass and spectacular brickwork -- the same as outside but clean. There had been a big restoration job, well done. The uncluttered floor invited movement and the seats sitting -- which I did for a listen and a look. A brochure explained it was 1870s and named the architect and stained glass artists, all unfamiliar to me but then they would be as I know little about Victorian churches. I looked around, at the story of Noah on the ceiling of a circular apse, at the brass plaques of commemorated and thanked Victorians and at the stained glass, for which you have to learn to ignore the thick black grid of window bars -- not difficult.
My main pleasures were in the vast, intricately textured volume of the building and the pictures, on the ceiling and in the stained glass. I'm strongly aware how experience of a few drawing classes, in which I'm the least competent student, has made me appreciate both the appearance of, particularly, people (I enjoyed sketching in the Royal Festival Hall concourse the other night) and the drawings of professionals. Going out through the porch I inspected a group of small stained glass windows at eye height. I could see they were essentially coloured drawings and admired the lines and the arrangements of shapes and spaces. No camera with me, sorry.
So everyone at school ought to be taught to draw properly. Perhaps they now are.
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation
Delayed but here at last: photos from by visit to Marseilles in June. (Click on it: the ones below are just a sample.)
Thursday, 9 June 2011
Marseilles
It’s three weeks since I came back from a jaunt to Provence with a plenitude of photos, of which these are by way of down payment and an apology for recent neglect. I’ve had no time to do anything with them -- and now I'm off again so it will be another couple of weeks’ wait at least.
These are Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, in a suburb of Marseilles, and Auguste Chabau, Avions, 1912-14, from Musée Cantini in Marseilles.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Surbiton: the good stuff
A couple of posts back I was up a Surbiton side street looking at the nice houses and nasty (and less nasty) flats. Round the corner is one of the main streets, Claremont Road, and very satisfying it is too to walk along from Adelaide Road towards Surbiton Station (itself a classic -- I see I haven’t done a blog on it and I must). Satisfying because interesting in its variety and some of the buildings are good.
First, welcome to our wheelie bins but behind it is the sort of substantial house that was built when Surbiton started to be a commuter suburb with the coming of the railway (which nearby Kingston, the obvious town for it, was too snooty to admit -- to its great disadvantage ever since: it’s stuck on a slow branch line and we’ve got all the fast trains and loads of them.)
Then this:
Pity we then pass on to this, though I suppose it could be worse:
First, welcome to our wheelie bins but behind it is the sort of substantial house that was built when Surbiton started to be a commuter suburb with the coming of the railway (which nearby Kingston, the obvious town for it, was too snooty to admit -- to its great disadvantage ever since: it’s stuck on a slow branch line and we’ve got all the fast trains and loads of them.)
Then this:
And -- a bit of a comedown:
But this I think is a gem:
Pity we then pass on to this, though I suppose it could be worse:
Surbiton doesn't have much more of that stylish 1930s architecture, still less good post-war, but plenty more 19th century villas. It's been saved from ruination by having the Kingston By-pass (another 1930s wonder) nearby, so there's little through traffic necessitating road widening, one-ways, counterflows, giratories and all that. It's a backwater with a great, well-served railway station -- about which more one day.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Arendt and Sennett
I've been re-reading in a protracted, fragmentary way Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) which I first got onto years ago after a good book architecture (George Baird, The Space of Appearance) made heavy reference to and drew its title from it. I know I've read it before from my pencil markings but, as seems normally to be the case these days, remember none of the things I’d marked -- in fact I almost might as well not have read it. Not quite, though I suspect my vague general impressions come from Baird’s quotes, not the book itself.
I was reading the section on homo faber, man the maker, about the craftsman, as opposed to homo laborans who just labours, producing things like food or laundered sheets that are consumed almost as soon as produced. Arendt makes a distinction between work and labour, the products of the former being ephemeral, those of the latter lasting, often, longer than their maker’s life and contributing to the ‘human artifice’ or made world that is there before we arrive in it and survives after our death.
Other European languages, she points out, make the same distinction. Labour is associated with childbirth, travail -- French travail. Work can be a verb or a noun, including a count noun (with singular and plural works), in French too: oeuvre, les oeuvres -- which reminds me that literary and artistic and scholarly works are part of the human artifice too, though whether she counts them as the product of homo faber too I’m not sure.
For our lives to be meaningful we need an intelligible world -- ‘human artifice’ -- in which to participate, and our works, deeds and words need to be seen and heard by others, our polis, our society, in the space of appearance.
Her homo faber is mainly the craftsman who makes things with hands and tools, and her account of him (and her, as we have to supply throughout -- she was writing before gender awareness got into philosophy) struck me as in some ways unconvincing. It doesn’t matter how for now. So I found myself wondering if Richard Sennett knew of her views or had anything to say about them in his own book The Craftsman -- which again I owned and had, apparently, read in part (though, again, without any recall of the bits I’d marked).
So I look at Sennett’s Prologue and what’s the first sentence I read:
‘Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the days in 1962 when the world was on the brink of atomic war, I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street’
on the Upper West Side in New York, it turns out. And the whole book, as I'm embarrassed not to have remembered, was an argument that Arendt had got it wrong about the craftsman.
I've heard Sennett speak at the London School of Economics, where he was until he retired, about the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. He’d been round the house sketching and measuring Wittgenstein’s crazy design, including such features as doorknobs exactly half way up the door for the sake of geometrical neatness.
So I have personally a student of Hannah Arendt who was a student and lover of Heidegger who was an assistant to Husserl who studied under Brentano (who unfortunately was a student of no-one I've heard of and a Catholic priest into the bargain, thus ending my backwards chain.)
On the grounds of that pedigree, at least its part back to about 1870, I reckon I deserve a bit more respect. (I certainly can’t claim it for my memory.)
I was reading the section on homo faber, man the maker, about the craftsman, as opposed to homo laborans who just labours, producing things like food or laundered sheets that are consumed almost as soon as produced. Arendt makes a distinction between work and labour, the products of the former being ephemeral, those of the latter lasting, often, longer than their maker’s life and contributing to the ‘human artifice’ or made world that is there before we arrive in it and survives after our death.
Other European languages, she points out, make the same distinction. Labour is associated with childbirth, travail -- French travail. Work can be a verb or a noun, including a count noun (with singular and plural works), in French too: oeuvre, les oeuvres -- which reminds me that literary and artistic and scholarly works are part of the human artifice too, though whether she counts them as the product of homo faber too I’m not sure.
For our lives to be meaningful we need an intelligible world -- ‘human artifice’ -- in which to participate, and our works, deeds and words need to be seen and heard by others, our polis, our society, in the space of appearance.
Her homo faber is mainly the craftsman who makes things with hands and tools, and her account of him (and her, as we have to supply throughout -- she was writing before gender awareness got into philosophy) struck me as in some ways unconvincing. It doesn’t matter how for now. So I found myself wondering if Richard Sennett knew of her views or had anything to say about them in his own book The Craftsman -- which again I owned and had, apparently, read in part (though, again, without any recall of the bits I’d marked).
So I look at Sennett’s Prologue and what’s the first sentence I read:
‘Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the days in 1962 when the world was on the brink of atomic war, I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street’
on the Upper West Side in New York, it turns out. And the whole book, as I'm embarrassed not to have remembered, was an argument that Arendt had got it wrong about the craftsman.
I've heard Sennett speak at the London School of Economics, where he was until he retired, about the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. He’d been round the house sketching and measuring Wittgenstein’s crazy design, including such features as doorknobs exactly half way up the door for the sake of geometrical neatness.
So I have personally a student of Hannah Arendt who was a student and lover of Heidegger who was an assistant to Husserl who studied under Brentano (who unfortunately was a student of no-one I've heard of and a Catholic priest into the bargain, thus ending my backwards chain.)
On the grounds of that pedigree, at least its part back to about 1870, I reckon I deserve a bit more respect. (I certainly can’t claim it for my memory.)
Monday, 25 April 2011
What are buildings made of?
Had one of those moments when you’re pulled up short by realising what you don’t know. Walking up Adelaide Road from Claremont Crescent to St Mark’s Hill I passed from a few lovely Regency houses...
and, looking back to the sunny side of the street, this:
...to modern low-rise blocks of flats in brick with white wooden window frames...
...and was trying to pin down what was so objectionable about the flats.
It's their pusillanimity. Although they're Modern in being rational and functional -- no frills, no ornament -- they're Modern without panache, machines for living in without brio, built of bricks and wood with their only modern material, concrete, concealed in floor slabs and staircases. Though modern in their use of concrete, electricity and provision of plumbing in bathrooms and kitchens, there’s nothing about them that celebrates modernity. Rather, the visible materials suggest banal and unscary conformity with traditional domestic norms. Its elevation may have been drawn with ruler and set square eschewing any variation that might add interest or create satisfying proportional relationships, and avoiding the rhetoric that in older buildings marks entrances as special and suggests the relative importance of the internal spaces, what we get is an ordinary brick house wall only bigger and ordinary windows and frames only more of them. It even has a hipped roof like a semi.
(This one’s a bit better, on the sunny side -- the sun certainly helps -- volumetrically satisfying with some interesting massing -- a bit more than just an ordinary house on steroids:
) (How do you 'close brackets' after a picture?)
Then I thought, what could have been used instead of brick? That's what I realised I didn't know. Very recently it’s been possible to use an inner and outer skin, the outer perhaps of wooden strips or laminate and the inner of plasterboard, separated by a wide cavity filled with insulation, and triple-glazed windows that in the interests of insulation try not to be bigger than they need to be. But what about when these flats were built, which I image was in the 1980s?
Come to that, what did Corbusier use for his walls in his Unités d’Habitation flats in Marseilles? presumably he didn’t pour concrete for his walls, though he might have. Perhaps he too used brick, covered with white stucco?
After the war there was talk of turning the vast apparatus that had produced matériel -- tanks and planes -- over to housing. I'm not sure what came of that, but steel- or aluminium-plated houses never appeared and prefabs were made of asbestos -- weren’t they, or was it plywood? -- and not in aircraft factories?
You note I could find all this out with a minimum of research, but I'm choosing to write out my ignorance first. The information I'm lacking will come along some day soon without my having to look for it -- as indeed it must have done plenty of times in the past, without my paying attention. But writing this will make me take notice when it arrives this time (a 'language and learning' or 'language across the curriculum' point, for those in the trade).
Prefabricated concrete panels, of course, were one possibility, as used, notoriously, in tower blocks and slab blocks -- and sometimes looking great -- as in Park Hill at Sheffield and in Robin Hill Gardens in London (these two):
and sometimes, in fact usually, awful as in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s blocks you see from the inner motorway in Leeds. Perhaps prefabricated panels were precluded by cost from use in the odd single low-rise block. So can’t low-rise blocks, being condemned to brick, look daringly modern and exciting? I'll have to pay attention to them as I walk around.
Back at the start of architectural modernity you had skyscrapers -- Chicago and New York. Steel structure, of course, and steel-reinforced concrete floor slabs, but what, before glass walling was possible, were the walls made of? My impression is that on the Chrysler Building and the Empire State they were made of stone -- how modern is that?
and, looking back to the sunny side of the street, this:
...to modern low-rise blocks of flats in brick with white wooden window frames...
...and was trying to pin down what was so objectionable about the flats.
(This one’s a bit better, on the sunny side -- the sun certainly helps -- volumetrically satisfying with some interesting massing -- a bit more than just an ordinary house on steroids:
) (How do you 'close brackets' after a picture?)
Then I thought, what could have been used instead of brick? That's what I realised I didn't know. Very recently it’s been possible to use an inner and outer skin, the outer perhaps of wooden strips or laminate and the inner of plasterboard, separated by a wide cavity filled with insulation, and triple-glazed windows that in the interests of insulation try not to be bigger than they need to be. But what about when these flats were built, which I image was in the 1980s?
Come to that, what did Corbusier use for his walls in his Unités d’Habitation flats in Marseilles? presumably he didn’t pour concrete for his walls, though he might have. Perhaps he too used brick, covered with white stucco?
After the war there was talk of turning the vast apparatus that had produced matériel -- tanks and planes -- over to housing. I'm not sure what came of that, but steel- or aluminium-plated houses never appeared and prefabs were made of asbestos -- weren’t they, or was it plywood? -- and not in aircraft factories?
You note I could find all this out with a minimum of research, but I'm choosing to write out my ignorance first. The information I'm lacking will come along some day soon without my having to look for it -- as indeed it must have done plenty of times in the past, without my paying attention. But writing this will make me take notice when it arrives this time (a 'language and learning' or 'language across the curriculum' point, for those in the trade).
Prefabricated concrete panels, of course, were one possibility, as used, notoriously, in tower blocks and slab blocks -- and sometimes looking great -- as in Park Hill at Sheffield and in Robin Hill Gardens in London (these two):
and sometimes, in fact usually, awful as in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s blocks you see from the inner motorway in Leeds. Perhaps prefabricated panels were precluded by cost from use in the odd single low-rise block. So can’t low-rise blocks, being condemned to brick, look daringly modern and exciting? I'll have to pay attention to them as I walk around.
Back at the start of architectural modernity you had skyscrapers -- Chicago and New York. Steel structure, of course, and steel-reinforced concrete floor slabs, but what, before glass walling was possible, were the walls made of? My impression is that on the Chrysler Building and the Empire State they were made of stone -- how modern is that?
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Mina Road: some documents
Before they were abolished in 1904, to be replaced by the London County Council as the authority in charge of London schools, the School Board for London produced a large printed report that includes a history of the development of its school buildings over the years since 1870. (Their achievement was impressive. There were no publicly provided schools when they started; over their 34 years they built 469.) One of the schools mentioned as significant was Mina Road (1882), and they print its plan, evidently of the first floor, where the Boys’ department was housed:
(Final report of the School Board for London 1870-1904, 1904, p.63.)
From other things I've read it seems the basic class size was 60, though it could be subdivided into 2 x 30 as we see in two of the classrooms, or doubled up for teaching by the head teacher, with one or more pupil-teachers, in the hall -- which had desks for that number. The broken line represents the ‘rolling shutters’ that were later removed. The principle was that the head teacher should be able both to teach one or two classes in the hall and keep an eye on the assistant teachers and pupil-teachers in the classrooms.
The total accommodation for that floor, going by the numbers on that plan, was 420 pupils (boys, not infants, aged 7-12) in 7 classes of 60 - and that fits with the actual pupil numbers I've found recorded in documents at the National Archives in Kew.
Mina Road was not judged a success. The Board’s account is as follows:
ln order to combine teaching with the occasional use of a large room for collective purposes, two types were now tried; one the Mansford-street (Hackney S) and Mina-road (East Lambeth K) type, of which four schools were built. Here there were large halls available for infants and for boys, but each of them were occupied permanently by two classes and the corresponding rooms for the girls were supplied on a separate floor over the hall. This type, though providing two handsome rooms, was not serviceable for teaching or for assembling the children. These schools are being improved by the halls being freed from the classes and used for their special purpose. (Final Report p.37)
That improvement was made possible by the removal of the oldest classes (Standards 5 and 6, what would later be called 1st and 2nd year secondary and now Year 7 and 8) to the new building, that still stands. Quite what was meant by that account of the girls’ provision on the second floor isn’t clear to me.
I hope the original plans survive in the archives. Patrick Kingwell and I will be looking in the London Metropolitan Archives -- we’ll report if we find them.
Friday, 15 April 2011
School desks at Mina Road
This is from the book written by the London schools architect, E.R. Robson in 1874 -- 8 years before Mina Road Elementary School (later Walworth School) was built (School Architecture, p.172).Were there desks like this at the school within anyone’s memory? Comments here welcome, or, if you can't work out how to do that (many people can't, I find) then email me at walworthresearch@me.com and I'll post your memories myself (with or without your name, as you prefer).
You can enlarge the image by double clicking -- then notice the slate rack at A.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Further memories of the building
Bit by bit we’re getting there. Now I've had this from Bill Cutts:
I was at the school from 1952 until 1957 and the old building was for the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th formers. The ground floor had a hall but it was Paddy Price’s gym and also served as the dining hall. I think there were 5 classrooms on the ground floor. Three classrooms in the gym section and one in each of the corridors at each end of the gym.
The 1st floor had a similar layout but the hall had been converted into the library, half of which was the 6th form.
The second floor I remember had the same classroom layout and numbers and the hall was used for the upper school assemblies.
A bit later Bill adds:
I have tried to remember the classrooms on the 2nd floor but all I can remember was that the first classroom inside the hall at the Walworth Road end was Miss Porchetta and next to that was Mr. Besch’s science room.
Incidentally, the Walworth Road end corridor of the first floor had a classroom on the Mina Road side that was my 3rd year form room. It had a piano in it and it was used for music lessons. Next to it with the door just inside what would have been the hall, was Miss Ashton’s form room, my maths teacher. Next to that was my 4th & 5th year form room and Mr. Rosen was my form teacher. The next classroom which was opposite the 6th form end of the library has slipped my mind. Through the double doors and again on the Mina Road side was my French teacher’s form room. He was Mr. Rogers.
I did make a mistake with the ground floor. The Walworth Road end corridor did not have a classroom. That space was the kitchen for the school dinners.
One day I'll search for the original plans in the London Metropolitan Archive.
Meanwhile, does anyone else than John (last posting) remember fires in the classrooms? Open fires, coal scuttles, tongs, pokers? how did it work, or not work? John remembers someone’s plimsolls getting burnt.
I was at the school from 1952 until 1957 and the old building was for the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th formers. The ground floor had a hall but it was Paddy Price’s gym and also served as the dining hall. I think there were 5 classrooms on the ground floor. Three classrooms in the gym section and one in each of the corridors at each end of the gym.
The 1st floor had a similar layout but the hall had been converted into the library, half of which was the 6th form.
The second floor I remember had the same classroom layout and numbers and the hall was used for the upper school assemblies.
A bit later Bill adds:
I have tried to remember the classrooms on the 2nd floor but all I can remember was that the first classroom inside the hall at the Walworth Road end was Miss Porchetta and next to that was Mr. Besch’s science room.
Incidentally, the Walworth Road end corridor of the first floor had a classroom on the Mina Road side that was my 3rd year form room. It had a piano in it and it was used for music lessons. Next to it with the door just inside what would have been the hall, was Miss Ashton’s form room, my maths teacher. Next to that was my 4th & 5th year form room and Mr. Rosen was my form teacher. The next classroom which was opposite the 6th form end of the library has slipped my mind. Through the double doors and again on the Mina Road side was my French teacher’s form room. He was Mr. Rogers.
I did make a mistake with the ground floor. The Walworth Road end corridor did not have a classroom. That space was the kitchen for the school dinners.
One day I'll search for the original plans in the London Metropolitan Archive.
Meanwhile, does anyone else than John (last posting) remember fires in the classrooms? Open fires, coal scuttles, tongs, pokers? how did it work, or not work? John remembers someone’s plimsolls getting burnt.
Thursday, 6 January 2011
Reggie Maddox, BGS
Today’s Guardian supplement has an article by Denis Healey’s son about his father’s drawings and paintings. Some are reproduced and they’re good.
Healey, who was a pupil at Bradford Grammar School, pays tribute to the art teaching he had from Mr Reginald Maddox, particularly in watercolour. This suggests that my contemporaries and I underestimated the man -- and indeed his woodcuts, or was it scraper boards, in the school magazine and the Christmas cards he designed were truly dreadful, as my dad, who my knew a bit about this stuff, invariably pointed out. We never saw his watercolours.
But -- something kids don’t sufficiently acknowledge -- he was a nice man and I liked going and working in his art room after school for my O level art -- not on my official curriculum -- a venture in which he encouraged me.
It helped that the art room was such a lovely room with a fine view across the valley to Bolton Woods (an industrial village with quarries). Indeed, the school had a lovely new building, completed just before the war when Bradford had money and was then occupied and, it was said, partly wrecked, by the army. It was a bit tackily Tudor with its mullioned windows but floors were parquet and the classrooms spacious and light. It has a handsome, well-designed music room that I was sorry to see on a recent revisit had been turned into a computer suite.
Healey, who was a pupil at Bradford Grammar School, pays tribute to the art teaching he had from Mr Reginald Maddox, particularly in watercolour. This suggests that my contemporaries and I underestimated the man -- and indeed his woodcuts, or was it scraper boards, in the school magazine and the Christmas cards he designed were truly dreadful, as my dad, who my knew a bit about this stuff, invariably pointed out. We never saw his watercolours.
But -- something kids don’t sufficiently acknowledge -- he was a nice man and I liked going and working in his art room after school for my O level art -- not on my official curriculum -- a venture in which he encouraged me.
It helped that the art room was such a lovely room with a fine view across the valley to Bolton Woods (an industrial village with quarries). Indeed, the school had a lovely new building, completed just before the war when Bradford had money and was then occupied and, it was said, partly wrecked, by the army. It was a bit tackily Tudor with its mullioned windows but floors were parquet and the classrooms spacious and light. It has a handsome, well-designed music room that I was sorry to see on a recent revisit had been turned into a computer suite.
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Bradford's Lost City
Britain’s Lost Cities is a book by Gavin Stamp, subtitled A Chronicle of Architectural Destruction. The destruction was by war and planning, the latter by local councils, but sometimes by other bodies like universities.
Bradford, my home city, features prominently, as it deserves to, and the pictures bring back memories of when I lived in the suburb of Great Horton, or perhaps Wibsey, on a hill on the western, Pennine side of the city, into the centre of which I would descend each morning on the bus, often leaving sunshine and sinking into smog that lasted all day, to get to the grammar school along the valley, running north from the centre, that carried the Beck in a sewer pipe to meet the Aire at Shipley. And at the end of the day I would emerge into late sunshine half way up the steep embankment of St Enoch’s Hill to Wibsey. (We speculated that St Enoch was probably a waistcoated and watch-chained Bradford Alderman, Enoch Priestley or Murgatroyd or some such.)
The trip involved two Corporation buses each way, both good and modern -- Bradford ran things well -- a regular motor bus down into town and a trolley bus out to Frizinghall, or possibly Manningham. (Your place names in Bradford depended on who you wanted to impress.) I got off the first bus in Tyrell Street and walked through to Forster Square (that’s Forster of the 1870 Education Act, another famous Bradford chap) for the trolley bus.
But if I had time I might walk up through the town centre for a change and get the trolley bus on Manningham Lane outside Busbys, the less posh but still respectable one of the two department stores. I’d be even more likely to take that route in reverse on the way home, when I had time to dawdle. One way would be via Ivegate, that looked like this.
Bradford had proper hills -- this was the foothills of the Pennines, all millstone grit rock that that city was built of, little brick and hence far more handsome than Leeds or Manchester, or so I thought, and I've never since been easy living anywhere without hills.
You can see the appeal of steep streets like this, obviously once a medieval country lane, now black with soot and full of interesting shops and firms and reeking of hot pies and fish and chips.
The other way I might go was up, or down, Darley Street, a handsome, evidently planned nineteenth century street from the heyday of Bradford’s civic pride when its concert hall, town hall and wool exchange were built and its fine parks laid out, still beautifully maintained in my day (as I think they still are). Behind the buildings on the left and accessed through wood-and-glass swing doors halfway up the street was Kirkgate Market, and above the entrance one of my favourite haunts, the Central Library with its huge collection, vast wooden tables and dignified reference library, a lovely place to browse or do homework and where I found much of the reading I most enjoyed (the other sources was a good school library) and dug out accounts of Ruskin’s visit to Bradford to advise on the architecture for the town hall. (The advice was rejected but the town hall was still a fine building.)
Anyway, towards the end of my childhood it all began to be destroyed by the planners and replaced by undistinguished and unlovely blocks and road schemes that are now themselves being replaced, if they haven’t already been.
So sad. Planning had been one of sources of wartime success and Labour’s hopes of building the New Jerusalem had rested on it -- and this is how it ended up, a disaster. Hence the passion and anger and despair of Stamp’s book.
Bradford, my home city, features prominently, as it deserves to, and the pictures bring back memories of when I lived in the suburb of Great Horton, or perhaps Wibsey, on a hill on the western, Pennine side of the city, into the centre of which I would descend each morning on the bus, often leaving sunshine and sinking into smog that lasted all day, to get to the grammar school along the valley, running north from the centre, that carried the Beck in a sewer pipe to meet the Aire at Shipley. And at the end of the day I would emerge into late sunshine half way up the steep embankment of St Enoch’s Hill to Wibsey. (We speculated that St Enoch was probably a waistcoated and watch-chained Bradford Alderman, Enoch Priestley or Murgatroyd or some such.)
The trip involved two Corporation buses each way, both good and modern -- Bradford ran things well -- a regular motor bus down into town and a trolley bus out to Frizinghall, or possibly Manningham. (Your place names in Bradford depended on who you wanted to impress.) I got off the first bus in Tyrell Street and walked through to Forster Square (that’s Forster of the 1870 Education Act, another famous Bradford chap) for the trolley bus.
But if I had time I might walk up through the town centre for a change and get the trolley bus on Manningham Lane outside Busbys, the less posh but still respectable one of the two department stores. I’d be even more likely to take that route in reverse on the way home, when I had time to dawdle. One way would be via Ivegate, that looked like this.
Bradford had proper hills -- this was the foothills of the Pennines, all millstone grit rock that that city was built of, little brick and hence far more handsome than Leeds or Manchester, or so I thought, and I've never since been easy living anywhere without hills.You can see the appeal of steep streets like this, obviously once a medieval country lane, now black with soot and full of interesting shops and firms and reeking of hot pies and fish and chips.
The other way I might go was up, or down, Darley Street, a handsome, evidently planned nineteenth century street from the heyday of Bradford’s civic pride when its concert hall, town hall and wool exchange were built and its fine parks laid out, still beautifully maintained in my day (as I think they still are). Behind the buildings on the left and accessed through wood-and-glass swing doors halfway up the street was Kirkgate Market, and above the entrance one of my favourite haunts, the Central Library with its huge collection, vast wooden tables and dignified reference library, a lovely place to browse or do homework and where I found much of the reading I most enjoyed (the other sources was a good school library) and dug out accounts of Ruskin’s visit to Bradford to advise on the architecture for the town hall. (The advice was rejected but the town hall was still a fine building.)Anyway, towards the end of my childhood it all began to be destroyed by the planners and replaced by undistinguished and unlovely blocks and road schemes that are now themselves being replaced, if they haven’t already been.
So sad. Planning had been one of sources of wartime success and Labour’s hopes of building the New Jerusalem had rested on it -- and this is how it ended up, a disaster. Hence the passion and anger and despair of Stamp’s book.
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Stone buildings in Brittany
On my third annual visit to Brittany, where I’ve always admired the stonework, I’ve noticed a feature for the first time, though it turns out to be common. The front wall of many houses is finished with a course of dressed stone that curves up and out to form a ledge. This then supports the bottom row of slates, creating an overhang that stops rainwater running down the wall.
This stone is granite and I wonder about its working in the days before powered machinery. How many hours labour did one of those curved stones represent? Or the stones with dressed surfaces in churches? And what tools were tough enough to shape granite? Was iron harder than granite and able to split it, chip it or grind it?
I know nothing about this and will look for a book that tells it all. It’s one aspect of that huge deficiency in all our educations in Britain: there’s no subject about the made world, how humanity has got from piling loose stones and using what lay around to mining, smelting, forging, baking: pottery, metallurgy, chemical technologies with ceramic and metal, etc etc. We get physics and chemistry if we’re lucky but not technology (in its basic sense of how materials are worked to make things).
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Blind alleys
Discussion with friend the other day: blind alleys, the value of, how we prize getting side-tracked in the library by something one hadn’t gone in there to find, or at home by taking down on impulse some book one hasn’t read for years, or ever, and settling to read it. In our version of the intellectual life (if we can pretentiously so dignify it) there has to be an oscillation between focused and specific study on the one hand and browsing on the other. Just as a species stays vigorous by mixing and breeding outside the family circle, and people stay interesting by the range of conversations and encounters they let themselves in for, so the way we think needs constant, unprespecified stimulus by what we find up ‘blind alleys’.
Blind alleys look blind because we can’t when we enter them see any way out that connects with where we ‘should’ be going. And indeed there may be no connection, or it may be years before we see one. We go up blind alleys when we ‘should’ be doing something else -- something on our to-do list (or, more likely, these days, on someone else’s to-do list they kindly maintain for us). Think of everything you need to do, write it down on a list -- then heed any strong impulse to do something else completely, something that presents itself as exactly what your soul needs you to do at the moment. I think our instinct for what alleys are worth going up gets pretty reliable with experience.
Giving in to such impulses may make us less productive in terms of turning out articles and getting our marking done for deadlines, but I think it makes us in certain respects better teachers and researchers, as well as more interesting people, because of the range of reference we can bring. We can draw on a rich and unique tissue of semiotic connections; everything has more connections in our minds.
A colleague’s son found school physics boring because the teacher knew only the syllabus and then found university physics inspiring because the teacher made links to the whole universe of knowledge and ideas that he knew about in his/her bones.
We were in Vienna for the history of education strand of a conference -- so went off on a blind alley that had nothing to do with education or with the supposed purpose of our stay; we spent a day investigating ‘Red Vienna’, the public housing schemes built under the socialist city government of the 1920s and early 1930s, the most famous of which was Karl Marx-Hof.
But of course Rotes Wien wasn’t in the end unrelated to our ‘real’ business, which was the teaching of English in the post-war years in a Labour London that was building its own new housing -- into which many of the pupils we’re now interviewing as older adults moved with their families. On the fourth year English curriculum at Walworth (Comprehensive) School in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, public housing was a topic for writing, reading and discussion -- and Simon Clements, one of the instigating teachers, had been going to be an architect. What animated some key English teachers of the 1950s was a similar spirit to that of the Vienna architects and planners of the previous post-war period.
In Saturday’s Guardian (p.12) physicists express their worry that the freedom they prize to explore blind alleys, a liberty to which they attribute many of the great discoveries of British science, is under threat from a government requirement that to get funding research projects must be likely to benefit the economy. ‘The university’s role of pulling in and nurturing deep thinkers will be sidelined in favour of people who can turn profit by making better widgets’. Moreover, recruitment will suffer because current students went in for physics ‘because they wanted to do pure knowledge and curiosity-driven work...’ (survey quoted) -- and such pursuits require permission precisely to pursue curiosity.
It goes without saying that the same goes for the humanities and social science.
Blind alleys look blind because we can’t when we enter them see any way out that connects with where we ‘should’ be going. And indeed there may be no connection, or it may be years before we see one. We go up blind alleys when we ‘should’ be doing something else -- something on our to-do list (or, more likely, these days, on someone else’s to-do list they kindly maintain for us). Think of everything you need to do, write it down on a list -- then heed any strong impulse to do something else completely, something that presents itself as exactly what your soul needs you to do at the moment. I think our instinct for what alleys are worth going up gets pretty reliable with experience.
Giving in to such impulses may make us less productive in terms of turning out articles and getting our marking done for deadlines, but I think it makes us in certain respects better teachers and researchers, as well as more interesting people, because of the range of reference we can bring. We can draw on a rich and unique tissue of semiotic connections; everything has more connections in our minds.
A colleague’s son found school physics boring because the teacher knew only the syllabus and then found university physics inspiring because the teacher made links to the whole universe of knowledge and ideas that he knew about in his/her bones.
We were in Vienna for the history of education strand of a conference -- so went off on a blind alley that had nothing to do with education or with the supposed purpose of our stay; we spent a day investigating ‘Red Vienna’, the public housing schemes built under the socialist city government of the 1920s and early 1930s, the most famous of which was Karl Marx-Hof.
But of course Rotes Wien wasn’t in the end unrelated to our ‘real’ business, which was the teaching of English in the post-war years in a Labour London that was building its own new housing -- into which many of the pupils we’re now interviewing as older adults moved with their families. On the fourth year English curriculum at Walworth (Comprehensive) School in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, public housing was a topic for writing, reading and discussion -- and Simon Clements, one of the instigating teachers, had been going to be an architect. What animated some key English teachers of the 1950s was a similar spirit to that of the Vienna architects and planners of the previous post-war period.
In Saturday’s Guardian (p.12) physicists express their worry that the freedom they prize to explore blind alleys, a liberty to which they attribute many of the great discoveries of British science, is under threat from a government requirement that to get funding research projects must be likely to benefit the economy. ‘The university’s role of pulling in and nurturing deep thinkers will be sidelined in favour of people who can turn profit by making better widgets’. Moreover, recruitment will suffer because current students went in for physics ‘because they wanted to do pure knowledge and curiosity-driven work...’ (survey quoted) -- and such pursuits require permission precisely to pursue curiosity.
It goes without saying that the same goes for the humanities and social science.
Tuesday, 25 August 2009
Gateposts in Brittany
(More pics that I thought were lost.)
Architects use the term 'characters' for building elements that have an individual presence and are experienced as entities in themselves as well as for the part in the building as a whole. The gateposts of farms in Brittany are plausibly regarded as characters; you almost feel you should shake hands with them as you enter.
Partly it's their obvious human form: upright, freestanding, with distinguishable body and head (or at least separate top components; it doesn't do to push the analogy to the point of saying it's the ball or the entire upper thing that's the head. One could argue, equally, that the whole top is a body and a head, and the main column below just a plinth). Gateposts, I suppose, are columns, which on Greek temples had been sculptures and before that, in one theory, actual captives. (I've been meaning for years to read -- or at least look at -- Joseph Rykwert's classic, The Dancing Column.)
As they stand there confident in their unmistakeable form they seem to have a secret. They read as enigmas, as signs of something. They know something we don't. (Some gateposts in a London park in a photograph in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory give me the same feeling.)
Irrespective on any heraldic significance the motifs may have (rope, ball), the number and configuration of the layers of the complex top clearly conform to some model of propriety. There would be a right way of doing it. Behind the shaping of the gatepost is some social order that knows what it's doing.
Clothing and hair styles in modern urban subcultures have the same effect. In the '60s Mod the width and shape of lapels, the length of hair on the neck, the size of the tie knot, the presence or absence of a shirt pocket collectively struck one as having a meaning: they were manifestations of some secret of life to which I had no access. Hence the confident self-sufficiency of his bearing.
The gateposts, by the way, are often double like this in Brittany. The gap between the pair of posts was obviously for people to walk through when the gate (now long gone -- these aren't working farms any more) was closed, but we never found out what that strange sill was for that you see in the top photo. It wouldn't keep cattle out or dogs or foxes or rats. Snakes, perhaps, adders being a problem in those parts?
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Architecture of the wagged finger
Peter Cook on British architecture at last year’s Venice Biennale reminds me of some reactions (Paula Scher) to the Helvetica typeface (see recent Helvetica posting, 19th January: Can a typeface nag?):
Using Venice as a point of cultural definition also involves the much-maligned ‘national' pavilions and you can never help the instinct to make a beeline for your own mother ship. So Shock! Horror! Despair! Sadness! Distaste! Misery! Misery! Misery! At a level of pretension that leaves one gasping, the British Pavilion takes seriousness to a new dimension of Cromwellian piety. While legitimately criticising the banalities of consumer-commercial British housing of the last twenty years the curator, Ellis Woodman, presents a show of quite deliberate interpretational mannerism [so] as to make his real intention very clear: under the mantle of reasoned thinking this is actually a show of Puritan zeal, where guru Tony Fretton is for once outmanoeuvred by Sergison Bates who ponderouslv come across as even grimmer than their familiar grim.
For those who have a pictorial memory of the architecture of Fascist Italy comes immediately to mind. Indeed, the stripped-down presentation accentuates this impression. Friends from other places kept referring to it as ‘dry’', but had no need to recall a history of tedium and architectural whinge that occurs from time-to-time on the British scene: the deliberately dull accompanied by the pious drone - the architecture of the wagged finger. Thank God that history suggests these periods are usually followed by a moment of Great British Invention and playfulness.
Architectural Review, November 2008, p.28
Using Venice as a point of cultural definition also involves the much-maligned ‘national' pavilions and you can never help the instinct to make a beeline for your own mother ship. So Shock! Horror! Despair! Sadness! Distaste! Misery! Misery! Misery! At a level of pretension that leaves one gasping, the British Pavilion takes seriousness to a new dimension of Cromwellian piety. While legitimately criticising the banalities of consumer-commercial British housing of the last twenty years the curator, Ellis Woodman, presents a show of quite deliberate interpretational mannerism [so] as to make his real intention very clear: under the mantle of reasoned thinking this is actually a show of Puritan zeal, where guru Tony Fretton is for once outmanoeuvred by Sergison Bates who ponderouslv come across as even grimmer than their familiar grim.
For those who have a pictorial memory of the architecture of Fascist Italy comes immediately to mind. Indeed, the stripped-down presentation accentuates this impression. Friends from other places kept referring to it as ‘dry’', but had no need to recall a history of tedium and architectural whinge that occurs from time-to-time on the British scene: the deliberately dull accompanied by the pious drone - the architecture of the wagged finger. Thank God that history suggests these periods are usually followed by a moment of Great British Invention and playfulness.
Architectural Review, November 2008, p.28
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Fragments shored up etc
Just to confirm I'm still here, more or less. No new photos.
What I have to say is just:
1. London beautiful in December, winter light. The best building in London, since cleaning and restoration, is the Festival Hall. Pure modernism: long horizontal windows, piloti, clean shape, not nervous about big expanses of flat surface. The back is the best view, now that the surrounds have been made lovely with paving and the masonry is pristine.
Much depends on the beauty of Portland stone. Contrast the concrete on the rest of the South Bank, which looks good at fewer times – and most of all when lit at night. The RFH cries out for photographs. I'll try and oblige.
2. I'm all for bikes in cities but they have one feature that can make them dangerous. I saw how today, off Chancery Lane (going to King's College library, the former Public Records Office, and another magnificent building, at least on the inside where it’s been restored and repurposed with flair and sensitivity – the finest library building I know, besides the British Museum Reading Room, Leeds University Brotherton Library (another rotunda) and the 17th century libraries of Oxford and Cambridge). Yes, bikes. One came out of side street into a more major road, causing a van to swerve to give him room – as the cyclist counted on him doing. The problem rarely spoken of is that cyclists don’t like to lose momentum: they value their stored energy and are reluctant to slow down because they’ll have to work hard to get their speed back again. Fit bikes with huge flywheels that could give them a starting boost in such situations.
3. I joined SofaCinema and ordered The World at War without quite realising that the DVDs would come one after the other, using up my whole monthly allocation so I'd be unable to watch anything else until I'd got through the whole series.
It’s great though. From the last episode I watched: a fed-up soldier waiting in a landing craft off the English coast ready to be towed in the next few hours to Normandy and D-Day. He comments cynically on the fatuous messages of cheer issuing from the top brass. Monty, brilliant but a fool: ‘God speed, and good hunting in the fields of Europe!’ Prat. One can appreciate how that went down with the fox-hunters of Wigan and the Gorbals.
One gain from the series: the name and music of Carl Davis, who I hadn’t heard of. The music you get at the start and end of each episode is haunting: thrillingly modernist and discordant with that tragic Central European note one gets in Bartok and Martinu, one to which I always mentally attach the phrase ‘the dark days of 1942’. But not without, too, a suggestion of the ‘broad sunlit uplands’.
I wish I could put a link so you could hear it, but of course it’s copyright. It’s at times like this, when a piece of music affects me profoundly, that I wish I had the musical knowledge to identify the features causing the impact.
I can’t get enough of World War II, while my inclination is to avoid anything about WWI. Is that because WWII’s in living memory – even mine, just; I remember my dad being in the army? Or because it isn’t done to death in school history, poetry anthologies, novels etc?
What I have to say is just:
1. London beautiful in December, winter light. The best building in London, since cleaning and restoration, is the Festival Hall. Pure modernism: long horizontal windows, piloti, clean shape, not nervous about big expanses of flat surface. The back is the best view, now that the surrounds have been made lovely with paving and the masonry is pristine.
Much depends on the beauty of Portland stone. Contrast the concrete on the rest of the South Bank, which looks good at fewer times – and most of all when lit at night. The RFH cries out for photographs. I'll try and oblige.
2. I'm all for bikes in cities but they have one feature that can make them dangerous. I saw how today, off Chancery Lane (going to King's College library, the former Public Records Office, and another magnificent building, at least on the inside where it’s been restored and repurposed with flair and sensitivity – the finest library building I know, besides the British Museum Reading Room, Leeds University Brotherton Library (another rotunda) and the 17th century libraries of Oxford and Cambridge). Yes, bikes. One came out of side street into a more major road, causing a van to swerve to give him room – as the cyclist counted on him doing. The problem rarely spoken of is that cyclists don’t like to lose momentum: they value their stored energy and are reluctant to slow down because they’ll have to work hard to get their speed back again. Fit bikes with huge flywheels that could give them a starting boost in such situations.
3. I joined SofaCinema and ordered The World at War without quite realising that the DVDs would come one after the other, using up my whole monthly allocation so I'd be unable to watch anything else until I'd got through the whole series.
It’s great though. From the last episode I watched: a fed-up soldier waiting in a landing craft off the English coast ready to be towed in the next few hours to Normandy and D-Day. He comments cynically on the fatuous messages of cheer issuing from the top brass. Monty, brilliant but a fool: ‘God speed, and good hunting in the fields of Europe!’ Prat. One can appreciate how that went down with the fox-hunters of Wigan and the Gorbals.
One gain from the series: the name and music of Carl Davis, who I hadn’t heard of. The music you get at the start and end of each episode is haunting: thrillingly modernist and discordant with that tragic Central European note one gets in Bartok and Martinu, one to which I always mentally attach the phrase ‘the dark days of 1942’. But not without, too, a suggestion of the ‘broad sunlit uplands’.
I wish I could put a link so you could hear it, but of course it’s copyright. It’s at times like this, when a piece of music affects me profoundly, that I wish I had the musical knowledge to identify the features causing the impact.
I can’t get enough of World War II, while my inclination is to avoid anything about WWI. Is that because WWII’s in living memory – even mine, just; I remember my dad being in the army? Or because it isn’t done to death in school history, poetry anthologies, novels etc?
Friday, 19 September 2008
New building at Waterloo
A propos of nothing, I just liked this, from a train window entering Waterloo, and this blog could do with more pics.
Buildings sometimes look their best before they’re finished. The roof is the now defunct Eurostar terminal.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Imagining EveryVille
I liked this challenge, set by Aaron Betsky, director of the Venice Biennale online architecture competition:
Produce a proposal “for ‘a new exurban community’, in EveryVille; an imagined place that has emerged somewhere around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the south-west of the intersection of Highway I and the Beltway around Megalopolis, around 20 kilometres from the city’s core.” (Architectural Review, September)
Betsky’s introduction goes like this:
EveryVille: Community beyond Place, Civic Sense beyond Architecture
Imagine every town. Remember where you grew up, a place shaped by your first walk, your first love, your first amazement at color and form and other people; your first humiliation when you couldn’t find your way or weren’t part of the group. Recall the sights, the sounds, the dirt on the street, the wind rustling through the trees, the day the garbage was picked up and the day before that, the trip downtown or to the airport, the place where what you knew slowly shaded over into an uncharted territory that itself receded the older you became.
Maybe you still live in this city, or visit it because your family is there. Maybe you never lived there but grew up in the countryside or in a high-rise. Deep in our culture, however, is the notion that a small-scale community, whether by itself or as the neighborhood in a larger city, is at the core of what connects us not just to a place, but to a sense of community.
‘Discuss’ would be my instruction to the class in the English lesson in which I introduced this extract. I would mean, as always, not just ‘Talk’ but ‘Get writing--use this as a start and think, remember, imagine and perhaps theorise on paper.’
Again as always, the writing, finished at home, will then circulate if the writer’s willing, and lead to more discussion and enter the collective memory and shared culture of the class, perhaps to be referred to in passing three months later or to give rise to something in another student’s writing, along with other stuff read from the Architectural Review and relevant bits from novels and autobiographies about places.
It goes on but I find the rest less interesting.
Produce a proposal “for ‘a new exurban community’, in EveryVille; an imagined place that has emerged somewhere around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the south-west of the intersection of Highway I and the Beltway around Megalopolis, around 20 kilometres from the city’s core.” (Architectural Review, September)
Betsky’s introduction goes like this:
EveryVille: Community beyond Place, Civic Sense beyond Architecture
Imagine every town. Remember where you grew up, a place shaped by your first walk, your first love, your first amazement at color and form and other people; your first humiliation when you couldn’t find your way or weren’t part of the group. Recall the sights, the sounds, the dirt on the street, the wind rustling through the trees, the day the garbage was picked up and the day before that, the trip downtown or to the airport, the place where what you knew slowly shaded over into an uncharted territory that itself receded the older you became.
Maybe you still live in this city, or visit it because your family is there. Maybe you never lived there but grew up in the countryside or in a high-rise. Deep in our culture, however, is the notion that a small-scale community, whether by itself or as the neighborhood in a larger city, is at the core of what connects us not just to a place, but to a sense of community.
‘Discuss’ would be my instruction to the class in the English lesson in which I introduced this extract. I would mean, as always, not just ‘Talk’ but ‘Get writing--use this as a start and think, remember, imagine and perhaps theorise on paper.’
Again as always, the writing, finished at home, will then circulate if the writer’s willing, and lead to more discussion and enter the collective memory and shared culture of the class, perhaps to be referred to in passing three months later or to give rise to something in another student’s writing, along with other stuff read from the Architectural Review and relevant bits from novels and autobiographies about places.
It goes on but I find the rest less interesting.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea
(Sorry -- I've lost the link for that image.) I was there last Tuesday, before a couple of sun-soaked days at Rodmell in the Sussex Ouse valley and South Downs – Eric Ravilious country, if you know that wonderful prewar British artist.
High Modernism greatly appeals to me. There’s a special variety associated with fresh air, health, the sea and swimming. The De La Warr Pavilion in this vein (Mendelsohn & Chermayeff, 1935) has just been restored from, apparently, near dereliction.
My own associations with this style of architecture are (1) the Lido in Lister Park, Bradford, and (2) an excellent play shown on Sunday night television in, perhaps, 1956: it was set in a Modernist Riviera hotel on the seafront in the late 1930s: wealthy British visitors mingled with MI5 agents and German spies – it was sinister and scary; but in addition there were a teenage boy and girl who met, etc., and one night were seen on the point of taking their clothes off to go swimming together… then the scene changed to the next day. This was the most erotic thing I had ever seen and was the hot topic in school in the morning. Ever since, High Modernist seaside architecture has had for me Nazi and erotic semiotic loadings.
I should add that the Pavilion contains an art gallery and auditorium, as well as cafe and restaurant. The gallery had an exhibition that we greatly enjoyed, of British post-war art -- painting, photography, sculpture. It's called Unpopular Culture and was curated by Grayson Perry, who talks interestingly on a video and has written far more intelligent captions than one typically sees in, say, Tate Modern -- presumably because he doesn't have recent Fine Art degree.
There are good photographs at LINK . (The site says, "You are free to view and download them for personal use but please do not link to them or publish them elswhere without seeking permission of the copyright holder." I'm not sure if a blog is personal use, but since the link can be found simply by Googling 'De La Warr Pavilion' I see no harm in giving it here.)
Monday, 5 May 2008
Notre-Dame: more
Click to enlargeBut 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.
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