It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.
We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.
Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.
And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.
Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.
We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.
But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.
And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.
It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.
But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.
If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...
If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...
If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...
We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.
Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.
I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^
