Perhaps I've Been Too Harsh...

Thinking about my previous post on honesty in architectural design, and reading over some issues of the wonderfully produced Retrospecta, lent to me by a colleague, I felt it necessary to follow up with some caveats. Actually just one slightly long-winded caveat.

What I seem to be implying is a drive towards the Corbusian mentality, perhaps not in explicit formal or methodological property, but in general mentality. Something about the deep lyrical poetics of architecture, that resonates with something you can't quite place within yourself:

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

— Le Corbusier

Rather, the volumetric, the proportional, the human scale. The challenge of rightfully assembling a series of interlocking moments (and the experience of interlocking moments) that touch the heart and lift forward in an arc towards beauty. I just finished Le Modulor, and found that I could have written (or have already written, closely enough to be startling) entire passages in the book. I found that the interlocking Fibonacci strands, tailored to a convenient if somewhat arbitrary 6'-0", was exactly the determining system I had set up to determine a range of type sizes in a first pass at my portfolio. Arriving at these conclusions I feel both vindication and revulsion. Strange moment, to have discovered a mind that is almost your own, or illustrates a path which you could easily take.

Here's the caveat: architecture is not just about the play of forms and the play of volumes. The framework of the Modulor threatens strangulation, asphyxiation. The tool is so definitional it may easily become overwhelming and stifle actual creation.

So my point is that explorations of surface and skins and folding and blobs aren't invalid. Even the postmoderns – and mostly I shudder at that kind of work – aren't really invalid. The mentality flies in the face of volumetric delight – it's all surface – but then again, why should I be so tied to a dogma?

So here I am, mostly freewheeling. I haven't come down on any side yet, which is both exciting and terrifying. But then again, maybe that is the only attitude that is appropiate in this contemporary age – absolute paralysis punctured by spasmatic creation, reactionary and schizophrenic thought.