Durable Transmissions from One Generation to the Next

A little while ago, Dr. Mary Grabar, a poet and professor of English Literature, wrote an essay entitled, "Death by Suicide: the End of English Departments and Literacy", in "Minding the Campus: Reforming our Universities". It is compelling  — please click the link in the title heading this post and read it. She ranged through many contributing factors and supporting points leading to the core of her argument.

Copyright © 2010 Wofgang Stoudt



Her main point was that, in our society, English Literature departments in most major colleges and universities have so strayed from their missions that, not only is a higher calling never heard by truly gifted artists, but even the more straightforward competencies are being lost: we are becoming an illiterate people.



This is true not only in literature but in the visual arts, applied arts, and other related arts.


Dr. Grabar amalgamates the emblematic in her stories: not merely does her matriculant wish for and fail to receive Classics in favor of contemporary politicized swill, but graduates, in jobs as nurses or engineers, are incapable of forming adequate, basic, handwritten communication to peers.


We erode from erudition to incomprehension. This principle suggests that higher callings affect applications within their broad fields. This holds true in poetry, in music, in higher mathematics, and in the visual arts: lose the poet, lose basic literacy. Each loss from the fine arts affects applied societal and personal abilities.


Copyright © 2007 Wolfgang Staudt


Each successive wave of erosion of the quality of our fine arts incrementally decays the willpower of our society to survive and maintain the liberty to enjoy rights granted by our Creator. As we cease to be a Christian society, we employ styles of expression that are either increasingly opaque or crude, and society, through the economy, devalues the work of artists. Our art is a barometer of our spiritual state. By the loss of position of architecture as a communicant of cultural vitality, Christendom lost the means of creating certain durable transmissions from one age to another of its foundations, inspirations, and aspirations — of what ordered it — so that we now lack confidence to assert the very right to life of our own society. We forgot. What culture has done this and survived?



An example of a durable transmission that was begun more than a century ago is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, of the Catalán province of Spain. Its durability may consist partly in maintaining the vision of its principal architect, Antoní Gaudí through the several generations required to build it, although he died in 1926. It is still under construction. Gaudí considered himself the last Gothic. The striking pictures of his work in this post are by Wolfgang Staudt (who generously allows certain of his images to be reposted online with attribution). They barely reveal the talent granted by God to the architects of such marvels. Should this building survive the destructive evils devised in modern Western civilization, it will be a witness of our Creator to generations.


Will architecture or any other art save Western society? Not by themselves, though in a degenerate state they contribute to the fraying of culture. More importantly, vital works of visual arts inspire individuals and communities to strengthen the framework of society in their locale, to "brighten the corner where you are" as it might be phrased. As we seek and identify those works that so encourage us and collect and create a market for them we are beginning to build our culture a new base of vitality and turn it from its present course of self destruction.

Movie of San Francisco Trolley run before 1906 Quake

Seven or so minutes of silver screen reminiscence with a melancholy instrumental:
Headed towards the Ferry Building along Market Street. On the eve of their pride, you might say — not long after, San Francisco would be devastated by the infamous 1906 earthquake, killing thousands.

Alternate source: http://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905

Tip of the hat to Charles Nelson for this.

A gracious Gothic Revival in Brookhaven

English bond brick and elegant drip cap accent entry. We need to see this level of detail in more traditional home designs.

No I'm not a Classicist

My architecture is not prone to overt Classicism, though I'm sympathetic to those who seek to relate their Architecture to humanity by means of a system as deep as that. Beyond the Kriers and Adams, Thomas Gordon Smith, and the lot, here's another: Quinlan Terry of England, kindly pointed out by Greg Mix, a Classicist local to Atlanta. He's not as fun as Shutze, nor does anyone quite draw like the Kriers, and rarely do Classicists show humor like Smith's early work, but he'll do for domestic tranquility, of which we are in need right now.

Defending What?

Let's state the basics. This is a series of views whose objective is the retaking of a culture from the nekulturny who have hijacked it. It is named for an earthen fortress that once protected a young city against attack, but which was abandoned as a new and unsuccessful strategy evolved to defend the city. The defenders were routed in the field, the city evacuated and plundered, eventually to be rebuilt under rule of the conquerors. A playground lays where cannon stood. The conquerors had their good points and readily assimilated some of the better points of the vanquished, so society functions with domestic tranquility, lawfulness, industry, and art. But some notes still don't ring true, and our prime objective is to identify false notes and recast the bell.