New Maya Lin installation: Land or Liquid?

Maya Lin again exhibits her playfulness with form, this time using the forms of water to create a peaceful landscape. You may like or dislike some of her monument designs, yet they seem to have strong emotional effects on those who experience them. She has a good understanding of the elements as they relate to human emotion, particularly in her use of water. Here, she does not use water directly, except to quote its frozen surfaces in dirt, grass, and gravel. A progression in her line of work, as the waves are progressions across the landscape: worthy of immersion by the viewer, a baptism in the joy of the environment.

Walkable Communities

One reason we don't appreciate the visual arts as society once did is that we don't pause enough to do so. This same speed inhibits our recognition of how community design inhibits knowing our neighbors and enjoying our surroundings. We sometimes don't appreciate our neighbors, either. The nature of our surroundings often makes it more necessary that we enclose ourselves away in the metal body armor, filtered air, and radio sound barriers known as automobiles. Are we urban knights or a besieged petty aristocracy in rolling castles? The return of walking holds promise for a regeneration of engagement of individuals with our communities, a mastery of which we have been unaccustomed for a generation or more. Watch this video from the Congress for the New Urbanism. It offers some intriguing prospects for our pursuit of that form of happiness that consists of interacting with our neighborhood.


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.

Atlanta Neighborhood Gateway Buildings 20070626

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Atlanta Neighborhood Gateway Buildings 20070626

View more presentations from Phillip andrew Jessup. (tags: neighborhood gateway)

Artistic Vision & Community Form

Reflections on Landscape and Industry

Surmise & Creation:
the Connection between Artistic Vision & Community Form

1. Industrial Ruins & Spiritual Ruins
Examining industrial forms related to community space, we found it useful to seek the views of fine artists, whose surmises necessarily precede the establishment of forms in a community environment.

All communities face changes. Such metamorphoses originate in institutional change, cultural change, and economic change, among other causes affecting their organization, image, and purpose. Ruin may initially result from economic decline or from loss of motivation that may be termed a spiritual decline, but it is a physical manifestation.

In the community particularized by this reflection, the broader region containing it imposed massive capacity increases in surrounding and bisecting transportation corridors, cultures comprising its denizens multiplied with a diversity atypical of most other communities in the nation, and a large manufacturing facility in its limits began a permanent shutdown that would affect its employment base, economic base, and social ecology simultaneously with vacating a major quadrant of its urban space. Such shocks to the system threaten ruin, physical and spiritual, and are often sufficient to generate questions among the remnant.

Within our area of interest, the highest capacity interchange of the Interstate Highway system in the South saw increases of its legs from four lanes to eight and ten lanes, and its ramps topped the heights of five-story buildings; heavy rail mass transit was added; the second busiest airport in the northern part of the state added capacity and continued to grow; the state transportation department resisted municipal requests to address disruptions caused by increases in capacity of a major corridor cleaving downtown, but it became the main street to a remarkable variety of cultures, though the old Main Street languished. Government mass transit ran buses and trains, scarred and healed the land, then tattooed the region with lines and nodes to institutional centers, while Hispanic microbuses offered international mass transit, currency exchange, and immigration lawyers. Oldsmobile died and with it the town’s fathers’ lifestyles. All the while, nearby infrastructure languished in an antiquated semi-rural pattern supportive of bucolic farmettes held by industrial workers soon to be out of jobs due to closing of a local automobile manufacturing plant.

Signs sprouted along a multi-cultural main street, not merely in multiple languages but in a multiplicity of alphabets and ideograms. Bombed ruins in defeated nations may be left as reminders of tragedy and later visited by millions as a landscape of memory, but factories abandoned from disinterest in their products hardly invite romantic or other fascinations. Against such a bleak sky even lightning bugs darken to leave no light for any remnant, but along with such threats of disruption come opportunities for redemption.

2. Cultural Redemption in the Availability of Trash as Treasure
Since Renaissance scholars noticed fragments of fallen Roman glory in their midst, Western culture took a Romantic view of older, ruined structures as reminders of supernal achievement. During the late Twentieth Century and early Twenty-first Century, American fascination for ruins was expressed in revivals of 19th & early 20th century. The habitation of ruins, seemingly unconscious after the fall of Rome, grew to a conscious fascination at various times afterwards. At its zenith, the interest was so intense that it was necessary to build ruins in order to meet the demands of the market place. The availability of ruins undervalued by their owners enabled them to be had at a low cost by those who exposed their worth to others until there were too few of the ancient artifacts for those who wanted them.

The post-industrial economy produced its own debris fields, and some of these in turn generated sufficient interest to invite speculation as to whether such Renaissance masters as Piranesi, had they lived in modern times, might have been known for their reconstruction of old factories as living quarters rather than their gleaning of Imperial detritus.

The current crop of industrial ruins seems destined to the first of many, and the impending availability encourages examination by those who would design, re-build, and inhabit them. Communities seek increased interaction with buildings and sites having continuing uses, though as they change, these forms will be noticed for different qualities that will affect their occupation. While cooling towers may not be converted to exam chambers, the scale of these edifices is so large as to necessitate re-design to accommodate human activity. We examine industrial forms for consideration.

3. Embodiment of Decay
The late Madeleine L’Engle called art an act of incarnation, while John Gardner speculated that it “beat back the monsters”, and J.R.R. Tolkien saw it as a sub-creation that essentially collaborated in the studio of God. By keeping in their foundations and their shells those fragments that survived from earlier eras, the re-uses proposed for facilities that once comprised the heart of industrial America incorporate archeology and architecture that continue to draw the interest of society.

I may know it as a Persimmon and Give Thanks

We seem to like an artist, approve of his works. Then what does he say of our views? Does he represent a moral stance? Does he engage a view that is part of our discourse? Is he Christian? Is he antichrist? Is he vaguely Judeo-Christian, or does he sort of think Jesus was a nice guy? Or does he deny or ignore all of this? What, indeed, does he defend?

It is only afterwards that we ask how the content of his art demonstrates his stance.

This is what is meant by asking an artist to take a moral stand. Who does this, nowadays? It may be our job to encourage them to do so, or to call such efforts to recognition when we see them. We need critics to address these issues. Few do.

Though full definition is elusive at present, low fruit appears below the fog that still obscures branches above; I may pick one. If it makes me pucker, I may know it as a persimmon, and give thanks.

Community Bridge

Community Bridge

I'm still picking my way through this fascinating website; however: a theory as to why this strikes such a chord (despite its non-slick web design): its creation, albeit in flimsy materials, bears strong resemblance to the method of the Gothic cathedral builders. There, master masons, spanning generations, provided a core of direction, but each individual stone carver had much freedom to depict his subject within certain bounds. True, the Medieval stone carvers of Europe were highly trained craftsmen, where some participants in a modern mass project, like this bridge, might almost be accused of doing "paint-by-numbers", but the overall effect had profound effects on their respective communities. I appreciate the referral to this site from the head of the Foundation for Community Arts. Can Christendom do better than encourage human artistic sub-creation to the end of coalescing a community that encourages brotherly love?

Notice 3 qualities about the symbols — they are:
• subjective — they adopt a point of view, as good art should;
• figurative (though occasionally geometric with cultural references);
• emotive — they express emotion of the artist & attempt to impart it to the viewer.

I see the first quality as exemplified by the Stuckists and perhaps by critics such as John Gardner, Fred Chappell, and those holding related views; the second as embodied in works by Pre-Raphaelites, Classicists, and various traditionalists for better reasons and mediocre ones; the third might meet certain of the standards for art of Leo Tolstoy.

Suffice it to say that the creation of works similar to this is an encouraging sign for our culture. We nevertheless must discover the core values we choose to defend in that milieu.

Out Of The Sky

Out Of The Sky

Well, at last a note since 3/2/07 — the author has been catatonic in the wash of culture, no doubt overwhelmed by the loss of Anna Nicole and angst over Britney. But for a tonic, I took a look at the website linked with this post. It's authored by David Clark, a radio commentator, author, story-teller, folk singer, and observer who sometimes travels the country and tells about it. Some of his writings appear as reporting of daily mundaneities, almost as frequent and seemingly insignificant as journals of personal encounters; then, after a spell, he'll put together many of his experiences to produce a series of essays with so much common sense that they upend our daily headlong rush. All of this is related from the view of a world-awareness based solidly in the soils of Middle Georgia, written with hands that do much of the work about which he writes. If you like what you read, he offers CDs and books, as well.

YouTube - Chinese Ballet Circus pas de deux troupe du Guangdong

If dance can bring tears to the eyes, this can.
YouTube - Chinese Ballet Circus pas de deux troupe du Guangdong
"David, wearing a priestly linen outergarment, dances before the Lord with all his might, while he and the entire house of Israel bring up the ark of the Lord with shouting and the voice of a trumpet." (2 Samuel 6:14-15)

He did not stumble. If America stumbles, if Christendom falls in worldly paths, it will be from a softness that does not seek excellence. To tolerate the average and not advance the best will put us on our knees in the arts first — the field we ignore — and in civilizational morality, finally in industry, engineering, science, medicine. To ignore a blessing is to reject it. To fail to seek is to lack confidence (faith) in success. It is legitimate to reject a "praying for dollars" doctrine; it is less legitimate not to work in all ways as though for God. And in the arts, we communicate our exultation as worship to Him and our delight to one another. If indeed these depicted dancers are non-believers, the culturally Christian West must step up or ask to whom it will yield the stage as it bows out: the Muslim or the Han? "Is there anybody out there?" (Pink Floyd, The Wall)

Musings on Heroes and Remnants

The playground suggests innocence of the new participants, or perhaps childishness or naivetë, yet the seriousness of this revenant redoubt and the hallowed regard for the ground on which the blood of its sentinels was shed present a contrast we will contemplate as our conversation develops. It invites visions of flickering movies in black and gray, of cobwebs brushing past a viewer exploring an abandoned monument of ancient, fallen civilization, building anticipation of the loosing of violent, destructive forces, of Lovecraftian Old Ones, who upon release will tear asunder our heretofore placid world. What in our heritage leads us to seek that ubermensch who will shutter the Evil One in its pit? Who in post-modern society expects any remnant to straggle forth and follow our hero in his quest?

Well, with that heavy and abstract intro concluded by two questions unanswerable in a reasonable post, let's segue into places where we can seek these answers at greater length. One opportunity is found in gatherings such as those conducted by a local singer and writer called Christopher, Philosopher. He offers monthly discussions on topics of importance to our society. Another remnant is found exalting often neglected fine artists who seek to advance a moral position through positive expression. The Foundation for Community Arts is a group of Christians strengthening select communities by encouraging those fine artists whose works inspire the human heart.

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.