Preoccupations

Celebrating Colin St John Wilson, architect of the British Library

Quoted by Fiona MacCarthy:

A great library is like a coral reef whose exquisite structure as it grows proliferates a living network of connectedness, and its ramification is all of a piece, like knowledge itself — the knowledge that bridges the endless curiosity of the human mind, from the first pictogram to the latest microchip.

(That coral reef thing again.) (Libraries and conversation! Michael Oakeshott!)

Technorati tags: British Library, Colin St John Wilson, libraries, knowledge, conversation, Michael Oakeshott

Desolate places

I remember Dom David Knowles' book, Bare Ruined Choirs, a celebration for, and lament over, the empty, roofless monastic buildings of these islands. Now, Alex has set me looking at Abandoned, a site where Uryevich collects pictures of 'abandoned plants, unfinished buildings, industrial sites. Most of them situated near to Moscow' — haunting, silent, empty places that have a melancholy weight to them, as does this one, an unfinished and abandoned Moscow hospital:

Another of Alex's links was to an abandoned psychiatric facility in Whitby, Ontario. I suddenly remembered the psychiatric hospital where, as a schoolboy, I had sometimes made occasional visits, organised by my school, to chat to patients: Powick Hospital, Worcestershire. Formerly the 'Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum', it was shut down in the 1980s but is still talked about because of the experiments with LSD conducted there. (In 2002, the NHS settled the claims of 43 former patients out of court, at a level well below the expected.)

Even without reports now online about forgotten children, Powick lives on in my mind as somewhere unhappy and disorienting. I see there is a website, British Asylums ('looking at the era of the “Lunatic Asylum” system during the 19th and 20th centuries. The site largely focuses on the asylums themselves from their origins as providers of sanctuary and care through to their demise in the dying days of the 20th century'), and a Middlesex University index of English and Welsh lunatic asylums and mental hospitals (and a lot more information besides, including a Mental Health History Timeline).

I think of John Clare (1793–1864), committed in 1837 to a private asylum and then, in 1842, to the Northampton County Asylum for the remainder of his life.

I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost:— I am the self-consumer of my woes:— They rise and vanish in oblivion's host, Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:— And yet I am, and live — like vapors tost Into the nothingness of scorn and noise:— Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; Even the dearest, that I loved the best Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the rest. I long for scenes, where man has never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God; And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept, Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie, The grass below — above the vaulted sky.

The punctuation adopted here is based on that in Robinson's & Powell's 1984 Oxford Authors Series edition and aims to present 'I am' as Clare wrote it. (The poem was written in the Northmapton County Asylum when Clare was in his mid-fifties.)  Helen Vendler: '… because Clare was unschooled in standard grammar and punctuation, his manuscripts presented his publisher [Taylor] with the problem of "corrections." By himself, Taylor transcribed the cascade of almost illegible manuscripts (a scribe failed at the task), changing misspellings, inserting punctuation (Clare used almost none), rectifying Clare's dialect-grammar, and suggesting cuts. Clare reacted to the corrections sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with irritation. Increasingly, he wished to assert his independence; yet he depended on his publisher to see his works into print. He went so far as to try to leave Taylor and solicit subscriptions by himself for a volume that he could himself control, but he could not manage to collect enough subscribers.'

Extracting sunlight

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift's satirical treatment of contemporary science, particularly as focused in the section dealing with the Grand Academy of Lagado, reached great new heights. (On one day in 1710, Swift visited Gresham College, the Tower, a puppet show and Bedlam. How his imagination must have responded …)

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. (III.v)

Now, via we make money not art, news of Parans — a Swedish company specialising in designing, developing and offering products for natural lighting:

Imagine an indoor environment where the variation of the outdoors light is always present, or a house that has sunlight in every single room. Now, Parans releases the first sunlight-transporting product of its kind. … The sunlight is collected by panels outdoors. The sunlight is then transported through fibre optic cables. Indoors, the sunlight flows out through beautifully designed luminaires.

The products consist of the light-collecting panel SkyPort, the light transporting cable SunWire and the light emitting luminaries Björk. The Björk luminaries are beautiful to use in a wide range of spaces, such as boutiques, stores, offices, entrances, etc. Almost any room is improved when natural light is introduced. The flexible SunWire cable makes installation very easy, also in existing buildings. The SkyPort panels are with standard building elements easily mounted on practically any roof.

Parans' luminaires … give a mixture of parallel light beams and ambient light, just as when the sun strikes through the foliage of a forest. This is the reason why the patent-pending luminaires are named Björk, which is Swedish for birch tree. By installing Parans system, you will be able to tell the weather even in the absence of windows or skylights, re-establishing a connection with the outside environment.

Something beautiful …  (What would Swift have made of it?)

Aleatoric

Ever since I first read this on Matt Jones' site, aleatoric has remained in my head and refused to go away. So I'm exorcising it now by posting it here. Aleatoric occurs in many associations on the web (Google lists some 8,940 occurrences): there are aleatoric places ('places decided by chance'), aleatoricity is central to Psychogeography, there is (most famously) aleatoric music ('The term was devised by the French composer Pierre Boulez to describe works where the performer was given certain liberties with regard to the order and repetition of parts of a musical work'), there are aleatoric methods for creating graphics ... The list goes on and on.

Aleatory and Aleatoric — Composition depending upon chance, random accident or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind. There is a tradition of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric methods, many influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the West, precedents can be found among artists of ancient Greece and later among artists of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) recommended looking at blotches on walls as a means of initiating artistic ideas. Aleatory (methodology) was also employed by numerous twentieth century avant-garde artists. Followers of the Dada and Surrealism (movements) produced numerous examples. Jean Arp (French, 1887-1966) made collages by dropping small pieces of paper onto a larger piece, then adhering them (to) where they landed. André Masson (French, 1896-1987) and Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) allowed their pens to wander over sheets of paper in the belief that they would discover in those doodles the ghosts of their repressed imaginations. Similarly, Tristan Tzara (Romanian, 1896-1963) created poetry by selecting sentences from newspapers entirely by chance. (adapted from ArtLex)

Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916–17
Torn-and-pasted papers on gray paper, 19 1/8 x 13 5/8" (48.6 x 34.6 cm)
Purchase © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

This elegantly composed collage of torn-and-pasted paper is a playful, almost syncopated composition in which uneven squares seem to dance within the space. As the title suggests, it was created not by the artist's design, but by chance. In 1915 Arp began to develop a method of making collages by dropping pieces of torn paper on the floor and arranging them on a piece of paper more or less the way they had fallen. He did this in order to create a work that was free of human intervention and closer to nature. The incorporation of chance operations was a way of removing the artist's will from the creative act, much as his earlier, more severely geometric collages had substituted a paper cutter for scissors, so as to divorce his work from "the life of the hand". (MoMA)

Images of Modern Architecture from arcspace

European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main
(Image courtesy Coop Himmelb[l]au)

Because of the many requests we have had from students around the world, who cannot afford an arcspace membership, we have decided to open all arcspace full features as of January 1, 2004. arcspace

Virtual Tour of VW's Transparent Factory

Tour of VW's stunning transparent factory in Dresden, built at a cost of some €186,000,000, roughly £130,000,000 at current exchange rates.

World Trade Center Transportation Hub

'The world caught its first glimpse today of the Port Authority’s enduring monument to the heroism of September 11, 2001, when world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava unveiled soaring, spectacular design concepts for the bistate agency’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which will significantly improve mass-transit connections across Lower Manhattan.' Press Release, PowerPoint presentation.