Archive: Æsthetics
Dredge: new frontiers
Some of the largest structures built by humans are invisible or go largely unnoticed. The shorelines around big cities like New York have been almost completely subordinated to the needs and wants of their inhabitants. Dredging plays a large role in the building of artificial boundaries between land and sea. BLDGBLOG, a must-read for anyone interested in architecture, reports on an exhibit by the Dredge Research Collective.
The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.
For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.
Urban Omnibus.
Mammoth, another architecture blog that includes two members of the Collective, defines the Dredge Cycle:
[…] dredging is better understood as a component of a wider network of anthropogenic sedimentary processes which generate a fascinating array of interconnected landscapes. Fluid topographies are restrained by bright orange silt fences; dredging barges continuously empty shipping channels which are promptly re-filled with sediment disturbed by upstream farms and new subdivisions; sensate geotextiles monitor the stability of landscapes they are literally embedded in; hulking geo-tubes lay engorged with dredged sediments in streams on Filipino golf courses and along Mexican beaches and on the coastal dunescape of Virginian spaceports. Silts, sands, and clays flow rapidly between these landscapes in liquid suspension, linking them and re-shaping the earth’s surface. Collectively, the choreography of these landscapes embodies a vastly quickened counterpart to conventionally defined geologic cycles — the Dredge Cycle.
One site, still being planned, where the Dredge Cycle will make itself apparent—in the form of several billion dollars of real estate—is the Lo-Lo Ma project, which could connect Governor’s Island to the southern tip of Manhattan. Core77 explains how it will be done.
Musa in the artworld
Musa has fans everywhere. This group of young designers named themselves after her. Their website is being renovated, but you can see their work on Flickr.
Artists
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Muse
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The train I’m on
In the wee hours one can still hear the sound of a freight train passing through the city, blowing its horn at the several grade crossings within city limits. I begin to think of other trains…
If you live in the US, you have to have been around for a half-century or more to remember when taking the train was a ordinary means of transportation, not just on the East Coast, but between any two places in the country. There’s now some discussion of reviving passenger rail, but the network of 1950 cannot be recovered. The rails themselves have been allowed to decay, rights-of-way have been built over or converted to other uses, stations have been torn down or renovated into malls or restaurants.
In 1900 or 1950, every little town had its station. My grandmother and her sister lived in the northwest corner of Minnesota, a few miles apart in places whose populations never exceeded a thousand or perhaps two; yet they could take the train in the afternoon to visit, having sent—on the morning train—a postcard to announce their plans.
Fifty years ago I travelled with my mother from Cincinnati to Chicago by train, there to meet her parents who would take me home with them. 
We had a sleeping compartment, with, as I remember, its own toilet, all in wood panelling and stainless steel, everything as efficiently arranged as if it were a ship’s cabin. I seem to remember that a steward showed us how to use the facilities. Our journey must have taken a whole day, but nothing of it remains for me—only an image of that compartment.
Source: Cincinnati Views
The Cincinnati train station, Union Terminal, still stands. It was built by the long-gone Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway Company, known familiarly as the “Big Four”. It is a striking Art Deco structure, designed by the firm of Fellheimer and Wagner, with the consulting architects Roland A. Wank and Paul Philippe Cret (Cret also designed the Main Building of the University of Texas at Austin). Unlike its counterpart in St. Louis, Cincinnati’s is still a working station, though most of the infrastructure that supported what was once its main function has been removed or turned to other purposes—notably to provide space for the Cincinnati History Museum.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The station was decorated with a set of murals by Winold Reiss. Two large murals in the Rotunda depicted the history of Cincinnati. Those have been preserved in situ. Fourteen murals in the concourse depicted local industries; when the concourse was destroyed they were moved, fittingly enough, to the airport, fourteen miles away across the river in northern Kentucky. The list of industries depicted is an apt summation of this country’s once-mighty capacities. It includes Baldwin Piano, Procter & Gamble, Crosley Broadcasting, Cincinnati Milling Machine, and U. S. Playing Card. Of these only P&G still exists as an independent company. Plus ça change, you might say, or sic transit, but when I was growing up these were the landmarks; Cincinnati’s regional and national identity rested on them more than on any scenic or cultural endowments, and their identity, to some extent, rested on their being based in Cincinnati.
I remember Union Terminal in its heyday just a little. One of my grade school classes visited there on a field trip. Of all the things we must have been shown I remember only the demonstration of the acoustic properties of the central Rotunda: if you whispered at one end of the “rainbow”, that whisper could be heard at the other, but nowhere in between. My only other preserved impression is of the size of the dome, an impression not so much visual as acoustic—the reverberant space.
Union Station
Union Station was completed in 1894. It was designed by Theodore Link, who modelled it after the fortifications of Carcassonne, a city in the south of France whose medieval fortifications are well preserved. In its heyday, it was the busiest rail station in the US. Passenger traffic dwindled after 1960, and in the 1980s it was “renovated” into a hotel and shopping mall. The mall has not been a success. The present Amtrak station is a hard-to-find hovel under the freeway about a block away.
Musa, 14 Jun 2007
Nieuwe Kunst
), you think that “ornament is crime”, you won’t like it. Loos’s Ornament und Verbrechen was published almost a hundred years ago. In that time, I think we have seen that there are worse crimes in architecture than an overabundance of ornament.
More from Cassandra
I’ve mentioned the Cassandra Pages before. Tonight, catching up, I find two entries that give the lie to all those idiots who hold that blog writing must somehow be inferior to the real writing of journalists and the like. The more recent is on the haves and have-nots of Vermont. The other is on music—on playing music, losing oneself in the adventure of sight-reading a new piece or of tackling once more an old familiar piece.
Blogging isn’t writing: see Karlin Lillington, “Gibson Kicks the Blogging Habit”, Wired News 28 Apr 2003. A quote from Gibson at the Utne Review (7 May 2003): “There’s no risk involved. Unless, if you’re accustomed to playing for higher stakes, it’s the risk of some edge being taken off your game”.
People seem to be confusing a medium with a way of using that medium. Blogging software makes available a structure (entries, typically brief, typically in reverse chronological order) that some people treat as if it were a sketchpad, and others as if it were akin to the feuilleton—written on a short deadline, and thus distinct from the sort of work to which an author devotes years of labor, but written with the same care as its equivalent in print.
I don’t think the journal-keeping of Kafka or Emerson threw them off their game. If I read old entries here or in my journals, I certainly find passages that I think could be improved; but the same is true of work composed more slowly. I tend therefore to agree with Valéry: “Un poèmeA poem is never finished. It is always an accident that puts an end to the writing of it, and makes it public. n’est jamais achevé. C’est toujours un accident qui le termine, c’est-à-dire qui le donne au public”.
Maker’s knowledge and the judgment of taste
An emailed comment on the Average Philosophers pictures got me thinking about the motives or motifs at work behind the scenes as I was making them. The visual starting-point was the “Fifty People See” series at Brevity on Flickr. Brevity mentions Jesse Salavon, so I looked at his work too. Further back, I think, were memories of Saul Steinberg’s vague portraits and landscapes, which manage to be, despite their determinate concreteness, about portraithood or landscapeness rather than being actual portraits or landscapes. Francis Bacon comes to mind too. His images fascinate me because you can’t quite make them fit together; they seem to portray bodies in pain but the parts of those bodies are difficult to distinguish, and so what exactly they are undergoing is unclear.
Lettrisme (Style réseau mondial)
The Web of Letters (via Encyclopedia Hanasiana) is a clever device that pulls letters off the Web via Yahoo’s image search. Type in a word and it produces an image in which the letters are graphics grabbed from who knows where.
Like the Church Sign Generator, it’s the kind of minor amusement that the Web seems to encourage.
These devices give me an excuse to mention Isidore Isou and Lettrisme (↓1). I first came across Lettrisme in the late 70s while browsing through back issues of the Revue musicale (↓2). Like Cioran, Ionescu, and Eliade, Isou (born Isidore Goldstein) emigrated from Romania to France; he arrived after World War II with his new invention and a letter of introduction to Jean Paulhan, the managing editor of Gallimard. Gallimard was unimpressed; Isou was undaunted. In addition to having the looks of a young Elvis Presley(↓3), Isou had a gift for creating events, the first of which was an intervention at the premiere of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuite in 1946. Michel Leiris was to give a talk on Dada before the play. Isou and his friends interrupted it, and eventually, after Leiris had cut his talk short and the play had begun, Isou jumped onstage to expound on Lettrism before a rapidly dwindling audience.
Thus did Lettrism, and Isou, make their first headlines. Isou explicitly patterned his movement on Dada (one of whose founders was Tzara, another Romanian import) and Surrealism. But by this time, the whole apparatus of movements and manifestos, of artistic “isms”, provocative happenings, and a scandalized bourgeoisie, was near the end of its useful life—though the Situationists did extend it into the 60s.
April 23, 2005
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Victoria & Albert do graffiti
An exhibition on “Black British Style” at the V&A has a page that allows you to make your own graffiti. This means, of course, that graffiti are irredeemably not cool. 
(Strange to think that the graffiti phenomenon is to my younger students roughly what bebop & abstract expressionism were to me: something whose heyday occurred before you were old enough to know, but not so long past that you couldn’t regret your belatedness. If only my parents had been hip enough to buy all the Blue Note albums and a first edition of Howl…)
Les nuages… encore une fois
As I said earlier, the Midwestern sky is a nepheophile’s delight. A multitude of forms, gradations of color, perspectives, shadings, ever-changing as the sun travels across the sky & the winds reshape them & carry them off. A tranquil delight on a calm, clement morning like this. 
Yet why should the eye find pleasure in that sight? I know that evolutionary psychology has an explanation for this as for so much else. The æsthetic sense, if I may call it that, offers no doubt some benefit. I see in my cats a feeling for “rightness”, for the suitability of a place to nap in, survey the yard from, or wait for prey. If that feeling is reliably attuned to the fit between the cat’s ends and the means that, on the basis of its feeling, it chooses, then (working backwards) we may conjecture that having such a sense was “selected for”, that it gave to the proto-cats who had it some reproductive advantage.
Something similar guides our choices in arranging things around us (when we take the time to do so: it often happens, of course, that convenience or laziness is the principle), and likewise the hand in drawing, the ear in putting sounds together in music. SpencerHerbert Spencer (1820–1903). Best known as an early proponent of Darwinism to human affairs, although in his early work (Social statics, 1851) his theory of development was Lamarckian. The ten volumes of his System of synthetic philosophy (1862–1892) begin with a “developmental metaphysics” (anachronistically, a theory of the origins of complex systems) and then followed out the consequences of the “developmental” style of reasoning in biology, psychology, and sociology. Spencer coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, which was adopted by Darwin in later editions of The Origin of Species.
thought that judgments of the beauty of the human form were effectively judgments of fitness to reproduce.↓ There is probably something to that. But even if such explanations are sound, there seems to be a kind of surplus value attaching to natural beauty. Kant wrote of “beauty as a symbol of morality”, as an intimation that the moral order, the noumenal realm of freedom, was or could be realized in the natural order, the phenoumenal realm of physical law. I don’t think one must be a theist to acknowledge that something extra is given in experience beyond what a strictly scientific account provides for.
thought that judgments of the beauty of the human form were effectively judgments of fitness to reproduce.↓ There is probably something to that. But even if such explanations are sound, there seems to be a kind of surplus value attaching to natural beauty. Kant wrote of “beauty as a symbol of morality”, as an intimation that the moral order, the noumenal realm of freedom, was or could be realized in the natural order, the phenoumenal realm of physical law. I don’t think one must be a theist to acknowledge that something extra is given in experience beyond what a strictly scientific account provides for.
