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Review: "On Common Ground", Francis Reed Working Press, London 1991, 89 pages. 5.80 Pounds Sterling. The "Common Ground" of the title of this book is a reference to a principle of diversity and interdependence which Francis Reed identifies as running through nature and, ideally, human life. The subject of the book is, almost tangentially, architecture. A survey of the history of Common Land takes up a third of the book; a critique of the alienation of industrial, Capitalist life and building from nature and the land takes up another third, and the final third is a wide ranging exploration of cosmological ideas as they might manifest themselves in a future architecture. Francis Reed is not short of his own ideas - in many ways this book is a very personal statement - but he is very often happy for his sources to speak for themselves. It is illustrated with many well-reproduced sketches from his notebook and a similar number of original photographs, some of which reproduce less well but which nevertheless help to tell the story. It might sometimes appear that the book does not know what it is about, but this is because the author is linking several ideas with one of his own. Common Rights ...were the residue of rights that in all probability antedate the idea of private property in land and are therefore of vast antiquity (p.7, quoting W.G.Hoskins). These lands were by no means chaotically managed, but were regulated by complicated local rules & organised at formal meetings of Commoners. They constituted a productive resource which was inherent in the community, largely outside the control of the Manor, and has been systematically eroded. Common Land represents a link to an ancient way of life which was less alienated from nature. In its complex local rules it reflected the minute adaptation of nature to specific conditions. "Through the process of development and the synergy of inter-relationships, things at once become themselves and achieve a transcendent dimension; in places we call this Common Ground "genius loci", perception the "saturated complex", and in people the process of individuation" (p. 37). If I understand this and the thrust of the book correctly, it means that the network of relationships between living things constitutes a common ground which they all share, but also individuates them. The local and specific nature of the interlocking rules governing the processes of life means a variety and diversity which is both evolutionarily beneficial and a source of delight. "To some [Classical Architecture] may have had connotations of free thought independent of medieval theocracy, but it has always been used to conceal enormous brutality" (p. 52). Reed respects the Beaux-Arts trained Mackintosh and Corbusier, but "to be really alive, architecture will always have to go beyond the Classical framework" (p.54). For Francis Reed there is in the Gothic style a pre-dualistic "paraphrase of nature".The Rennaissance was a "winter", and today there is "a diseased architecture of monumental banality" (p. 36).Reed has sympathy for what Colin Ward called the Moral Left, who work collaboratively with materials; an undercurrent on the margins, from the Arts and Crafts to the pioneers of the Modern Movement. The post-modernists, however, have created a cardboard pastiche without a "genuine inner force" (quoting Christopher Alexander, p. 41). "Deconstructivist" architects produce "...a devious architecture, a slippery architecture thats slides uncontrollably...towards an uncanny realisation of its own other nature...The architect expresses nothing here. What is being dissolved is a set of deeply entrenched cultural assumptions..about order, harmony, stability and unity (quoting Mark Wigley, p. 59). "Even the marginality of the dispossessed can be appropriated...with the arrival of the new Yuppie Internationalism with corporate post modernism as its aesthetic, we have the perfect expression of a culture which...displays a passivity towards the totalising forces, systems of exploitation, administration and control, and at the same time continually simulates signs of "individuality" to produce a totally colonised but "irresponsible" subject - the free individual" (quoting Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, Art in Ruins exhibition 1988, p. 59). "If so much of our predicament is rooted in an eclipse and negation in the relation between things, a way forward may lie in the idea of dynamic balance - embodied, for instance, in traditional Celtic metaphysics or the wheel of the Four Elements, or in much of the "New Science"" (p.63). A localised "mythos", such as the "Matter of Britain" or "Albion", can be thought of as a part of the consciousness or memory of the planet itself which is concerned with the relation between people and a particular part of the Earth (p.63). Reed says that there are "archetypal symbolic themes which form a common ground of the human imagination" (quoting Kathleen Raine, p.66), which also have a bearing on architecture. These are such as the meeting of inner and outer forms, water, and the flow of space. Celtic tradition "introduces a feeling of transparency and interpenetration of one element with another, of transposition and metamorphosis" (quoting Kathleen Raine, p.68). The Four Elements can be seen reflected in the traditional house as well as in renewable energy sources. Earth represents walls and Air space, forming a polarity of shelter; Water in the well outside and Fire in the hearth inside form a polarity around which life is lived. Earth also represents geothermal power, whilst the others have obvious connotations with renewable energy John Betjamin is brought in: 'Architecture can only be made alive again by a new order and a new Christendom... it is unlikely that this will be capitalism' (p.82) Reed draws in many ideas which could come together to inform a new metaphysics; and he sees Architecture as playing a mediating role in groping towards a new consciousness for the continent. This is not an argument for an indiscriminate appropriation of new age fads, and Reed is fully aware of the dangers of submerging the self in the cosmos, but he argues that rational materialism is sterile without vision; that, in fact, much of what passes for materialism is little more than abstract technological romanticism. There is a general consensus that Architecture as a discrete profession is in crisis. Reed's book can be seen as an attempt to redeem the profession by opening its economistic ideological framework to a plurality of other influences, including Japanese ecomancy, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory. There is certainly a worthwhile idea behind this book, concerned with restoring severed connections, which may indicate a direction in which our civilisation and its architects could look for that all too necessary rebirth. Whether such a rebirth will destroy or preserve Architecture as a profession remains to be seen. Malcolm Stroud From Here & Now 13, Glasgow, Autumn 1992