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 9 Jan 2007 @ 12:58
An Idea discussed at a conference in Vienna, at the MAK-Austrio Museum
linkhttp://www.mak.at/e/jetzt/f_jetzt.htm
in the early 1990's. Now almost 12 years on, the question still pertains, and continues without a solution on offer.
Effectively, owing to almost total personal liberalisation within any known culture or tradition, our experiences are lived for us somewhere in the media, and this now is the lingua franca and has to be, and can be, the only commonality serving as a basis for communication. For between client and architect it is imperative that some exchange of meaning takes place in order to provide a brief for the clients expected needs to be fulfilled in the commissioning of a building.
By a consensus of well known, amongst the schools at least, architects, asked to ponder the dilemma posed by this question and offer a solution, it was agreed that they could find no solution and yes, Architecture in sense had ended. Elvis has left the building. More >
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 5 Oct 2006 @ 09:09
finding some more material.
A very useful architectural site with facility to hunt either by building, building type, or architect
[link]
There are the illustrations of the buildings, with substantive maps and site plans of the buildings of any chosen architect. This link following is on an architect from Greece 440 BC, Mnesicles.
[link]
es
[link]
It is surely part of the legacy of Architecture and its renowned practioners, for it takes more than one individual to complete a building, a whole sympathetic team indeed to do so, and in a way an architectural plan is imbued with life by any who care to resusitate the ideas and put them into brick and mortar. Why should a wonderful design be deemed over because its Signature has moved on to heavenly pastures new? Would he not be given added comfort in the spiritual realms to know that his work and contemplations towards imbuing the earthly environment with sculptural works were continuing in his absence?? Each in their own way Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier made indellible contributions to the ideas of built form in the psyches of man. Each quite different, their work stands as signposts to new types of societies and existence which found huge favour almost immediately.
My own thesis is based on Firminy Vert, an idealised name for a heavy industrial area in France beautified by Le Corbusiers several buildings in the vicinity. These buildings have the capacity, I believe, to make one withdraw into oneself while take deap fresh breathes of air, an inward concentration, allowing new thoughts and insights by the viewer upon exhalation. While in the building, the exterior is literally framed by the concepts inherent in the building, like say the L'eglise Saint-Pierre. One is viewing the outside world through the established concreteness of the biulding which can be shared by the body looking and thinking within the coordinates of that space. It may as well be spaceship offering such capacity to see again anew, the heavy impending industrial sector surrounds on the perimeter of this new space. A holding forth on one's own terms amongst factories belching and hard working endless daily routines on a factory floor. A virtual sanctuary for the self and body corporate to acquire determination inspired by new vision and sense of wholeness with depth in such a surrounding space.
The exterior of the buildings of Corbusier, I believe, are a silent spoken language as the breeze passes over the forms creating inaudible music and tones, as the wind passes over empty bottle tops, the inherent qualities of the building are signified to the environment in these tones, audible only to elemental arcadia as being life giving or life taking. The litmus test being Man himself either being lifted on experiencing the building or drawn down, as with a Pirenesi horror nightmare construction, giving a leaden immovable feeling of hopelessness. So I believe it is Man who judges the life giving potentialities of constructions; but of course not all people are equal in this regard, some have other agendas of their own regarding building, and we all know about this. Which brings us back full circle to the architect, who really only ever thought about the building for its own sake and the purpose. Corbusier added yet another value to his buildings which is why he remains the Iconic Architect par excellence for the popular notion of Modernity coming about after 1920.
Here are fews words from a leading right wing paper says on the subject. More >
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 26 Jun 2006 @ 14:33
PreRaphaelite Dreams
The paintings of this movement have always remained singularly unattractive to my appreciation until learning the following.
One of the main inspirations behind the PreRaphaelite Movement was a newly acquired awareness amongst artists and intellectuals on the periphery of the Catholic Emancipation Act (of Parliament). This itself spurred by the famous Oxford Group dissenters from Protentantism in the wake of a new freedom wave declared on Catholicism in England.
The artist considered to be the most sublime of all the Renaissance artists is Raphael, who unfortunately lived a relatively short life. It is now known that many of Raphaels paintings uses as subject matter, Mary Magdalene, often denoted by the colour orange, green and or red of the chemise, or dress on the bodice part of attire and drapery. Attending one such exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery a couple of years ago was a most heart lifting experience. The extent of beauty in each drawing, etching and painting is simply breathtaking. Raphael must have nursed a fascination with Mary Magdalene, and intellectual circles in Italy must have all hummed and buzzed with the newly found realisations of that time of her friendship with Our Lord, and subsequent escape with family to Provence, and a generation later to England at Glastonbury, where the family line continued to show itself in the Arthurian legends as Sir Galahad renowned for his prayer ability, spiritual experiences, and other worldliness. In the recent debate on the Da Vinci code, authors most knowledgeable have not been quoted, one wonders why? Personally, I do believe completely in Mary Magdalene as close friend of Jesus, and mother of children: Can see why a following sprouted in Provence with her arrival, and can see why this would have created a confusion with the Virgin Mary.
The church strongly denies this, to use the same link as used in Jazzolog, Its a Girl fame, I refer to it again here, being the chief inspiration for this log.
[link]
The second link below is about the womem members of the PreRaphaelite movement. It makies extremely interesting reading, and carries notions both of a real struggle and wish these ladies pursued to a new intellectual line. This line seems permanently to remain a secret. The strength of the movement, to judge from the depth and strength of their art, is not matched at all with the few histories made on this group, namely that it was simply another art movement, albeit the first so called Avant Garde one.
[link]
Quote:
""
As so often in the history of PreRaphaelitism, it is William Michael Rossetti who provides the ultimate verdict. 'All the artists whom I best knew and valued deplored her death as a real loss to art', he wrote in 1906; 'they had looked upon her as the leading hope for painting in the hands of a woman'.(44) Yet had William Michael consulted his sister, another ambivalent PreRaphaelite, he might have seen that his apparently handsome conclusion was still inadequate. What Joanna Mary Boyce's life and work attest to most vividly is the struggle for social mobility and intellectual independence that must come before art, if art is to shape culture in the way that PreRaphaelitism is commonly allowed to have done. This struggle dogged the female artist in the orbit of PreRaphaelitism's challenge; and, when male PreRaphaelites are praised as iconoclasts, trend-setters or free-thinkers, it should be remembered by what comparative privilege they attained such positions. . . . . . "
This article carries a palpable mystery woven between the words although accidental of course.
My first introduction to things Mary Magdalen in High Art (apart from that through the Church at Easter each year), and, most importantly after learning about the Black Maria legends in Provence, through the work of Le Corbusier and his links with the Cathars in the Pyrennes, was while visiting an important historical house from Elizabethan times, in which Queen Elizabeth I lived as a child, in the sixteenth century. In this house were two things connecting the previously collected research above. One was a family tree **chart showing the holy blood line (from Jesus) descending down through time to Queen Elizabeth and the other was a collection of medium sized portraits of Mary Magdalene perhaps 6 or 8 in all. Each one of these portraits, showed a different aspect of prayer or adoration or modesty or self containment in the full Renaissance style at a time shortly AFTER Raphael himself. ((** Family Tree charts showing descendency from the Holy family were very much the vogue for at least 1,000 years, mattered in the survival stakes, and are all related to the Magdelen myth)).
The point which struck me was the fascination that this artist obviously held for Mary M. Catholics are only ever shown pictures of Mary mother of Jesus, so it was with total wonder not only to see so many of Mary Magdalen but also that they were so very beautiful too, and almost completely unknown. (More mystery).
I also believe that Leonardo Da Vinci who was simply a more prolific genius in the art of painting than Raphael, had the capability and talent to show a 13 year old St John in the Last Supper painting without giving rise to doubts that he had actually painted a fully grown woman, if that is what he had intended. Un doubtedly the person next to Jesus in this painting looks like a women, demurely looking down, (ie away from the artists gaze, or photographer) because the most important person and people are Jesus and his disciples. If it were a young boy, he would not need to look submissively but be casting his eyes about like any of the other men disciples. As he was to be the most divine of authors for Jesus, he more rightly could have been seen looking in admiration directly at Jesus without crossing boundaries of acceptable behaviour of the times.
I believe this subject matter represents the depths of the PreRaphaelite movement and the suggestions in their haunting paintings. The sudden interest that must have been accorded Women in this time as is shown continously in the painting of this known style to my interpretation. However, a real contradiction of sorts does come out of both the works and histories written in the links supplied, especially as the Rossetti faction is described as being the Spiritual one, which would be the opposite of Mary Magdalen, who is very much the material counterpart to the truly spiritual Virgin Mary.
More than anything else in the civilisation in our Western world, this myth surrounding Magdalen actually underpins the fundamentals of Christianity, by showing what it is NOT based on, ie normal intelligent woman, but rather the regular myths of Virgin Mary and Jesus.
This does not detract in any way from the myth of Magdalen. As with the opposites of Materialism and Spirit say, the Magdalen myth is as important in the whole Christian tale as that of Virgin Mary, in that it is its very opposite in manifestation and this is the very point of BOTH. This is the continous and infinite Mystery which, I am sure, endures and enthralls, and will continue to do as long as Christianity survives.
One last entry on the artists themselves, is an extract from Wikipedia:
More >
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 5 Jun 2006 @ 09:47
Another take on "Time" from the world of astronomy. One of the daily newspapers publishes a map of the visible heavens at a certain latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. Where or where can one find the same for the Southern Hemisphere view. My own astronomy was learnt in the Southern Hemisphere as a child and it is quite uninspiring to be always confronted with the Northern one. Is this an opening for an aspiring web magnate? To publish maps of the heavens from one own's vantage point, at the push of a button. Wonderful when going on holiday, get in from the view of one's familiarity and move over to the latitude / longtitude of one's visit and get into Sidereal Time.
[link] More >
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 9 May 2006 @ 14:39
In the ancient plays, intrinsic to the classical plot outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics, an investigation into the Art of Poetics, he defined as a key component of an gripping play, the denouement, (in addition to the famous three Unities, place, time and action). This can be described as the moment when the fate of chief character, or hero, changes from one of self destruction to self fulfilment, even if it involves his death, it will be deemed by Fate (Karma) to have released the spirit from previously conspiring forces onto its own journey toward spiritual, actual or real glory, fitting to the notion of hero, and even tragic hero: one generally considered by the audience to be good and fitting to all known circumstances, even if perhaps perplexing. More >
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