Veritas et Venustas

Quote of the Day

One of these days I'll get around to making the case that today's highbrow-architecture scene is well understood as something akin to the high-end women's-fashion world. Both fields specialize in the creation of brittle, hysterical whimsies that are sometimes amusing in snobbish and absurd ways. Little harm is done when such productions are fodder for the pages of Vogue, and when they're understood to serve fantasy purposes. But what kind of person would impose high-strung, soon-to-fall- out-of-fashion craziness on our public realm?

— Michael Blowhard:

Another brick in the wall

Yes we can

Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, a response to the Clintons' attempt to discredit him with some remarks made by his minister, represents the politics I want. Not negative spinning and hypocritical attacks designed to win (without truth), but principles and ideas for governing:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Shame On Who?

Photo © 2008 CBS

EVERY DAY, in every way, Hillary is looking more and more like someone who's going to lose. In the video here she looks more like a frightened scold than a tough leader.

And what is she so angry about? Obama does not have "the right to attack" her health plan. Huh?

Then she challenged Obama to another debate. Since he wins those debates, that's a good idea because ... ?

Her full comments are after the jump. Sorry about the advertising in the CNN video, but so far no one else has put the video or the sound bite online. You know they will soon.

From CBS News' Fernando Suarez:

CINCINNATI -- Speaking to reporters following a rally at a community college here, Clinton slammed Obama and his campaign for distributing mailings to Ohio voters attacking Clinton’s universal health care plan and her position on NAFTA.

“Today in the crowd I was given two mailings that Senator Obama’s campaign is sending and I have to express my deep disappointment that he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio. He says one thing in speeches and then he turns around does this,” Clinton said waiving the two mailings at the cameras.

“Just because Senator Obama chose not to present a universal health care plan does not give him the right to attack me because I did. So let’s have a real campaign. Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's playbook, this is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged.”

“This election is about misleading, false and discredited attacks that interfere with voters being able to make an informed judgment,” she said.

“I am not going to stand here and see this campaign polluted by the kind of misleading, discredited and false attacks. We deserve better than that. He’s been called out on it, he has been contradicted on it, he knows better and here it is ‘Paid for by the Obama for America Campaign.’”

“So, shame on you Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public, that’s what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio and let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign.”

More Good Architecture Critics

David Brussat: Why classical architectural rocks
Providence Journal

RISD’s Chace Center (l.) and its People’s Savings
Bank (r.), on North Main Street in Providence
Photo by David Brussat

Brussat writes:

Scruton has an essay in this month’s issue of The New Criterion, Between Art & Science, reviewing three books: Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art, by former Boston University president John Silber (2007, Quantuck Lane); From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, by Nathan Glazer (2007, Princeton University Press); and Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (Umbau-Verlag) and A Theory of Architecture (ISI Books), by Nikos Salingaros. Glazer and Silber describe the silliness and stupidity of modern architecture, but Salingaros focuses on the question of why, even in societies that often embrace the silly and the stupid, the public still mostly prefers traditional architecture.

...

Scruton describes aspects of Salingaros’s thinking that elucidate the main ideas in Scruton’s own Classical Vernacular. “Architecture, Salingaros argues, is governed by universal and intuitively understood principles, which have been exemplified by all successful styles and in all civilizations that have left a record of themselves in their buildings. These principles are followed by life itself, and govern the process that unites part to part and part to whole in a complex organism. Because these principles correspond to life processes in ourselves, we intuitively recognize their authority, are at home with buildings that obey them, and uncomfortable with buildings that do not. The forms, scales, materials and undetailed surfaces of modern buildings deliberately flout these principles, and this is a sufficient explanation of the hostility that they arouse.”

Nathan Glazer, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City

Nikos Salingaros, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction

John Silber, Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art

Roger Scruton, Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism

Complete article by Brussat:

A DECADE AGO, I spent a pleasant evening in London as the guest of Roger Scruton, author of my bible, The Classical Vernacular, published in 1994. We attended a lecture by David Watkin, a professor at Cambridge and perhaps the world’s leading scholar of classical architecture.

Scruton has an essay in this month’s issue of The New Criterion, “Between Art & Science,” reviewing three books: Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art, by former Boston University president John Silber (2007, Quantuck Lane); From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, by Nathan Glazer (2007, Princeton University Press); and Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (Umbau-Verlag) and A Theory of Architecture (ISI Books), by Nikos Salingaros. Glazer and Silber describe the silliness and stupidity of modern architecture, but Salingaros focuses on the question of why, even in societies that often embrace the silly and the stupid, the public still mostly prefers traditional architecture.

I quoted Salingaros, a mathematical physicist at the University of Texas in San Antonio, in my column on Frank O. Gehry’s purposely absurd Stata Center, at MIT (“Oops! Stata, Stata, Stata, oops!” Nov. 29, 2007): “The randomness they imply,” he wrote of buildings like the Stata Center, “is the antithesis of nature’s organized complexity. . . . Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.”

Scruton describes aspects of Salingaros’s thinking that elucidate the main ideas in Scruton’s own Classical Vernacular. “Architecture, Salingaros argues, is governed by universal and intuitively understood principles, which have been exemplified by all successful styles and in all civilizations that have left a record of themselves in their buildings. These principles are followed by life itself, and govern the process that unites part to part and part to whole in a complex organism. Because these principles correspond to life processes in ourselves, we intuitively recognize their authority, are at home with buildings that obey them, and uncomfortable with buildings that do not. The forms, scales, materials and undetailed surfaces of modern buildings deliberately flout these principles, and this is a sufficient explanation of the hostility that they arouse.”

That is, the public prefers the traditional styles because they resonate unconsciously, on the basis of generations of observation that is astute because architecture is the only art form we experience all day, every day, lifelong. But it is more: The architecture we love mimics our biology, nature itself.

“For Salingaros, therefore,” Scruton continues, “no cause is more urgent than a return to the natural order of architecture, which will enable us once again to be at home in urban surroundings.

“The secret of this natural order is contained in the concept of scale. Successful buildings are not given size and shape, as it were, in one gesture. . . . Successful buildings achieve their size and shape, Salingaros argues, by a hierarchy of scales, which lets us read their larger dimensions as amplifications of the smaller. The architect ascends from the smallest scale to the largest through repeated application of a ‘scaling rule,’ [which] is not arbitrary, since life itself seems to favor, in the fractal structures of snowflakes and crystals, in the exfoliation of leaves and cells, a figure in the neighborhood of three, and it is the ‘rule of a third’ which, according to Salingaros, has been applied by master architects throughout history. . . .

“Salingaros develops this and related ideas in an intriguing manner, arguing that modernism went wrong from the start, with Adolf Loos’s famous dismissal of ornament [Ornament and Crime, 1908] — a dismissal which effectively left the lowest end of the scalar progression undefined, so that everything larger became free-floating and ungrounded. . . .

“Many of the ways in which architectural cells unfold into buildings imitate the ways in which plants and animals grow, and in attempting to give a comprehensive theory of this kind of unfolding, Salingaros is repeating a theme broached in his writings by the Prince of Wales.”

Here (and in its obsessive quotation) this column of mine tails back on last week’s column on Charles’s speech opening the New Buildings in Old Places Conference, in London. Along with the other two authors reviewed by Scruton, both the prince and Salingaros blast modernism — but Salingaros tries to explain its malevolent ethos, which I’ve only been capable of barking at vaguely in past columns.

“Salingaros,” Scruton concludes, “associates the radical modernism of the starchitects less with egoism than with a nihilist desire to negate the togetherness of communities, and to infect our surroundings with objects that forbid us to take comfort.”

But why? This is a vital question for society that Scruton does not address here and I cannot answer. I will read Salingaros himself and report back.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com).

Yes We Can

EXCEPT for the fact that he was only 8 years old at the time, Obama could have given this talk at Woodstock. All of the themes of the Sixties — environmentalism, feminism, civil rights, urbanism, organic food, small is beautiful, think global act local, peace & love, the place of the individual in the community, and change — will play out in the next few decades.

http://www.dipdive.com/

La Bellissima

Men do not love Rome because she is beautiful, Rome is beautiful because men have loved her.

—Leopold Kohr

Other Quotes from Kohr:

"Small is beautiful."

"Whenever something is wrong, it is too big."

(continued)

"As the physicists of our time have tried to elaborate an integrated single theory, capable of explaining not only some but all phenomena of the physical universe, so I have tried on a different plane to develop a single theory through which not only some but all phenomena of the social universe can be reduced to a common denominator. The result is a new and unified political philosophy centering on the theory of size. It suggests that there seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness...

"There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations have been welded onto overconcentrated social units. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe. For social problems, to paraphrase the population doctrine of Thomas Malthus, have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are part, while the ability of man to cope with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that, if a society grows beyond its optimum size, its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them.

Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.

"A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power."

“To Drive Or Not To Drive”

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

And it has all come to pass in just a couple of generations. My dad was born in the mid-1920s, just as the automotive moment was becoming inevitable. And now here I am, always wondering how much longer we will be driving, certain that every time I start the engine in my diesel pickup I am firing up a dinosaur technology. You could ask for no clearer sign of the bind we are in than Mitt Romney’s campaign promise to reinvigorate Detroit in an era of $100-a-barrel oil. America is full of people like me, who remember when gas was 21 cents a gallon, which is the price of admission to climate change.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, January 21, 2008

Quote of the Day

There are so many things I love about Jane Jacobs:  She hated one-way streets, and loved local beer.

Judy Wicks, The White Dog Cafe

Quote of the Day

You can measure the health of a city by the vitality and energy of its streets and public spaces.

- Holly Whyte, quoted by NYC Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden

So let's get the streets right.

Hubville

A friend invited me to last night's Sox game in his box at Fenway. Cowabunga, those were good seats, even better than they look in an iPhone snapshot.

Meanwhile, the Yankees were clinching the Wild Card spot in Tampa. Quote of the Day, from A-Rod:

“This feels like home. It’s hard to believe that I played for another two organizations. So much has happened to me here, adversity, some success, that I feel like anything but New York feels weird for me now.”

The game was the day after my birthday. In 2004, we saw the Sox clinch the Wild Card on my birthday, and they acted like they'd just won the World Series. Little did we know. So this year we've got some reverse Mojo going.

¿ Masonic Theosophy ?

That's how it was described here (via Design Observer)

The Modernist Disease: Cogito Ego Sum

COGITO ERGO EGO SUM (I think therefore I am my ego) could be the motto for the 20th century. I thought of this today when I heard John Cage say in an interview on WNYC that the traffic noise outside his apartment on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan was "more beautiful than any music I've ever heard."

Think about that: the non-stop cacophony of angry drivers honking their horns, the screech of taxi brakes, and the sound of trucks and buses constantly accelerating and braking is more beautiful than Mozart's Requiem, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a folk tune or any Beatles song. It makes you understand how far Modernism and the ego took us from beauty, and how much it valued every little thought that occurs to our brains.

Traditionally, artists understood beauty as bringing some aspect of the divine to earth and the material. It is a long way from that to Cage's love of traffic noise, which is typical of the egotism and materialism of 20th century art, especially from 1980 on. Every art school, and every art magazine emphasized the importance of theory. Glorifying intellectualism and the the ego, they gravely weakened the connection to the transcendent.

On its own, the ego has no common sense. It is limited by its experiences, knowledge, fears and insecurities, and easily makes nonsensical judgments. Connected to the divine and the transcendent, it knows as much as its fears will allow, and can potentially make perfect judgments. The ego in touch with the higher self and the divine would never think traffic noise is more beautiful than Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

Some other ego works:

Egotecture

Egonomics

Egonomics 2.o

Egological

Egolution

And some other quotes from Cage:

"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it"

"There is no noise, only sound. I haven't heard any sounds that I consider something I don't want to hear again, with the exception of sounds that frighten us or make us aware of pain. I don't like meaningful sound. If sound is meaningless, I'm all for it."

"I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'"

"I do what I feel it is necessary to do. My necessity comes from my sense of invention, and I try not to repeat the things I already know about."

"I myself enjoy things as long as they remain mysterious to me. When I'm able to understand them, to my satisfaction, that is to say thoroughly, then I'm through with them. I would like to leave things alive and mysterious, if I can."

"The whole idea of value judgment is a mistake and if you insist on having dessert all the time instead of eating your vegetables, then you can listen to just the sounds that please you. I like to listen to all sounds."

"For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue."

Cage was a Buddhist who seemed to understand the meaninglessness of Modernism better than the meaninglessness of Buddhism. After the jump, a quote I found when I Googled "buddhism meaningless."

From What Can We Learn From Buddhism?

Once Buddha told a story about a man who was wounded by an arrow. Instead of allowing his relatives to find a doctor to pull out the arrow, the man insisted on first finding out who hit him, the color of his skin, where he came from, what material the arrow was made of, who made the arrow, and so on. Buddha said the man would die long before he could find those answers.

One who studies but does not practice is like a person who can recite the contents of a huge cookbook but never goes into the kitchen to prepare food. He can never relieve his hunger. Practice is therefore a prerequisite to enlightenment. In some sects of Buddhism, for instance, Zen practices such as meditation are even put ahead of knowledge.

Further, intellect, whether in the field of religion, philosophy, science, or art, is a function of the human mind, The human mind is like a computer that operates on the basis of the information stored within. The mind receives its information mainly from the sense organs. Unfortunately, our sense organs are so inferior that they perceive only very limited information, and our picture of the universe is therefore distorted.

In two previous talks, "The Five Eyes" and "A Glimpse of Buddhism," I used an electromagnetic spectrum chart to illustrate the fact that our physical eyes can see only a very small segment of the universe, and a sound reception chart to demonstrate the limitations of our unaided ears. Because the information we perceive through these organs is far from complete, the impressions we obtain, the interpretations we formulate, and the conclusions we draw could be very wrong in any given instance.

Furthermore, the unenlightened human mind is basically a linear operator; it is finite and exclusive; it is "either-or"; it is dualistic. On the other hand, the enlightened mind is all-inclusive, completely spontaneous, nondiscriminating, and all-encompassing. The scope of the ordinary human mind is similar to the view one gets peering through a pipe: one is unable to see the whole horizon. Similarly, one cannot reach enlightenment by the intellect alone.

Therefore, what we can learn on the intellectual level is to accept the challenge of the vastness of the Buddhist teaching, but to avoid being buried by it. The voluminousness of Buddhist literature can itself be a burden and becomes a serious obstacle if one clings to it. One must free oneself from all attachments before one can attain enlightenment. Buddha used the raft as an analogy. A raft is used to cross a river. Buddha asked his disciples, "Would you say that a man is wise if, after crossing a river and seeing that there is a long way to walk on land, he puts the raft on his back and carries it rather than getting rid of it?"

Idiot of the Month: Chris Goodall

From yesterday's London Times:

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

If Goodall is not an idiot, he's an irresponsible publicity monger.

Even taking his argument at face value, someone walking slowly uses few if any more calories than someone driving a car. And while Goodall would be closer to being right if we got all our calories from agri-business beef — we don't.

More importantly, almost no one walks three miles to buy their groceries, while Americans routinely drive 30 miles or more to go to Sam's Club for their Agribeef, which can come from 3,000 miles away. Walking three blocks does not equal driving 30 miles. And local, organic produce would solve more energy problems.

More on this later today, when I update this post.

For now let me comment that the Times, which hates Prince Charles, has commissioned Goodall to make a carbon audit of Prince Charles. I wonder how that will turn out? Yet Charles's Prince's Foundations has hired some of the world's leading experts to study solutions to global warming and climate. And oh, what a coincidence, his development at Poundbury is a sustainable model which reduces driving. Charles also campaigns against agri-business, which uses energy-intensive methods. See Michael Pollan's great The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I noticed a few years ago that whenever Prince Charles criticized Modernist architecture and planning, the next day the Times would have unflattering stories about Camilla.

That's not cricket, old chaps. And this is the group that just bought the Wall Street Journal.

Philadelphia Quotes

Having established my Philadelphia cred and praised Philadelphia as the home of the some of the best urbanism, architecture and architects in America, I offer the following quotes:

"I once spent a year in Philadelphia. I think it was on a Sunday."

— W.C. Fields

"Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed."

— W. C. Fields

"Here lies W.C. Fields. I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

— proposed by W.C. Fields for his gravestone.

"The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people that make them unsafe."

— Frank Rizzo, former Mayor of Philadelphia*

“I'd rather be a lamp post in Denver than Mayor of Philadelphia.”

— Sonny Liston

"I'll play first, third, left. I'll play anywhere - except Philadelphia."

— Richie Allen

* Rizzo was a former cop and police chief. At the time he was mayor, many people thought it was his police who made Philadelphia unsafe.

Some Philly cops then carried “drop guns” in their cars. After shooting and killing one of those people making the streets unsafe, they would put the gun next to the body and claim that they were merely returning gunfire and defending themselves.

Quote of the Day - The Truth Is Slowly Getting Out There

It's time for a reconsideration -- something like what architects call a post-occupancy evaluation, which looks at how a building is working for people in everyday use. This one, however, won't rag on the library's already well-documented functional shortcomings, such as the unwieldy and baffling vertical traffic flow. Instead, we'll venture into a region few architects know how to talk about: how a building feels.

This one feels, in varying places, raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating. Ponder any spot in this vast building, and two, three or more of those adjectives inevitably swirl together. That's the first indicator of trouble. If this building were fulfilling the showers of acclaim heaped onto it, all we'd be talking about is joy.

This library, incredibly, is an uncomfortable place to read....

Lawrence Cheek, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Truth Is Out There - Koolhaas In Seattle