Eternity has gotten a lot of bad rap of late. All of our intelligencia are all about imminence, the things that are right in front of us. (Perhaps a better title would be 'From Eternity to Here'! Anyway, it would have messed up one heck of a movie, theone with Burt Lancaster, Montgoery Clift and Deborah Kerr from 1941.) I guess lots of folks are tired/fed up/ frightened of things having to do with the 'Beyond' (but damn, I do love that old series 'One Step Beyond') ....I guess all the screwed up killings in religion's name(s) have pretty much put the kibosh on transcendence.
Well, maybe, maybe not. It may turn out to be a concept we can't do without. It's not too big artistically maybe but I hereby resurrect it for this new project for Ms. Alembik. It's a firepit/patio on the top of a hill which I think of somewhat as a 'stargate', a portal to an outdoor nighttime experience (based in very archaic ritual) of fire and stars. Some would say that we are now beyond the archaic and now live only in the age of stars or the space age. I would disagree, nodding to William Faulkner who said something to the effect that the past is not dead it's not even past. We carry within the seeds of a cast of billions over periods of millions of years. True, we can only see the fruit of that Right Now but that hardly means anything in the vast scheme of things, the scheme of things in which fire, stars and that 'vast vegetative wave' I keep writing about, exists and has an existence outside the human kingdom.
The very fact of something existing outside human control is an incredible irritant to human sensibility to which the whole of the development of modernity attests.Rather than using techniques that work with the embedded nature of life in the universe, the developed sensibility of worldwide modernity seems to be one of a conquering army, of severing sensibility from its roots and transferring it wholesale into a machine form of existence, best exemplified by the Fordist means of production via the assembly line, even extended to life itself. And so it makes perfect sense that our design and architecture reflects that right-angled existence you might say, one devoted first and foremost to ease of mass factory production.
I see many pretty designs based on a modernist 'cleaning up' of the unruliness of the garden. All you have to do is check any contemporary landscape mag or many of the garden mags and you'll seee designs predicated on machine modernism. It's easy to see why: they good in sketches and CAD blueprints and they fit in with the machine esthetic of the 'Dwell' (as in the design mag) look.
Many people adore the work of Antonio Gaudi and the organoform shapes he developed but truth to tell its very difficult to achieve anything like that anymore at least on the scale at which Gaudi worked. The economics seem to prohibit it; the bottom line quarterly profit report of corporations prohibit such large scale craftsmanly (and hecne lets face it, idiosyncratic) handwork, Afterall, the Sagrada Familia is still unfinished and the finishing architect has subtly but distinctively turned the finishing into a sort of modernist streamlining (albeit with Gothic overtones) and virtually eliminating the vegetative flourishes (which aren't actually flourishes but at the heart of Gaudi's work; see here for a recent overview of this controversy).
(Here you see the added front of the Sagrada Familia)
Well, I could go on but there is plenty of material elsewhere on Gaudi and his way of working, one totally at odds with modernity by and large. The advent of the computer has changed, paradoxically at first glance, this situation somewhat if you look at the work of Greg Lynne and Frank Gehry who inhabit a terrain of intuitive 'sculpturization' of forms that only the computer can make possible. Needless to say, these forms are still firmly within a modernist esthetic of production. If one is looking for a more seamless integration of form and labor that favors a human scale, these are not the places to look perhaps.
And so we are led back to the garden again, a place where architects go to create their 'follies' as such structures are called, somewhat deprecatingly. One could just as well call many of the modern forms of architecture follies but somehow the connection with the garden betrays a subtle devaluing of worth.
On the other end of the scale, we have the film Avatar where the metaphysics of the garden reaches surreal heights (again, we might add, by courtesy of the computer). This perhaps puts us at the heart of the problem, not removing us (except in the way that all art removes us to a different place. Hopefully.)
It may be that the tomatoes in pots outside our back door offer just as much food for thought.
