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Dag Rowiet,

We hebben het over verschillende dingen gehad. We spraken over je huis en hoe daarin dingen gepersonaliseerd raken, hoe je een relatie krijgt met dingen in het maken. Dat die relatie iets animistisch heeft, in de zin dat jij het ding maakt maar ook het ding jou maakt. Er is een uitwisseling (mogelijk dat het Japanse Shinto (post 1) en het Chinese Feng Shio (post 2) interessant kan zijn waar sprake is van een animistische relatie met dingen). Ook Malafouris (post 3) heeft op een intrigerende manier over maken geschreven, met aandacht voor de relatie tussen lichaam en materiaal. In het bouwen ontwikkelt zich een relatie. We relateerden dit aan de queer performativity van Karen Barad (post 4). Ook spraken we over de verwevenheid in de maatschappij tussen dingen (waaronder mensen), hoe dingen op elkaar inwerken. Hoe je mogelijk de maatschappij ook als een huis kan beschouwen (misschien relatie met Sloterdijk waarvan je dingen hebt gelezen). Hoe we verweven zijn met machtsstructuren, maar hoe deze ook weer veranderen door de acties van mensen. In deze context is de antropoloog Tim Ingold ook interessant, hij verdiept zich ook in de verwevenheid van de maatschappij en doet dit vanuit het begrip lijn (zie post 5). Daarnaast is nog een post over Heidegger (post 6) die net als jij bouwen zag als een worden, een innige relatie tussen ons zijn en de omgeving. Ook wees ik op het boek van Michael Pollan die net in het Nederlands is vertaald (zie post 7).  Michael Pollan schreef een filosofisch boek over het maken van zijn schrijvershuisje. Het bouwproces en het beschouwproces vloeien hierin naadloos in elkaar over. Ook het boek architectuur van het geluk van Alain Botton kan interessant zijn (post 8): beschouwingen over de relatie tussen het welbevinden van de mens en zijn omgeving (de architectuur) vanuit kunsthistorisch perspectief.

We hadden het ook over de lastige relatie tussen individuen en gemeenschap. We kamen op dit gesprek toen we over het huis hadden dat je hebt gebouwd, hoe je ook moeite hebt dat het huis wordt verhuurd, en je dan je relatie tot het huis verliest. In post 9 vind je info over filosofe   Simone Weil die altijd zocht naar een goede verhouding autonomie en gemeenschap, spanningsrelatie tussen individu en gemeenschap. Tot slot hadden we het over Schiller (post 10),  hoe die geloofde dat men via spel een goede balans kan krijgen tussen lichaam en geest, gevoel en idee. Zonder spel is het lastig een idee te ervaren, te belichamen. Dit brachten we ook in verband met je huis bouwen.

Groetjes,

Hille

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#Shinto #JapaneseArchitecture

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1 In very general terms, we can understand tradition through two dichotomies. On the one hand, tradition is associated with a past that repeats itself in the present - in opposition to what is contemporary, novel, and emerging. And on the other hand, we can understand tradition as embodied in the present - it is lived, continuously re-emerges, re-evaluates, re-positions, and projects itself into the future. This dichotomy has also been presented as a division between "Western European" and "Eastern" cultural views; however, this divide is a gross generalization; geographical boundaries are perhaps the least-suited method of circumscribing philosophical thought and its debate. For example, many so-called "Western" philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ravaisson, Whitehead, or Bergson have established dialogues and theorized ideas that can be found in different forms in the East.

2 Using this misconceived divide as a point of departure, we could say that in some Eastern cultures, tradition is predominantly understood as an inherent part of life, manifesting a particular understanding of the present and the effects of the past in its production. In Japanese culture, in particular, tradition is deeply rooted in the awareness and celebration of life, understood as unfolding in and through time, evidencing an affinity with Bergson's philosophy . This paper proposes to reflect on how this philosophy manifests in Japanese aesthetics, focusing mainly on the aesthetics of architecture and the built environment. I propose to analyse how architectural traditions in Japan interconnect with Bergson's philosophy and contribute to an alternative ontology - an ontology of duration, where the structures and spaces we build are no longer entirely material but transient transformations that are part of an ongoing process.

3 This essay will first explore some of the aesthetic traditions of Japan and how these are sympathetic to many of Bergson's ideas, exploring how Japanese awareness and sensibility are akin to a form of intuition. Secondly, I will present the case of the shrine. Looking at this case from a rationalist view of metaphysics, I will identify its problems with standard ontology (if such a standard can be defined at all). Following will be an interpretation of the shrine in relationship to Bergson's philosophy, namely the aspects of duration, possibility, perception, and memory. Concluding, I will reflect on the implications this alternative ontology can have for interpreting and understanding architectural works cross-culturally.

1 For further references on Japanese aesthetic and cultural traditions, see, Cox (2003) and, Sanford, (...)

4 The idea of reality as change and transience is central to Shinto and Buddhist philosophies, for whom impermanence is an essential feature of the world. Japanese traditions evidence a particular awareness of this worldview, which is central to its aesthetic culture and traditions. 1 This awareness can be understood as a form of perception that focuses not only on the object but also on the processes involved in its creation and life. This sensibility is evident in Japanese craftsmanship; it can be seen in the tectonic nature of things like wood joinery, the folded layers of forged metal, or the celebration of imperfections that arise in the making of artefacts. The aesthetic appreciation of (beauty in imperfection), or the practice of (repair of pottery with gold seams) are examples of the awareness and celebration of the imperfect, incomplete, and ephemeral nature of things (Koren 2008).

5 The awareness of the transience of things reflects a profound expression of the cycles of nature and life itself. For example, the old lunar calendar reflected the agrarian society of Japan but also the imperfect and transient nature of the seasons. It marked the cycles of agricultural activities and the life cycles of plants and animals. Therefore, each year the calendar was adjusted to reflect these natural cycles. The New Year coincided with the beginning of Spring and the blooming of plum blossoms, the second month with the cherry blossoms, the third with the peach flower, and so on. Each year's calendar was announced so that agricultural activities could be organized accordingly. The Gregorian calendar, adopted by Japan in 1873 during the Meiji Restoration, was a rational and mathematical abstraction of planetary movements. While the lunar calendar reflected time according to the rhythms of life, the modern Gregorian calendar measures time objectively. Japan's adoption of the modern calendar means that now the New Year starts in the winter, or that June, named , which means "the month with no water," is in the middle of the rainy season (Noguchi 2004, 12-13).

6 The contrast between the two calendars can be related to Bergson's critique of the spatialization of time, characteristic of the physical sciences and mathematics. Bergson distinguishes between the homogeneity of space into which time is thrown in order to be measured and divided; with the heterogeneity of lived experience. It is a distinction between the quantitative nature of a mathematical variable and the qualitative flow of the rhythms of life The modern Gregorian calendar imposes a rigid order of successions onto nature, becoming desynchronised with the natural movements of life. The traditional lunar calendar, in contrast, adjusted itself to the movements and rhythms of the natural world, drawing meaningfulness to time, not as a measurement but as the movements and experience of life itself For Bergson, scientific knowledge relies on artificial abstractions that do not fully represent the heterogeneous movements of life and nature. The modern calendar relies on measurement and convention created by human intellect for practical reasons. Bergson tells us:

There is no doubt but that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself(Bergson 1922, 44).

7 The relationship of the body with the cycles of life is fundamental to Japanese culture, rituals, and aesthetics. "At the heart of a culture lies a certain view of the body, and this view decides which perceptual experiences the culture chooses to value" (Noguchi 2004, 8). Life, its creation, maturing, weathering, decay, renewal, and death, and the awareness of these processes in all things underline traditional Japanese sensibilities. This sensibility contrasts with a more mechanistic or functional view of the body found in, for example, some European philosophical traditions, where the body is a 'tool' or 'machine' to be used, serving a functional purpose. This mechanical view of the body reflects a meaning for life and death in, the so-called, modern capitalist culture. Life, as with time, becomes a commodity that can be gained, used, lost, and even sold. It has value, but it is a quantitative, mercantile value where the qualitative heterogeneity of life is merely apparent. This view of life also circumscribes the past, present, and future to strict, rigid boundaries, allowed to touch at points but never cut into each other. For Bergson, the past interpenetrates the present, and the present continuously gestures towards the future. Bergson's analogy of a melody illustrates this idea. When a note extends into the next, we perceive them as being inside each other, interpenetrating, not as distinct notes. If a note is played out of tone or unnecessarily extended, we perceive this as an error because it fails to fulfil our anticipation of what is to come.

2 See Isozaki (2011, Part 1) and Tanizaki (2001). Related discourse can be found in Yasuo (2008), pas (...)

8 The contrast between these views can be extended to how tradition is understood. In Japan, tradition is alive; it re-emerges, re-invents, and evolves in a creative way. It survives by being lived and performed. Tradition is a part of life, interpenetrating it like with the melody. 2 A contrary, or "European" view, understands tradition as something from, or contained, in the past; it survives only through preservation. 3 Analogous to embalming or taxidermy, where bodies are given a lifelike effect. This illustrates a distinct view of the body.

4 Questions about the relationship between science and culture may be too extensive to present in thi (...)

[D]eath becomes merely the production of waste material. Hospitals have already turned into processing facilities for industrial waste, with organ transplants serving as part of the recycling business. Anybody who senses something strange about this mechanical image [...] will realise immediately that science in itself can never become 'culture'( Noguchi 2004, 12). 4

5 An example of this is the belief of the ' in Shinto religious practices.

6 A similar example is the word in Portuguese. A profound melancholic longing or yearning tha (...)

9 In Japanese traditions, bodies, and therefore matter, have tangible and intangible attributes, eliciting that life is present even in the most ordinary objects, in their becoming, maturing, decay, renewal, and perishing. 5 This particular awareness is best expressed by the phrase mono no aware . It is one of those untranslatable expressions particular to a specific culture which often portray and express a profound sentiment and character of that culture. 6 The meaning of mono no aware is complex, ( ) refers to "things," the particle ( ) indicates possession, and ( ) means "pathos." The literal translation is "the pathos of things" (Parkes 2018, Chap.2), but can also be understood as a "deep feeling of things" or "the impermanence of things." The expression suggests a worldview in which objects and bodies are not static but transient and unfolding - in duration. This understanding is intrinsically related to the beauty of things in the sense that it elicits a particular aesthetic feeling. The Buddhist priest in the fourteenth century, expressed this sentiment in the book Essays in Idleness.

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty( in Keen 1967, 120).

10The intangible has a profound effect on the understanding of matter. In Japanese traditions, the intangible is as much a part of things as the physical particles that constitute them. The practice of mosha reflects this form of dualism. Mosha is the tradition of reproducing an artefact, usually a painting or calligraphy work. However, the products of mosha are not understood as a copy; they "preserv[e] both tangible and intangible qualities of the original" (Ellis, Oka and Hashimoto 2016, 286). All aspects of the artefact, its material form, technical "know-how," and its "pathos" (expression of feeling or meaning) are transferred and not merely copied into the new object. The practice emerged during the Meiji Restoration to save Buddhist artefacts that were being destroyed due to anti-Buddhist sentiment. The products of mosha practices are not copies or forgeries; they are understood as extensions of the original object. In "European" culture, a similar equivalent to this aesthetic conception is found in works of literature, music, and other performance arts. A work of literature is not contingent on a single copy of a book or manuscript, or a piece of music is not contingent on its original performance; listening to any performance of a musical work is to experience that musical work and not a copy. Japanese aesthetic practices like mosha, extend this quality to all art, suggesting an entirely radical ontology.

11The concept of MA is another important aspect of Japanese aesthetics. MA is the awareness of "an indivisible state of time and space" (Iimura 2002). The 1989 short film " MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji," directed by the artist Takahiko IImura in collaboration with the architect Arata Isozaki (texts) and music by Takehisa Kosugi, exemplifies the awareness and experience of MA in a work of art. The film begins with a description of the 16 th-century stone garden in the Ryoan-Ji temple, Kyoto, followed by the text:

MA, a Japanese word, is a perception of space and time. It embodies the idea of space and time as one. Ma is reflected in many Japanese art forms and is fully realized in the garden of Ryoan-Ji.

12In Takahiko Iimura's notes on the film, he says:

In these films I am interested in realizing Henri Bergson's concept of temporal duration, called "durée," [...]. I see Bergson's "durée" as closer to the concept of time in the East, which regards time as duration rather than as divisible. If one regards the concept of Japanese "MA" as an indivisible state of time and space, there is common ground with Bergson's "durée" [...].
I thought of not merely expressing the concept of "MA", but also of experiencing "MA." [...] The slow tracking shots across immovable objects create a continuous space while making the viewer conscious of his or her own time-process(Iimura 2002).

7 For further reference see: Miyazaki, Hayao (2009), Starting Point 1979-1996, Viz LLC; and, Miyazaki (...)

13Gunter Nitschke suggests an association of MA with "place," where "place is the product of lived space and lived time, a reflection of our states of mind and heart" (Nitschke 1988). Nitschke's conception of place includes both the tangible and intangible, the objective and subjective. MA does not negate space; it infuses it with the subjective awareness of heterogeneous life. The Ryoan-Ji stone garden also appears in the 1949 film "Late Spring" by Yasujiro Ozu. The scene depicts two fathers contemplating the stone garden and contemplating life. The juxtaposition of the scene, the garden, and the characters' dialogue are symbolic. The experience of the garden is not immediate; its stones, although immovable, appear to us gradually. As with life, it too is never immediate; it slowly progresses through all things. The phenomena of MA, in many ways, can be related to the phenomena of duration. The Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has referred to MA in several interviews as "the time between a clap." 7

14This brief outline of Japanese traditions and aesthetic culture reveals an inherent affinity with Bergson's philosophy. There are apparent sympathies with Bergson's durée - the tangible and intangible, the discrete and qualitative, the homogeneous and heterogeneous, the multiple and the whole. The sense of awareness, central to Japanese sensibility, can be related to Bergson's philosophical method of intuition, which equates to a kind of understanding or knowledge of the world and reality from within. Bergson distinguishes two types of knowledge. "Relative knowledge" based on mathematical, analytical abstractions that understand things from the point of view of an observer. And in contrast, "absolute knowledge" grasps things from the "inside," which is attained by the method of intuition. However, it is important to note that Bergson does not oppose science; on the contrary, he understands the value of scientific progress. His criticism is that science deals in abstraction, in isolated observations of things and phenomena, a viewpoint but not the whole picture. At the very least, the traditional Japanese sensibility and aesthetic awareness are akin to Bergson's intuition, of knowing and understanding of things from the "inside."

Under the pretext of positivism hides the absurdity of the scientist who turns on the lights in order to investigate the nature of darkness( Noguchi 2004, 15).

9 The origin of the shrine is an issue of some debate. For a more indepth exposition on this matter s (...)

15 Ise Jingu is one of Japan's most highly regarded Shinto shrines. The shrine is dedicated to Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess, the highest deity in the Shinto religion and the ancestor of the royal family. Popularly considered the "Soul of Japan" and a symbol of Japanese identity, it is a national treasure representing the emperor's grandeur and a symbol of Japanese nationalism. The shrine complex is comprised of many structures. The most distinguished are two plots of land that sit side by side. On one side, the goshoden enshrines the sun goddess herself in the form of a mirror. On the other side an empty plot of the same size and shape - the kodenchi (Lopes 2007, 79). Many rituals take place at the shrine, and although there are inherent political connotations, their calendar is generally defined by the cycles of rice cultivation. It is also one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan. According to some records, the Ise Jingu 8 could be 2,000 years old, 9 although one particular ritual, the Shikinen Sengu, makes dating the structure a complex issue.

16The Shikinen Sengu is the ritual of the cyclical rebuilding of the goshoden every twenty years in the empty site next to it, the kodenchi. In effect, every twenty years, the goshoden and kodenchi swap places. The works involved take about eight years and are a significant undertaking - 15,000 trees, 900 meters of silk, 3.75 kilograms of gold, and 260 kilograms of lacquer are some of the materials required for the task. In 2013 the reported cost was 55 billion yen. Ancient building techniques are used, and specific rituals, a total of thirty-five, mark each rebuilding stage. Some rituals are modest, while others involve thousands of participants (Lopes 2007, 79).

17There is no single explanation for the performance of this ritual. A theological view may present that itrepresents the Shinto doctrines of purity and renewal or that the deity, or kami, must always be placed in a new and beautiful shrine. A cultural approach may defend that it expresses an awareness of the transience of life and nature, fundamental to Japanese aesthetics. From a technical or architectural perspective, the ritual preserves the construction techniques, traditional tools, and know-how, passing this knowledge down to future generations. Or it is simply a way of preserving the building fabric because of the perishable qualities of the materials. Whichever the reason for this ritual of rebuilding, we can accept that it is well within the aesthetic traditions of Japanese culture.

Curious philosophers [and architects] who look into the pairing of goshoden to kodenchi will find themselves rethinking the ontology of architecture( Lopes 2007, 77).

Fig.1 - The Ise Jingu shrine during the rebuilding process

The shrine during the rebuilding process. Creative Commons License URL:<https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Ise_Shrine_Naiku_1953-8-26.jpg>

18The Shikinen Sengu presents a significant problem - how can something be 2,000 years old if it is entirely rebuilt every twenty years? Buildings are material objects individuated as tables, chairs, or other ordinary things. They are made of parts and come into existence when these parts are assembled. Ultimately, if this ontological view is taken to the extreme (atomism), buildings and other objects are bundles of particles organised in a specific manner, location, and time. The well-known puzzle of the Ship of Theseus illustrates the complexity of the persistence of objects and part substitution and raises significant hesitations regarding the reduction of object identity to their material constitution. It is generally accepted that an object can survive the gradual replacement of some of its parts. It is controversial if it survives the gradual replacement of all of its parts. It is more controversial and likely not accepted that an object could survive the simultaneous replacement of all parts. Furthermore, it is not compatible that an object can stand beside itself, and there is a moment in which the "old shrine" and the "new shrine" stand side by side. Therefore, according to more rationalist or even Platonic views on ontology, the Ise Jingu cannot be more than twenty years old.

19However, the issue with this view is the same criticism Bergson makes about spatialising time. Time becomes subordinate to space, and things happen in a succession of intervals. Accordingly, each iteration of the Ise Jingu would have to be a distinct material object that exists only in discrete moments. However, it is commonly accepted, and our intuition tells us that the shrine is 2,000 years old, suggesting an alternative ontology of duration. In this alternative, the past and present co-exist; they interpenetrate, which is distinct from the cadence of successive moments into which things come and go from existence. Duration is not bound by mathematical division; instead, it is a continuous multiplicity. It can reveal other durations and encompass them ad infinitum (Pearson 2018, 18). The many are revealed as one, as Bergson notes:

We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought(Bergson 1910, 101).

When we are seated on the bank of a river, the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life's deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose( Bergson in Pearson and Maoilearca 2002, 257).

21As with a melody, we can extract each note, but these alone do not constitute the melody in its fluid unfolding and duration. Bergson tells us that "when we try to cut it, it is as if we suddenly passed a blade through a flame. [...] [We divide] the unfolded, not the unfolding" (Bergson in Pearson and Maoilearca 2002, 255). To understand the Ise Jingu, in this way, is to understand it as unfolding in time, in duration. We can only divide its duration in terms of the re-buildings that have already happened, and this is not the complete picture; it is an abstraction possible through our intellect.

22A counterargument is that the Ise Jingu is the case of a multi-instantiating object; similar to a work of literature or a piece of music, the same exact object is performed and repeated as a given aesthetic experience. However, although the current existing form of the Ise Jingu may resemble earlier ones, the Shikinen Sengu ritual of rebuilding has allowed for changes in material and spatial specifications (Lopes 2007, 82). Nevertheless, we do not consider the current form of the shrine as an error or impostor; it has simply evolved, continuously recreating itself anew.

23The architect Bruno Taut in his praise of Ise Jingu, compared it to the Parthenon:

The shrines of Ise Jingu are Japan's greatest and most completely original creation in terms of world architecture. [...] The Parthenon on the Acropolis is to the present day a visible sign of the beautiful gifts that men of Athens bestowed on their collective symbol of wisdom and intelligence, Athena. It is aesthetically the greatest and most sublime building in stone, as are the Ise shrines in wood. But still there is a great difference. Even if the Parthenon had not been blown to ruins it would today still be only a monument of ancient times, as life is missing from it. How very different are the shrines of Ise! Not only are the religious rites and the everlasting stream of worshippers a living presence, the shrines have yet another vital quality, which is entirely original in its effect, intention, and perception. This is the fact that the shrines are always new( Taut in Isozaki 2011, 124).

24There are further relations between the Ise Jingu and Bergson's philosophy, particularly if we look at the dichotomy between the goshoden and the kodenchi - the empty and the built sites. For Bergson, "consciousness is both memory (the conservation and accumulation of the past in the present) and anticipation of the future" (Pearson 2018, 75). The contrast between the two halves of the Ise Jingu reveals this idea through aesthetic means. Each half cannot exist in isolation; the unbuilt side is as much a part of the whole as the built side. The goshoden, through the continuous process of rebuilding, elicits the past into the present as a form of lived tradition. The kodenchi, the unbuilt site, awaits the future iteration of the shrine to materialise; mediating between perception and memory, it is a site of the virtual. Both plots are sites of endless possibility. According to Bergson, possibility follows reality and does not precede it; it is put into the past retroactively, after the fact.

As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into the indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been possible, but it is this precise moment that it begins to have been always possible, and that is why I said that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared. The possible is therefore the mirage of the present in the past; and as we know the future will finally constitute a present and the mirage effect is continually being produced, we are convinced that the image of tomorrow is already contained in our actual present, which will be the past of tomorrow, although we did not manage to grasp it. [...]
If we put the possible back into its proper place, evolution becomes something quite different from the realization of a program: the gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field( Bergson in Pearson and Maoilearca 2002, 279, 281).

10 Endosmosis is the movement of water inside the cell while exosmosis is the elimination of water out (...)

25The complexities of the Ise Jingu speak to the nature of time and reality we find in Bergson's philosophy. It is the continuous exchange between the built and unbuilt, each site simultaneously eliciting the past, present, and future in a continuous and creative movement. The kodenchi is a site of the past and simultaneously of the future. When we perceive it, we simultaneously recollect what is no longer present while evoking the possible future because of the juxtaposition with the built shrine by its side. It is simultaneously the site of what is no longer present and of what has not yet arrived. The dichotomy between the goshoden and the kodenchi presents both the virtual and the actual; however, either is entirely virtual or entirely actual, they are in constant flux, in a movement of subtraction and compression, revealing and concealing. "[P]erception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other and are always exchanging something of their substance as if by a process of endosmosis" (Pearson 2018, 70). Perhaps this analogy best describes the nature of Ise Jingu; paradoxically, resorting to science, the endosmosis and exosmosis 10 are carefully regulated for cells to be able to remain alive. The co-existence and permeability of the past and present allow us to understand Ise Jingu in its entirety and not as a succession of distinct moments but as the intensity of life, continuously renewing, inventing and projecting itself forwards.

Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting, for the present moment, always going forwards, fleeting limit between the immediate past which is now no more and the immediate future which is not yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually reflects perception as a memory( Bergson in Pearson 2018, 83).

26And so, it is with the Ise shrine.

27 Ise Jingu is not unique; more than thirty shrines in Japan are regularly rebuilt. The Kasuga Taisha shrine in Nara is rebuilt every thirty years, the Kamo Mioya Jinga in Kyoto every fifty years, or the Nukisaki Jinga in Gunma Prefecture every thirteen years. Many other shrines and buildings are rebuilt in irregular intervals, e.g., the Izumo Taisha shrine in the Shimane Prefecture has been rebuilt twenty-five times. This process, or ritual, of rebuilding is also not unique to Shinto structures; Buddhist monasteries and temples have also been rebuilt. Some are gradual replacements as materials decay; others are entirely renewed, like the central Golden Hall of the Kofukuji temple in Nara (Lopes 2007, 80).

28These rebuilding practices reveal a profound understanding of architecture's ephemeral and transient nature. It reveals a sensibility and awareness that things are not solely defined by their tangible material qualities but also exist virtually in duration. These practices accept changes to the material and spatial specifications, meaning they are not just replicas of what was there before but have evolved creatively. Tradition is kept alive and relevant in these rituals, which, in turn, have permeated architectural practices in Japan. We can find traditional forms in modern works of architects, such as the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, or in the concept of "metabolist" architecture playing with parts and elements that could be replaced and changed according to cycles of growth and renewal (Lopes 2007, 80). The rebuilding and replacement of structures have a long tradition in Japanese practices, a tradition that is continuously alive.

29Lopes (2007) suggests that in order to overcome the paradox presented by the Ise Jingu, it should be considered a token event. To which the corresponding type, I assume, would be the type "Japanese architecture." This view is appealing; however, understanding things as events may still reduce time to space if such are considered as divisible or made-up of successive intervals. Furthermore, this view ties us to a strong commitment between ontology and culture. Culture and distinct forms of aesthetic appreciation undoubtedly inform ontology, but is ontology contingent on culture? If these rebuilding practices and traditions were only circumscribed to a particular culture, in this case, Japanese culture, it would be suggested that ontology is, in fact, contingent on it. However, they are not; we find equivalent practices in many other cultures worldwide, namely European architecture. Although the awareness and sensibility of these practices may not be as ingrained into European cultural habits, they are still present.

30For example, we can find this rebuilding in the pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. The pavilion existed for a short period between 1929 and 1930 and was known as the German Pavilion. It was subsequently demolished after the International Exposition in Barcelona and rebuilt in 1986, now named the Barcelona Pavilion. Between 1930 and 1986, it existed only in photographs, drawings, and memory. Despite the different names, it is considered the same pavilion.

31We can find other manifestations of these rebuilding practices in the reconstruction works of many buildings and monuments after the destruction caused during WWII, e.g., the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. These examples seem to suggest that the ontology of architecture is not circumscribed to specific regional and cultural types. Furthermore, Japanese art and architecture were likely among the most influential expressions to permeate European aesthetic sensibilities. We find Japanese architecture's material and spatial sensibilities in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We can find the perception of MA, the awareness of an indivisible state of time and space, at the Barcelona Pavilion in as much as it is found at the Ryoan-Ji stone garden.

32The question remains whether we are dealing with distinct ontologies, or a shared understanding of architecture. Bergson's contribution is that metaphysics is no longer confined as a closed system subordinate to scientific and mathematical logic alone; it becomes open and permeable to our sensibilities, expression, and experience of life.

33 As a provocation, I would like to conclude with a quote from the architect Arata Isozaki, which elicits a profound connection to Bergson's :

We may also discover a Darwinist influence at work here, and Bruno Taut's reference to the Parthenon stood clearly within such a paradigm. In the tradition persisting since classicism, positing the Parthenon as a convenient standard for measuring architectural progress had become commonplace. For instance, the lithic column with its entasis is said to preserve the trace of its having been made from a bundle of plants. This form then crystallized as a mass of stone, as an immutable emblem of progress as well as a means of achieving timelessness. (Isozaki 2011, 144).

34 At Ise, transubstantiation is omitted. Instead, the rebuilding-and-relocation scheme of twenty-year cycles embraces a biological model of regeneration. In order to preserve life, forms are generated and regenerated isomorphically. [...] In their shared will to embody permanence, Ise and the Parthenon are alike, but the paths to attainment are opposed. Stone structures weather over time. Wooden structures are less characteristically able to withstand alterity (changes in social systems and the style and taste of each age) yet better able to respond flexibly to the spirit of the age by way of naturally restorative and self-regulating impulse (Isozaki 2011, 144).

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Duration and the Ontology of Japanese Architecture

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La philosophie d'Henri Bergson et les traditions culturelles, esthétiques et architecturales japonaises partagent une affinité en ce qui concerne leur vision de la réalité en tant que changement continu et leur conscience des impulsions vitales de la vie dans toutes les choses.

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#FengShui #House

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Photograph by ChandlerPhoto

Feng shui is an ancient Chinese art of arranging buildings, objects, and space in an environment to achieve harmony and balance. Feng shui means "the way of wind and water." It has roots in early Taoism but is still popular today, having spread throughout China and even to Western cultures.

Feng shui stems from the Taoist belief in chi, or the life force that inhabits everything. Chi is made up of yin and yang elements. These are opposing but complementary forces that cannot be separated. Taoists believed that by balancing yin and yang elements, people can improve the flow of positive chi in their lives and keep the negative chi away. Feng shui is a method of balancing yin and yang, and improving the flow of chi by arranging furniture, decorations, buildings, and even whole cities in a beneficial way. The ancient Chinese people believed that arranging things to create positive chi would ensure good health, improve interpersonal relationships, and bring luck and prosperity.

Though little is known about the origins of feng shui, there is evidence that the Chinese have been designing their homes and towns using its principles for over four thousand years. Some early examples of feng shui can be found in the placement of ancient Chinese grave sites-areas where bringing positive chi was very important. In modern times, people all over the world use feng shui rules to decorate their homes. Many feng shui rules are about what items to place near or far away from doors and windows, because chi can enter and leave through those openings. The easiest way to change feng shui in a room is to add or move one of the five elements, which are water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. All materials can be classified as one of these five types. According to practitioners, mixing, combining, or subtracting these items can quickly improve the flow of positive chi.

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Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Society

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Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

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Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society

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André Gabrielli, National Geographic Society

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Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese art of arranging buildings, objects, and space in an environment to achieve harmony and balance in a way that will bring peace and prosperity.

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#Malafouris #Making

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#KarenBarad #Queer

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#KarenBarad #Queer #QueerPerformativity #Barad Natures Queer Performativity

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#Queer Critters #KarenBarad

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Anthropology courses often teach us to recognize the humanity in others. Introductory textbooks reveal the logic behind social practices of native peoples, inviting the reader to identify with foreign cultures. At the same time, the desire to preserve the sanctity of such common humanity motivates communities to demonize individuals who commit "acts against nature."

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Fear, Freedom and the #Queer World of #QuantumMechanics #KarenBarad

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Fear, Freedom and the Queer World of Quantum Mechanics

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The rise of the individual has been critical since Nietzsche and indeed still is, in enabling us to move beyond a traditional world governed by religion, belief, and authoritarianism. This has given us an unprecedented degree of freedom and capacity for authenticity, bringing with it essential human

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#Queer Book is Loanable in Minerva Library

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David J. Getsy is Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, and Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture.

Emily Roysdon is a New York and Stockholm-based artist and writer. Recent solo projects include new commissions from Secession, Vienna; Performance Room, Tate Modern, London; If I Can't Dance, Amsterdam; and The Kitchen, New York. Roysdon's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 2010 Whitney Biennial, New York; Greater New York at MoMA PS1; The Generational, New Museum, New York; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Power Plant, Toronto; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

In 2012 Roysdon was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize, exhibiting in Kiev and the Venice Biennale. Her work is in the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others. She completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006, and is a Professor of Art at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.

Prem Sahib was born in London in 1982. He lives and works in London.

Forthcoming and recent solo exhibitions include: Prem Sahib in collaboration with Celia Hempton, Southard Reid, London, UK (2016); Side On, ICA, London, END UP, Southard Reid, I am here but you've gone, curated by Milovan Farronato and Stella Bottai, (2015); performance and presentation of work made in Stromboli as part of Forget Amnesia curated by Milovan Farronato and Haroon Mirza, Fiorucci Trust, Italy, Tongues, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2014). Night Flies, Southard Reid, London, Back Chat, Lorcan O'Neill Gallery, Rome (2013) and Home From Home, Arts & Jobs, London, He Looked Me Up, Marian Cramer Projects, Amsterdam, and FEEL UP in collaboration with Eddie Peake, Southard Reid, London (2012).

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Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer - Whitechapel Gallery

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David J. Getsy is Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, and Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture.

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#TimIngold #Line

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#TimIngold #Lines

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#Heidegger #Building #Being #Dwelling

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Wie weet er nog te wonen? Een vreemde vraag in een land waarin slechts enkelen dakloos zijn [1]. Zo simpel is wonen echter niet, als we Martin Heidegger hierover aan het woord laten. In de beroemde voordracht 'Bouwen Wonen Denken' (1951) stelt hij dat de woorden 'bouwen', 'wonen' en 'zijn' samenhangen. Het Oudhoogduitse woord voor bouwen is 'buan', een woord dat tevens 'wonen' betekent en ook verwant is met 'ik ben'. Van deze drie betekenissen is 'wonen' volgens Heidegger het belangrijkste. Wonen is meer dan een dak boven je hoofd hebben. Wie werkelijk woont, staat open voor de fundamentele dimensies van het Zijn. Het werkelijke wonen legt en behoedt de relatie met 'de hemel en de aarde, de goddelijken en de sterfelijken'; 'das Geviert' in Heideggers terminologie. Het werkelijke wonen 'ontziet' en 'laat-in-zijn-wezen'.

Helaas missen we dat, stelt Heidegger in deze voordracht. De grootste woningnood is niet een tekort aan woningen, maar het feit dat de mens weer moet leren wonen. Behoedzaamheid en koestering hebben geen plaats meer in de huidige tijd; wat overheerst is een instrumentele houding ten opzichte van de wereld, gebaseerd op overwegingen van nut en efficiëntie. Met deze analyse trekt hij dan direct de conclusie dat de mens ook niet meer weet te bouwen. Slechts wie weet te wonen, weet te bouwen. Bouwen is, in de ogen van Heidegger, op een ongedifferentieerde plek op deze aarde de vier genoemde dimensies van het Zijn voelbaar maken.

Heidegger is een van de filosofen die door de Leuvense hoogleraar architectuurtheorie Hilde Heynen in haar boek Architectuur en kritiek van de moderniteit uitvoerig besproken wordt.

Naast onder andere Walter Benjamin en Adorno mag hij zijn licht laten schijnen over de ontwikkelingen in de maatschappij en de verhouding van de kunst, en in het bijzonder de architectuur, tot deze ontwikkelingen. Uitgangspunt van Hilde Heynen is dat we sinds de vorige eeuwwisseling in een grondig veranderde samenleving leven, een samenleving die gekenmerkt wordt door een proces van steeds sneller verlopende veranderingen, breuken met het verleden. 'Moderniteit' noemt ze dat in navolging van Marshall Berman, die dit proces in zijn All that is solid melts into air (1982) beschreven heeft. Traditie wordt gezien als een ballast die de vooruitgang in de weg staat. Daar breekt de moderniteit mee. Deze (repeterende) breuk wordt echter niet onverdeeld positief ervaren. Kenmerk van de moderniteit is daarom een 'dubbelmoment': euforie over de nieuwe kansen en grootse perspectieven van het nieuwe, maar ook melancholie en heimwee naar wat radicaal verloren is. Om het met Berman te zeggen: 'Modern zijn betekent dat we ons bevinden in een omgeving die ons avontuur, macht, vreugde, groei, transformatie van onszelf en van de wereld belooft - maar die tegelijkertijd alles wat we hebben dreigt te vernietigen, alles wat we kennen, alles wat we zijn.'

Het begin van dit tijdperk wordt, zowel door Berman als door Heynen, gelegd rond het einde van de 19e eeuw. Door de toenemende industrialisatie werden toen radicaal nieuwe mogelijkheden geschapen die grote invloed kregen op alle terreinen van het leven. Hoewel de meeste architecten vast bleven houden aan de traditionele esthetica, zijn enkele architecten en architectuurcritici geïmponeerd door de mogelijkheden die de nieuwe technieken en materialen bieden. Deze avant-garde in de architectuur, die het in het begin van de 20ste eeuw voor het zeggen kreeg. werkte welhaast kritiekloos aan de nieuwe perspectieven. 'Een groot tijdperk is aangebroken. Er heerst een nieuwe geest', schrijft de bekende Zwitsers-Franse architect Le Corbusier in 1923. Deze nieuwe geest komt regelrecht tot uitdrukking in de architectuur van zijn gebouwen. Ze breken radicaal met de traditionele architectuur. De zware muren die het huis verankerden aan de bodem, maken plaats voor kolommen. Het huis komt los van de ondergrond, van haar verbondenheid met de aarde. Het zadeldak, dat niet alleen praktisch is maar ook geborgenheid en bescherming uitdrukt, maakt plaats voor het platte dak met dakterrassen en vrij uitzicht op de hemel. Licht, lucht en ruimte is het idioom, de vertaling van de grootse perspectieven van deze eeuw in architectonische uitgangspunten.

Achteraf weten we meer van de utopie van de vooruitgang. De filosofen die in dit boek aan de orde komen, wijzen stuk voor stuk op verloren waarden en de ontheemding die daarmee gepaard gaat. Binnen de moderniteit is geen aandacht voor de waarde van het volle leven, het wonen à la Heidegger incluis, voor continuïteit, geborgenheid en verbondenheid. De actualiteit is vluchtig. Daarmee is het wonen een probleem geworden, de betekenis van wonen veranderd. Het wonen krijgt de vluchtige betekenis van het zich telkens eigen maken van nieuwe omgevingen. Uiteraard een betekenis die haaks staat op Heideggers notie van het wonen als het 'in-zijn-wezen-laten'.

Uit Heynens analyse blijkt dat architecten vaak weinig oog hadden voor de negatieve kanten van de moderniteit. Ze zijn vaak vooral gegrepen door de emancipatorische perspectieven van de nieuwe mogelijkheden. Het doel van Heynen is dan ook architecten een instrument geven waarmee ze een kritische distantie tussen ontwerp en cultuur kunnen bewerkstelligen om zo op een meer evenwichtige manier te kunnen reageren op nieuwe ontwikkelingen. Een waardevol streven! Het is niet om het even hoe architecten omgaan met de heersende cultuur en hoe ze dit in hun ontwerpen verwerken. Architectuur is 'slechts' een decor. Het is de dagelijkse leefomgeving van mensen en daarmee decor van de culturele ontwikkelingen. Maar tegelijkertijd is architectuur ook een culturele uiting van de samenleving. Juist vanuit deze laatste gedachte is architectuur meer dan stenen stapelen of op een esthetisch verantwoorde manier beantwoorden aan een functionele vraag. Architectuur drukt uit hoe wij als samenleving met de materie van het leven omgaan.

Het instrument dat Heynen ontwerpers aanreikt is het begrip 'mimesis', dat ze ontleent aan Adorno. Mimesis gaat uit van kleine verdraaiingen, veranderingen en verschuivingen ten opzichte van het bestaande, om zodoende het 'normale' in te kaderen, er nieuw licht op te werpen. Hierdoor zou binnen alle snelle veranderingen van de moderniteit oog blijven voor de waarde van continuïteit en herkenbaarheid. Helaas weet Heynen in haar conclusie niet duidelijk te maken hoe dit begrip voor woningbouw zou kunnen gaan functioneren. Terwijl juist binnen de woningbouw het dubbele karakter van de moderniteit het helderst tot uiting komt. Het blijft voor architecten, die alle mooie ideeën uiteindelijk toch graag in ontwerpen geconcretiseerd willen zien, uiteindelijk toch te abstract.

Misschien kan de houding van de Weense architect Loos, tijdgenoot van de eerder genoemde Le Corbusier, hiervoor een aanknopingspunt zijn. Uit Heynens bespreking blijkt dat Loos, als een van de weinige architecten, wel oog had voor de negatieve kanten van de moderniteit, maar er toch niet op een nostalgische manier op reageerde. Hij probeert de traditionele waarden van het wonen ruimte te geven binnen het moderne paradigma. De moderne metropool, met haar eisen van doelmatigheid en snelheid, kan niet samengaan met de intimiteit van het wonen, zo stelde hij. In zijn architectuur wordt dan ook veel aandacht gegeven aan de overgang tussen het private en het publieke. Hij brengt een grote scheiding aan tussen het interieur en het exterieur. Het exterieur is bij Loos altijd heel sober. Zonder enige 'uitdrukking' van de persoonlijkheid van de bewoner. Het is gericht op het ritme van de moderne metropool. Met deze exterieurs is hij heel beroemd geworden. Het interieur daarentegen bewerkte hij rijkelijk. In ruimte, materiaal en bekleding. Het moest ruimte bieden voor het persoonlijke, intieme leven van haar bewoners. Het interieur is het domein van het samenzijn met dierbaren, het toneel waarop het echte leven zich afspeelt. Hier wisselen de hoogtepunten van het leven zich af, hier begint en eindigt leven, hier heerst vreugde en verdriet. Dat moet binnenshuis blijven, dat mag niet aan de stad geëxposeerd worden.

Architecten kunnen de samenleving niet veranderen, maar zijn wel bepalend voor de leefomgeving van de bewoners van die samenleving. Daarbij zijn begrippen als continuïteit, behoedzaamheid en intimiteit van belang. Woorden die binnen het huidige architectuurklimaat wegens hun conservatieve karakter te weinig overdacht worden. Nog steeds zien wij architecten heel hard achter de nieuwste ontwikkelingen in de techniek aan hollen en deze zonder kritiek omarmen. Ze zijn volledig geïmponeerd door de nieuwe vormen die er met de (computer)techniek gemaakt kunnen worden. Daaraan wordt alles ondergeschikt. Vormen die het beleveniskarakter van onze maatschappij naadloos uitdrukken. Het is een architectuur van het moment. De techniek is natuurlijk niet fout, evenmin als de nieuwe vormen die met deze techniek gemaakt kunnen worden. Zolang echter het nieuwe geen rekenschap geeft van de erfenis van het verleden, de ervaringen uit het verleden, levert dit hijgend de toekomst achternalopen uiteindelijk onleefbare en levenloze architectuur op. Architectuur is niet alleen vorm, niet alleen een toekomstvisioen dat gebouwd moet worden. Architectuur draagt de kiem van de toekomst met zich mee - dat mag best gezien worden, maar zal uiteindelijk ook voor dit moment onderdak moeten bieden aan haar gebruikers. Daarom is de kritische distantie waar Heynen voor pleit belangrijk. En daarom verdient Loos' dubbele houding navolging. Zonder wonen geen leven.

Uitgeverij SUN, Nijmegen 2001, 319 blz., € 29,90

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Architectuur en kritiek van de moderniteit

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Wie weet er nog te wonen? Een vreemde vraag in een land waarin slechts enkelen dakloos zijn [1]. Zo simpel is wonen echter niet, als we Martin Heidegger hierover aan het woord laten. In de beroemde vo...

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#MichaelPollan #Building #Being

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#BuildingARoomOfMyOwn #Michael Pollan

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I NEEDED A PLACE TO WORK. THAT AT least is the explanation I prepared for anybody who asked about the little building going up, very slowly, in the woods behind my house. I was building a "home office," an enterprise so respectable that the Government gives you a tax deduction for it. The fact that it would also be a room of one's own, a temple of solitude off the beaten track of everyday life, was a part of the plan I kept to myself.

Since I am someone who lives in his head much of the time-who makes his living as a writer-this probably sounds reasonable enough, if perhaps a little dreamy. What made considerably less sense, however, was that I wanted to build this place myself, with my own two unhandy hands. This part of the dream would entail a journey for which I was singularly unprepared, a journey into a realm where I had never attempted anything more ambitious than the weatherstripping of a window. It was a journey that certain comfortable abstractions would not survive, including one called lumber. That particular euphemism fell one snowy morning in January, the day a flatbed truck from the lumberyard backed four massive timbers of fir-prone trunks more than 20 feet long-into my driveway: so these were the trees I was proposing to turn into the frame of my little house.

Since each timber weighed more than a quarter of a ton, the lumberyard had sent two men to help unload. A friend also happened to be on hand, and after taking a few minutes to small talk and gather ourselves for the task, the four of us slid one of the timbers off the flatbed and, with a collective groan, hoisted it up onto our shoulders. Moving at an almost ceremonial pace, we walked the great trunk up the long, snow-crusted incline to the barn where we planned to work on the frame till spring, when we would raise it on its site out in the woods. "We" consisted of myself and a friend named Joe Benney, who, at 27, is one of those geniuses of the how-to you still sometimes meet in the country, a man equally at home in the realms of stone, steel, internal combustion, gardens, guns and plumbing as well as wood. Working on a hourly basis, Joe had agreed to be my Virgil.

Although these logs had been squared up and dressed at the mill, it was impossible not to be conscious of them as trees-and not to feel slightly abashed at what had been done to them on my account. Simply by picking up the phone and placing an order for four 20-foot pieces of 6-by-10 Doug fir, appearance grade, I'd set in motion a chain of events that was as momentous as it was routine. To fill my order, at least two mature fir trees, green spires as old as the century, had been felled in a forest somewhere in Oregon and then trucked, or floated, to a mill in a town called McMinnville. (This much I knew from the yellow cardboard tag stapled to the end grain.) There they'd been skinned of their bark and, after several passes through a saw and then a planer, transformed into the slabs of salmon-colored lumber sprawled on the floor of my barn, looking more than a little forlorn.

It's hard not to feel sentimental about such majestic pieces of wood, especially today, when we recognize the preciousness of old trees more than we once did. Each of the timbers in my barn, destined to serve as the corner posts of my building, cost $150, a figure that manages to seem both exorbitant and-considering what they are, or were-paltry at the same time. Since the corner posts would be a conspicuous element of the interior as well as the exterior of the building, Charles Myer, an architect and old friend who'd designed the structure for me, had specified the highest-grade clear-that is, knot-free-fir, wood that is typically found only in the unbranched lower trunks of the oldest trees. It is the fate of precisely such Douglas firs, and the creatures whose habitat depends on them, that loggers and environmentalists have been fighting over in the Pacific Northwest, a fight that has already closed down hundreds of sawmills like the one in McMinnville, and turned fir into one of the most precious of woods.

The reason Charlie had specified such large timbers was that he'd conceived of the building as a kind of primitive hut carved out of the woods. The archetypal hut consists of four substantial corner posts (whole trees in some accounts) surmounted by a gable made of timbers only slightly less substantial. A primitive hut's construction should recall the forest from which it springs, and that's more easily done with 6-by-10 timbers than with slender sticks of what carpenters call two-by.

The primitive hut is a myth, really, a story about the origins of architecture in the state of nature. As the story goes, architecture was given to man by the forest, which taught him how to form a shelter out of a quartet of trees crowned by pairs of branches inclining toward one another like rafters. Like many myths, this one is fanciful but also in some deep sense true, for architecture as we know it is unimaginable without the tree. Speaking of the very first structures built by man, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that "trees must have awakened his sense of form." It is the tree that gave us the notion of a column and, in the West at least, everything else rests upon that.

If the idea of a hut dictated the big, treelike timbers, the timbers in turn dictated the building's system of construction. It would be a variation on the traditional post and beam, in which the frame of a building is made up of large and generously spaced vertical posts joined to horizontal beams. Traditionally, the joints were of the type known as mortise and tenon: the ends of each beam are chiseled into a protruding shape called a tenon that is inserted into a matching notch, or mortise, carved into the post. Until the 1830's, when builders in Chicago invented the modern balloon frame, in which relatively light pieces of lumber are joined with nails, virtually all buildings built out of wood had post-and-beam frames held together with mortises and tenons.

Traditional post-and-beam joinery requires a specialized set of skills not many carpenters possess anymore, so Charlie had proposed an idiot-proof alternative involving a store-bought piece of steel and a handful of nails. But Joe would have none of it. He insisted that we mortise our posts, despite the fact that no one would ever see the joints in question. "Doesn't matter," Joe said when I, feeling powerfully attracted to the idiot-proof, tried to point this out. "We'll know."

ON THE FIRST DAY OF WOODWORK, JOE SHOWED UP WITH AN incongruous pair of tools: a set of fine chisels with ash handles and a beat-up chain saw. The chain saw was to cut our posts roughly to length; this would constitute the first cut made in our fir, and as I was afraid he might, Joe insisted I make it.

I am petrified by chain saws, a phobia I don't regard as irrational or neurotic in the least, but there was simply no way to decline the Homelite Joe held out to me without suffering a loss of face. Even though Joe and I shared no illusions I had any clue what I was doing as a carpenter, it would have been a mistake to compound my ignorance with a lack of pluck right at the beginning. So, straining for nonchalance, I took the chain saw, gave its starting cord a yank, and held on as the machine leapt menacingly to life.

But cutting the fir timbers proved unexpectedly easy, perhaps because there were no imperfections in the wood, no knots or bark to frustrate the blade and provoke its willfulness. The snout of the saw moved like a cleaver through the soft, cheddary wood, its gasoline howl-deafening indoors-the sole evidence of effort or resistance. For the first time, I noticed the sweet, elusive aroma of fresh-cut Doug fir, an oddly familiar perfume that nevertheless took me the longest time to place. But then there it was: roasted peanuts and hot spun sugar, the summery scents of the fairground.

Trading a chain saw for a chisel, which I needed to cut the mortise in my post, is to trade one way of knowing a piece of wood for another. The chain saw acquaints you with certain general properties-a wood's hardness, its aroma-but the chisel discloses information of a fineness any machine would overwhelm. Something as subtle as the relative density of its springwood and summerwood-the two distinct rings a fir tree lays down each year-the beveled tip of the chisel's steel blade will scrupulously transmit to its ash handle and then through that to your hand. Tap by tap, the blade of the chisel gradually ate into the body of the tree, and the material it encountered there felt less like wood than dense flesh-almost like a slab of tuna. As long as it remained sharp, the blade sliced easily through the wood's layered grain, raising a plume of curled shavings I half-expected to be moist to the touch.

After some practice the tool began to feel light and alive in my hand, almost as though it knew what it was supposed to do. Which in some sense it did. Like any good hand tool, but especially one that has been fine-tuned over centuries, a well-made chisel contains in its design a wealth of experience on which the hand of a receptive user can draw. Working properly with such a tool awakens that experience, that particular knowledge of wood; at the same time it helps to preserve it. When the chiseling was going especially well, it reminded me of what it is like to work with an exceptionally well-trained animal; if I paid close enough attention to what it wanted to do, even let it steer me a bit, the chisel had things to teach me.

After Thoreau cut down the pine trees for the frame of his hut at Walden, he hewed and mortised the logs himself, a process-an intimacy, to judge by his account of it-that he felt had somehow righted his relationship to the fallen trees. "Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree," he wrote, even though "I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it." I used to think this was a too convenient rationalization for Thoreau's having done something that ordinarily he would have deplored. This is, after all, the same Thoreau who once composed an elegy for a pine tree felled by a lumberman ("Why does not the village bell sound a knell"). Suddenly we're supposed to believe that the care he has taken hewing these pines, the purpose to which he has put them and the knowledge they have yielded are enough to compensate for the sacrifice.

Now that idea no longer seemed self-serving or crazy. It was the work that purchased this intimate knowledge, and its price, fair or not, is indeed the death of a tree. Though it's probably wrong to think that only the handworker, with his traditional tools, gains such a close acquaintance with trees. The lumberjack working with his screaming chain saw knows trees, too, he just knows different things. Both, however, can fairly claim to know the tree better than any of its more distant admirers.

MORTISING BY HAND TOOK FOREVER, BUT ANY TIME I GRUMBLED about the cumbersomeness of traditional joinery compared with nailing together a frame of 2 by 4's, Joe would spring to the defense of the post and beam. Timber frames are structurally superior to modern balloon frames, he contended, and they make a thriftier use of a tree; the extra passes through a saw needed to turn a log into 2 by 4's wasted far more wood (in the form of sawdust), not to mention energy.

As soon as we had raised our posts outside on their footings and fitted the floor beams into the notches we'd chiseled, I could see there was a certain poetic economy in post-and-beam framing, in the way it seemed to carry the treeness of lumber forward into a building. The vertical posts performed like trunks, exploiting the strength of wood fibers in compression, and the horizontal beams acted very much like limbs, drawing on their strength in tension. Also, the mortises and tenons locked together in a satisfying knotlike way; instead of the superficial attachment made by a nail, the beam nested into the body of the post almost as if it were a bough.

But soundness and sentiment aside, it seemed to me that, as much as anything else, it was the very difficulty and mystique of traditional framing that commended it to a carpenter like Joe. Since not everyone could do it, those who could were entitled to a special status. It's no accident that, until the invention of the balloon frame, the housewright, or joiner, ruled the building process from design to completion, wielding the sort of cultural authority and prestige that architects do today.

The shift from post-and-beam to balloon framing (named for the dubious-seeming lightness of the new structure) marks an important historical shift, and not merely in building technique. For between the two types of frame stands a gulf of sensibility as well as technology. This is something my own building helped me to at least begin to appreciate, since its frame was actually a hybrid that drew on both traditions. After Joe and I had raised the main posts and beams, we traded our chisels for hammers and nails. The building's floor and sections of its walls were all to be framed out of conventional 2 by 4's and 2 by 6's, in the way most wooden structures have been put together since about 1850 or so.

Now that we were swinging hammers rather than tapping chisels, I felt as if I was back on at least semi-familiar ground. But on the first morning of floor framing, I noticed Joe watching me closely as I pounded nails, clearly weighing whether or not to interrupt.

"Can I show you a better way to do that?"

"What-to hammer a nail?" I was incredulous, and then, after he explained what I was doing wrong, crestfallen: it turned out I didn't even know the proper way to swing a hammer. It seems I was holding the side of the hammer with my thumb, a grip that forced my wrist to deliver most of the force needed to drive the nail. Joe reached over and moved my thumb down around the shank of the hammer. Now as I brought the hammer down I felt a slight loss of control but a substantial gain in power, for suddenly the tool had become an extension of my whole arm and not just my hand. Joe never said it, but I'd been holding my hammer as if it were a tennis racquet poised for a backhand, a realization that heated my cheeks with embarrassment. Once I corrected my grip, I found I could drive a big 10-penny nail through a piece of two-by with half as many blows as before, and the business of framing moved smartly along.

It wasn't hard to see why balloon framing had caught on. Where it had taken the two of us to raise and manhandle our posts and beams into position, I was able to frame most of the floor by myself in less time than it had taken me to mortise a notch. It is only after struggling with 6-by-10 posts that you can understand how carpenters could ever have thought of 2-by-4 studs as sticks-by comparison, these were as easy to handle as toothpicks.

Though this wood, too, was Douglas fir, I was only dimly aware of this fact, and would not have noticed had the yard slipped in a few pieces of pine or spruce. Balloon framing doesn't acquaint you with the particularities of wood in the way post-and-beam framing does, and it's easy to forget that these are trees you're working with. In this sense 2-by-4 framing is a more abstract kind of work than timber framing, with an industrial rhythm that places a far greater premium on the repetitive task and the interchangeable part. Which is why an amateur like me could frame a wall in an afternoon.

What I was discovering in the course of framing my little building, an entire culture had discovered in the middle of the last century. Contemporary accounts of the new technology brim with a kind of giddiness at the rapid feats of construction it had suddenly made possible-houses put up in days, whole towns rising in weeks. Since a couple of men could assemble one of the new frames without the kind of group effort or specialized skills needed to raise a timber frame, a pioneer family could now build a house just about anywhere they wanted to, even out on the treeless prairie, and in just about any style. By comparison, the technology of timber framing-communal, hierarchical and conservative by its very nature-had been supremely well adapted to the kind of close-knit religious communities that had settled the forested East. Looked at from this perspective, the new way of cutting and joining trees added a powerful centrifugal force-and a force for individualism-to the settlement of the West.

THE CULMINATION OF TIMBER FRAMING arrives with the raising of the ridgepole, a moment of high drama that Joe approached as one of his biggest scenes. For weeks now, I'd been asking him how we were going to do it-should I be lining up some sort of crane for the day?-and for weeks Joe had been telling me not to worry, that he'd figure out something when the time came. But it was definitely on his mind. During breaks, I'd follow his gaze as it slowly traveled up from the top of the walls to the overhanging trees, only to suddenly plunge again; I guessed he was testing out scenarios (a block and tackle maybe?), running calculations on what it would take to lift a 4-by-10 ridge beam 16 feet overhead.

On the appointed Saturday we began indoors, framing the two end gables-the triangles that hold up the roof at either end of the building. At the apex of each triangle, we left a 4-by-10-inch gap between the two rafters: this was the slot in which the ridgepole would ultimately sit, once we had managed to raise the gables into position. It seemed as though we might still want the crane (the gable assemblies themselves weighed a couple hundred pounds apiece, the ridge beam even more), but Joe said all we would need was one more pair of hands to raise the ridgepole, no particular skill required. So I arranged for an exceptionally tall friend named Don to come by later that afternoon.

After we carried the first gable out to the site, Joe carefully arranged a pair of ladders and set a 2-by-10 plank across the top of the walls. "O.K. Mike, here's the plan," Joe said. "First we turn the gable upside down and inside out. Then, together, we lift the thing just high enough so that this rafter tail here hits that spot there on the plate. You're going to have to balance everything right on that point long enough for me to climb up onto the top of the wall. Then we pivot the whole assembly this way until the other rafter tail hits that point over there, and slide the 2 by 10 under the peak to hold it up. Follow me? Then you get up on the other ladder, and together we flip the thing around, shimmy it forward, and then get under and lift it to vertical."

No, it made no sense to me either, none whatsoever. I told Joe that following his plan was like trying to learn origami over the radio. He wasn't smiling, and I realized then that what we were about to do was not without danger. I said to Joe that maybe it would be better if he just told me what to do one step at a time.

So I followed his instructions, moving first this way and then that, hoisting, holding, pivoting, and then climbing on cue, an obedient pyramid ant, not even aspiring to grasp the big picture, and trusting utterly in my carpenter-turned-choreographer. And then, astoundingly, there we were, each of us holding one side of a 300-pound assembly that we'd managed somehow to raise high into the trees without a crane. I wanted to cheer, except that I was still holding my breath as I waited for Joe to brace the gable. So instead I thought about this newspaper article I'd read that claimed men are especially adept at mentally rotating an object in space, a skill I'd never had much reason to appreciate before. Women supposedly have the edge in verbal agility, which seemed much the better deal. Not today. And here it was, right in front of me, a full-dress display of the male genius.

After raising the second gable, we were ready to set the ridgepole. Don, the six-and-a-half-foot friend I'd recruited for the event, arrived as Joe and I were preparing to mark and cut the gorgeous length of knot-free fir we'd selected for the building's spine. This timber, too, had come from Oregon, according to the stencil on its flank. My tentativeness handling such a piece of wood had vanished; I felt well acquainted with fir, if not quite friend, not foe either. I took up the circular saw, found my mark and worked the blade through the familiar wood flesh, breathing in its sweet midway scent.

"This is what you call a ridgepole?" Don was slightly horrified at just how big the beam was: "I was picturing something a bit more bamboolike."

"We call it a ridgepole to make it feel lighter," Joe said. "But it's really a big tree with the bark taken off and a few corners added."

As Don and I shouldered the ridgepole from the barn out to the site, Joe trotted out ahead, climbing up into the frame to receive it. Now Don, his face reddening with the strain, pressed his end up over his head barbell-style while Joe guided it to a spot on the wall plate; I then did the same with mine. Don and I joined Joe up in the frame, as he directed a new choreography that had the two of us manning opposite gables while he flew back and forth across the structure, helping us each in turn to hoist and then align our beam ends over their intended slots. Don's end went down first, sinking comfortably into its wooden pocket; I watched his tensed expression suddenly bloom into relief. My end needed some manhandling to force the beam down into its slot, where it didn't seem to want to go.

"Time for some physical violence," Joe advised, as he handed his big framing hammer up to me. Now I pounded mightily on the top of the ridge beam-holding the hammer correctly, I might add-and inch by inch it creaked its way down into its slot, the tight-binding wood screeching furiously under the blows, until at last the beam came to rest on its king post, snug and immovable. That was it: the ridgepole set, our frame was topped out.

I asked Joe to hand me his big carpenter's level; along with the tool he gave me a look that said, You're really asking for it, aren't you? There was exactly nothing we could do, after all, if we discovered that our ridge beam was not true. I laid the level along the spine of the building. From where he stood Joe had the better view into the tool's little window, and I read the excellent news in his face. "It doesn't get any better," Joe said, reaching out his palm for a slap. None of us wanted to come down from the frame, so we stood up there in the trees for a long time, beaming dumbly at one another, weary and relieved.

IN COLONIAL TIMES THE topping out of a frame was followed by a ceremony, half-solemn and half-raucous, that invariably included the nailing of an evergreen bough to the topmost beam. Most of the ceremony has been lost to time, but the tree-hanging survives. Even today on a balloon-framed split level in the suburbs you'll often see a conifer tacked to the ridge board before the vinyl siding goes on. I've seen steelworkers raising whole spruce trees to the top of a skyscraper frame high above midtown. Perhaps it's nothing more than superstition, men in a dangerous line of work playing it safe. Or maybe there's some residual power left in the old pagan ritual.

I've read many explanations for the evergreen hanging, all of them spiritual in one degree or another. The conifer is thought to imbue the frame with the tree spirit, or it's meant to sanctify the new house, or appease the gods for the taking of the trees. These interpretations seem reasonable enough, yet they don't account for the fact that someone as unsuperstitious and spiritually retarded as I am felt compelled to go out into the woods in search of a evergreen after we'd raised the ridgepole. Joe probably would have done it if I hadn't, but it was my building, and there was something viscerally appealing about the whole idea, the way it promised to lend a certain symmetry to the framing process, tree to timber to tree. But now that I've actually performed the ritual, I'm inclined to think there's more to it than that. Like many rituals involving a sacrifice, there's an emotional wrench right in the middle of this one. The hanging of the conifer manages all at once to celebrate a joyful accomplishment-the transformation of trees into a dwelling-and force a recognition that there is something vaguely shameful in the very same deed.

Sacrifice seems to be an inescapable part of our condition-we kill to eat, we chop down trees to make our houses, we exploit other people and the earth for our gain. One of the things a ritual does is help us to frame, acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in the paradoxes of being human, reminding us at once of the power and the shame undergirding our achievements. Without such a double awareness, we're apt to find ourselves either plundering nature without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us bring either one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature nowadays. For who can hold in his head at the same time a feeling of shame at the cutting down of a great oak and a sense of pride at the achievement of a good building? It doesn't seem possible.

And yet right there may lie the deeper purpose of the topping out ceremony: to cultivate that impossible dual vision, to help foster what amounts to a tragic sense of our place in nature. This is something I suspect the people who used to christen frames understood better than we do. To cut down a tree, to build a house, their rituals imply, is in some way to alienate ourselves from the natural order, for good and bad. The topping-out ritual, with its peculiar mix of solemnity and celebration, must have offered the early builders a way to square the shame and the nobility of this great, dangerous accomplishment.

I'm more than a little embarrassed to utter any such words in connection with my own endeavor, so distant from my world do they sound. But along with the remnants of the old rituals, might there also be at least some residue of the old emotions? I remember on that January morning when I took delivery of my fir timbers, how the sight of those fallen trees on the floor of my barn had unnerved me-"abashed" was the word I'd used. In the battle between the loggers and the northern spotted owl, I'd always counted myself on the side of the owls. But now that I wanted to build, here I was, prepared to sacrifice not only a couple of venerable fir trees in Oregon but a political conviction as well.

So maybe it was shame as much as exultation that brought me down off the frame that early summer evening, sent me out into the woods in quest of an evergreen to kill. Joe had forgotten which you were supposed to use, pine or hemlock or spruce. I decided any conifer would do. It was spruce I came upon first, and after I cut down the little tree and turned to start back to the site, holding the doomed sapling before me like a flag, I saw something I really hadn't seen before: the shape of my building in the landscape. The simple, classical arrangement of posts and beams, their unweathered grain glowing gold in the last of the day's light, stood in sharp relief against the general leafiness, like some sort of geometrical proof chalked on a blackboard of forest. I stopped for a moment to admire it, and filled with pride. The proof, of course, was of us: of the powers-of mind, of body, of civilization-that could achieve such a transubstantiation of trees. Look at this thing we've made! And yet nothing happens without the gift of the firs, those green spires sinking slowly to earth in an Oregon forest, and it was this that the spruce recalled me to. Joe had left a ladder leaning against the front gable. I climbed back up into the canopy of leaves, the sapling tucked under my arm, and when I got to the top, I drove a nail through its slender trunk and fixed it to the ridge beam, thinking: trees!

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Building a Room of My Own - Michael Pollan

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I NEEDED A PLACE TO WORK. THAT AT least is the explanation I prepared for anybody who asked about the little building going up, very slowly, in the woods behind my house. I was building a "home office," an enterprise so respectable that the Government gives you a tax deduction for it.

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#APlaceOfMyOwn

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder was Michael Pollan's second book, after Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991). In 2008 it was re-released and re-titled as A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.

The book begins by outlining how Pollan reached the decision to build a "writer's house" himself. The second chapter covers the site selection process. The next chapter follows the design process, including references to Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. The following four chapters deal with the construction process. The final chapter covers the finishing work and moving in.

The book is not a how-to book for first-time builders. It is a general overview of the building process, the experiences involved, and the motivations of the author.

Official

Reviews

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder was Michael Pollan's second book, after Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991). In 2008 it was re-released and re-titled as A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams .

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#ArchitectureOfHappiness #AlainDeBotton

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De populaire filosoof Alain de Botton lijkt in zijn nieuwe boek geregeld op instorten te staan, en voor een publicatie over architectuur is dat een interessant gegeven. De Botton toont zich een fanatiek melancholicus die zich, zoals de dichter Rilke naar wie hij verwijst, moeilijk kan neerleggen bij de vergankelijkheid van de schoonheid van architectuur, of bij de relatieve invloed die de gebouwde omgeving heeft op het menselijk leven. Zoals hij voordien verschillende westerse filosofen, of auteurs als Marcel Proust, heeft beschreven in de hoop uit die lectuur 'iets te kunnen leren', er 'beter' of zelfs 'gelukkiger' door te worden, zo gaat De Botton dit keer op een niet zelden wanhopige manier op zoek naar de hoogst individuele 'voordelen' van architectuur. "Zij die van architectonische schoonheid hun levenswerk hebben gemaakt", schrijft hij, "weten maar al te goed hoe vruchteloos hun inspanningen kunnen blijken. Fraaie architectuur heeft geen van de onmiskenbare voordelen van een vaccin of een kom rijst."

Dat neemt niet weg dat De Botton het toch probeert. Hij moet er wel zijn verwachtingen voor bijstellen - architectuur maakt niet gelukkig, want "we krijgen bij de aanblik van schoonheid een brok in de keel door het impliciete inzicht dat het geluk waarop die schoonheid zinspeelt de uitzondering is". 'De architectuur tegen het ongeluk' was dan ook een betere titel geweest: vanuit een sterk romantisch-idealistisch discours browst De Botton door de architectuurgeschiedenis, op zoek naar realisaties die een afspiegeling vormen van een perfect, harmonisch, 'mooi' en gecontroleerd leven, dat helaas altijd net buiten het bereik van de beschouwer blijft. Als een einzelgänger stelt hij zichzelf buiten de geschiedenis (Palladio staat naast Nollet & Huyghe, Albert Speer naast het Dogenpaleis van Urbino) in de hoop om op een pragmatische manier de altijd op de loer liggende depressie de baas te blijven.

Het boek probeert toegankelijk te zijn - De Bottons boeken zijn stuk voor stuk bestsellers - op een persoonlijke, impressionistische en gedetailleerde manier: elk hoofdstuk wordt ingeleid door een dagboekfragment dat getuigenis aflegt van een - vaak treurige - ontmoeting met architectuur. Voor een ingewijde komt zo'n essentialistische of utopische benadering al snel vervelend, want achterhaald over: wie enigszins vertrouwd is met de 20ste-eeuwse architectuurtheorie, verwacht van architectuur niet langer een 'afspiegeling van een ideale wereld', of baseert zich toch op een leesmethode die er niet van uitgaat dat een harmonieus gebouw de belofte van een harmonieus leven in zich draagt. Veel van de laat 20ste-eeuwse architectuur probeert dergelijke pretenties net te ontmaskeren, door op een literaire manier illusieloosheid aan affirmatie te koppelen - het is dan ook niet verwonderlijk dat een architect als Koolhaas geen enkele vermelding krijgt in De architectuur van het geluk. Dat neemt niet weg dat het boek van De Botton ook getoetst moet worden op zijn 'populaire' dimensies. Het wil bovenal een introductie zijn op de mogelijkheden van architectuur. Dat is geen overbodige taak: architectuur blijft toch het 'kneusje' onder de kunsten, een soort republiek met gesloten grenzen, die zelfs voor veel 'ontwikkelde' lezers een onbekend, onbegrepen en onbemind terrein blijft. Het spreekt voor De Botton dat hij niet vervalt in een 'lifestylediscours' dat uiting geeft aan de zuiver vormelijke, materiële, beeldende of 'ruimtelijke' eigenschappen van architectuur - iets waaraan het merendeel van de 'vulgariserende' architectuurpublicaties zich wel bezondigt. De Botton gaat uitdrukkelijk op zoek naar de (filosofische) betekenissen van architectuur; maar helaas zijn de redeneringen die hij daarbij ontvouwt vaak even labiel als de emoties die architectuur in dit boek teweegbrengt.

Bewustzijn is zelden een welgekome gast, en voor bewustzijn over de gebouwde omgeving geldt dat nog meer dan elders. De omwegen die De Botton inlast om deze semantische bestaansgrond van architectuur zowel duidelijk als draaglijk te maken, zijn echter vaak zo laag-bij-de-gronds dat ook de leek waarschijnlijk de wenkbrauwen fronst. Het theoretisch dieptepunt van het boek zijn de passages waarin De Botton een beroep doet op de fysiognomie, de pseudo-wetenschap die in de 18de eeuw in zwang was en die ervan uitging dat menselijke eigenschappen zijn af te lezen uit gelaatstrekken. Wie een puntige neus heeft, die is "geslepen maar vulgair"; wie dikke lippen heeft is "dom en zeer seksueel". Van hieruit is het een kleine sprong naar gebruiksvoorwerpen, want "de voorwerpen die we als mooi omschrijven weerspiegelen de mensen van wie we houden". "Met wie zouden we bevriend willen zijn?" staat er geschreven onder een drietal afbeeldingen van badkranen, want "ook als voorwerpen helemaal niets weg hebben van een mens, kunnen we ons vaak gemakkelijk voorstellen welk soort menselijk karakter erbij past". Dergelijke onzin bewijst nogmaals hoe het kind door De Botton uiteindelijk met het badwater wordt weggespoeld: wie het 'nut' van (de betekenis van) architectuur voor de 21ste-eeuwse, 'verdwaalde' of ronduit 'ongelukkige' mens wil aantonen, kan niet zomaar elk historisch of cultureel besef achterwege laten ten voordele van een antropomorf of pseudo-psychologisch en pragmatisch discours. Het is uiteindelijk binnen het opzet van De Botton een gemiste kans. De - ondanks alles - 'ondersteunende' eigenschappen van architectuur komen nu net voort uit de kansen die we krijgen om via gebouwen aansluiting te vinden bij overkoepelende betekenisvelden geworteld in de geschiedenis, de maatschappij en de cultuur. Dat een gebouw 'ons' daarentegen toelacht als een "mooi bruinharig meisje dat verdwijnt in de menigte", is eerder een reden om er voor op de vlucht te slaan.

In een aantal passages slaagt De Botton erin dit theoretische gemodder te overstijgen. Het laatste hoofdstuk ( De belofte van een veld) vormt bijvoorbeeld een 'mooi' pleidooi voor meer verantwoordelijkheidsbesef bij het verkavelen van wat voorheen natuurgebied was - zij het opnieuw op een zeer esthetische of zelfs pathetische manier. Zo hengelt De architectuur van het geluk toch weer naar het 'vals geluk' dat architectuur kan bieden, als een 'technisch reproduceerbaar kunstwerk' dat op een onbewuste manier wordt 'geconsumeerd'. Openingen naar een kritische en waarachtige architectuurlectuur - en naar een 'wreed geluk' - biedt het werk van De Botton zelden.

Alain De Botton, De architectuur van het geluk verscheen in 2006 bij Uitgeverij Atlas, Herengracht 481, 1017 BT Amsterdam (020/524.98.00; www.boekenwereld.com). ISBN 90 450 1276 6. Het Engelstalige origineel verschijnt later dit jaar.

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De populaire filosoof Alain de Botton lijkt in zijn nieuwe boek geregeld op instorten te staan, en voor een publicatie over architectuur is dat een interessant gegeven. De Botton toont zich een fanatiek melancholicus die zich, zoals de dichter Rilke naar wie hij verwijst, moeilijk kan neerleggen bij de vergankelijkheid van de schoonheid van architectuur, of bij de relatieve invloed die de gebouwde omgeving heeft op het menselijk leven.

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#TheNeedForRoots#Simone Weil

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A Good Mind and the Good
The Need For Roots.
by Simone Weil.Translated from the French by Arthur Wills.
Putnam. 302 pp. $4.00.

I First read The Need for Roots in Paris when Gallimard issued it in 1949, and at once told my Parisian friends that I thought it the deepest work to come out of France during the whole war period. They were as surprised by my enthusiasm as I was perplexed by their coldness; in Paris, you expect your friends to agree with you, and when they do not you know something real is at stake. Now most of the persons to whom I spoke about Simone Weil had known her, having contributed during the 30's, along with her, to La Condition Ouvrière, a left-wing review edited by Georges Bataille and Boris Souvarine. These people would not praise her or hear her praised. They did not want to admire her; moreover, they were convinced they did not have to. I do not think they were much influenced by the fact that the Catholics were then bruiting her name. (The same persons admired Claudel. It would be so much nicer to despise him, but seeing that one couldn't, wasn't he admirable?) But nothing could make them accept as inevitable the mounting interest in Simone Weil. One, a historian, did not scruple to attack his own views when they happened to coincide with hers. "Where considerable goodness is present," he told me, "I can never believe there is much intellect."

Simone Weil was committed to the very opposite view. She did not expect to find much intellect where good was not abounding. What is more, she did not find it even where the whole world does. She did not find great beauty in Racine's plays, which, except Phèdre, were not written in "a state of holiness"; and she did not find great thought in Descartes, to whom she denied the title of philosopher: it seems that he showed a petty, property-minded interest in his own ideas, and sometimes left out steps in his demonstrations just to keep other savants from guessing what he was about. Now these judgments are self-defeating. We ask at once: what is the intellectual meaning of purity if with impure motives one may be Descartesr? What artistic meaning has "holy" inspiration if, lacking it, one may write Andromache and Bérénice?

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But I do not want to argue here against Simone Weil's case for the identity of intellectual and moral perfection. My point is simply that her attitude cuts under the presuppositions by which most intellectuals justify their lives, namely, that man is limited, and can achieve one kind of excellence only by sacrificing others, and must choose, as Yeats has put it, between "the perfection of the life or of the work." For Simone Weil, to make such a choice was to consent to imperfection, intellectual as well as moral.

So, paradoxically, it becomes of ethical interest to justify the value of Simone Weil's work solely on its intellectual side. But can one do so successfully? Did she indeed touch that "focal point of greatness" she speaks of in The Need for Roots, "where the genius creating beauty and the genius revealing truth, heroism and holiness are indistinguishable"? From T. S. Eliot's admirable introduction to her essay, it would appear that in his judgment she did not, for he quotes with approval Father Perrin's remark that "her soul was incomparably above her genius." His judgment may be qualified-Eliot qualifies it finely-but I do not think it can be set aside. A restatement of the leading ideas in The Need for Roots would not show Simone Weil to be a great or even an important political thinker. If she is important, it is because she makes drastic distinctions that are deeply meant. If she is great, it is because when speaking on the great questions her whole soul is in what she says. She may well seem more important when she is speaking to you than when you are speaking of her. And yet. . . .

In The Need for Roots we read: "In Giotto, it is not possible to distinguish between the genius of the painter and the Franciscan spirit; nor in the pictures and poems produced by the Zen sect in China between the painter's or poet's genius and the state of mystical ecstasy; nor when Velasquez places on the canvas his kings and beggars, between the painter's genius and the burning and impartial love that pierces to the very depths of people's souls." Similarly, it is not possible, I think, to distinguish in Simone Weil between the purely intellectual ardor that wishes to see clearly, and the sisterly concern for the human soul that is always the object of her regard.

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The Need For Roots was essentially an act of goodness. Let us recall the circumstances in which the essay was written. Simone Weil was in London during the war. She had requested that the Free French Committee have her parachuted into occupied France so she could participate actively in the Resistance. Only when convinced that she could serve no useful purpose in France, did she take up the task of examining what should be said there. It is probable that the intelligence is keenest when detached; but perhaps detachment, to be human, ought not to be deliberate, but fated; and the example of Simone Weil suggests that when detachment is really fated, it may be anything but cold.

In discussing what should be said to the French under the conditions of occupation, Simone Weil was led to consider the whole question of modern society. Yet I hardly think that what counts most in The Need for Roots are its generalizations, often speculative, on religion, the state, science, tradition (or, as she calls it, "rootedness," from which concept her essay takes its name). It is when she touches on specific, immediate questions that she is incomparable: confronting them, she is able, undismayed by urgency, to maintain a sure and intuitive grasp of the structure of the valuable. She suggests Antigone, not Plato.

Take, for instance, her solution to the problem of how to renew French patriotism. For the traditionalists, of course, the problem was simple: one had only to stress France's past glory. But Simone Weil saw that the past glory was inseparable from past crimes-committed by the French as a nation as well as a state. She did not hesitate to note in this essay, written at the request of a political group whose symbol was the Cross of Lorraine, that because of Jeanne d'Arc's connections with the Monarchy "fallen into despotism," the people of Paris had not supported her. Even less acceptable than the attitude of the traditionalists was that of the liars, of those who said, "France is the truth." "France," said the truthful Simone Weil, "lies and needs to lie." Yet patriotism was necessary, even morally necessary, for if it acts as "a dissolvent of morality" in time of peace, "the contrary takes place during wartime." How to be a patriot without endorsing the misdeeds of the French state? How admit them, and be a patriot?

Here Simone Weil put forward a completely original solution, and one perfectly appropriate to the conditions in which "the souls and bodies of Frenchmen found themselves"; she elected for a patriotism based not on achievements, military, scientific, or literary, but on "compassion." "One can love France," she said, "for the glory which would seem to insure for her a prolonged existence in space and time; or one can love her as something which being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account. These are two distinct ways of loving. . . ." She pointed out that the second way of loving France was the only one now possible to the mass of the people: ". . . if their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is in the first place imperfect, and secondly very frail and liable to misfortune, and which it is necessary to preserve and cherish, the people will feel more closely identified with it than the other classes of the population. For the people have a monopoly of a certain sort of knowledge, perhaps the most important of all, that of the reality of misfortune." Such a patriotism would not be likely to degenerate into chauvinism, for, she writes, "compassion tends to universalize itself."

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On This question of patriotism, something more than intelligence was required for a solution satisfying to the intelligence itself; that "something more" was Simone Weil's moral intuition of a content in national feeling that was deeper than self-love. Her whole moral attitude, in fact, was based on the conviction that if, on the one hand, self-love was very powerful, on the other hand it was not a fundamental reality. She never accepted the view, so widespread nowadays, that egotism "properly" directed is itself a positive value. In politics, one must struggle against the self-love of the nation, but also

against the self-love of the class, even of the working class. But to struggle politically against the self-love of the class or of the nation one had first to conquer one's own. The destruction of the ego, she believed, was fundamental to the assumption of a true social attitude; political understanding rested on the capacity of a person to depersonalize himself, to become an "impersonal person."

Let us note how much more intelligent is this criticism of self-love than the anti-individualism of the Bolsheviks, with which it is not to be confused. The Bolsheviks were indeed opposed to the self-love of the individual, but not, like Simone Weil, on intellectual grounds. They wanted the individual to sacrifice himself for the party or the class; but this was a matter of practical necessity; they did not believe self-love to be superficial; their point was not that the individual should arrive at a deeper vision of reality; what they wanted was merely to make use of him. And when the individual is regarded in this way, it appears at once that, in fact, he can never be of any real use at all. This comes out in the following story I have heard told of Lenin: To a young Communist who exclaimed: "I would give my life for the party!" Lenin replied mockingly: "That's easy. But would you pimp for the party?" Which is as much as to say, "And even if you did that, it would be nothing."

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We Read in Simone Weil's Cahiers: "Learn to give as if you were begging." Evidently the struggle against self was a hard one. I think we must bear her whole attitude in mind if we are to understand what prompted her in England, during the war, to refuse to nourish herself better than could the lowest-paid workers in France. It is said that her death was induced more quickly by this course, and some people have found this action bizarre. But if we consider the monstrous force and myriad disguises of self-love, and take into account her view that it is the main obstacle to any real truth in personal as well as in political life, and above all, if we have been illuminated by any insights she derived in struggling against self, we should be able to see her death as an unfortunate accident befallen in the line of duty. We read recently of a star baseball player, valued by his team, breaking his leg during training in making a slide not even needed to win a game, and we do not find the player's daring wilful. We should see her death, I think, as a consequence, not of sternness towards herself, but of something more like zest, and we should see such zest as an eminently intellectual thing.

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The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil - Lionel Abel, Commentary Magazine

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A Good Mind and the Good The Need For Roots. by Simone Weil. Translated from the French by Arthur Wills. Putnam. 302 pp. $4.00. I First read The Need

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#FriedrichSchiller #Play #Body

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'Ruimten rondom' uit 1974 is geen verhaal, maar bij Georges Perec is het onderscheid tussen verhaal, essay of een reeks observaties diffuus. In het boek denkt Perec na over ruimten. De hoofdstukken hebben titels als 'De bladzijde', 'De kamer', 'Het land' en 'De wereld'.

De stijl die hij hanteert lijkt op die van een wetenschappelijke verhandeling, maar wat hij onderzoekt / beschrijft is vaak te gewoon om voor wetenschap interessant te kunnen zijn. Hij beschrijft de kamers van een huis en trapt daarbij nogal wat open deuren in. "Een slaapkamer is een vertrek waarin een bed staat; een eetkamer is een vertrek waarin een tafel en stoelen staan." Ik wil hier aan toevoegen, enzovoorts. Wanneer Perec een keer dit woord gebruikt schrijft hij: "Hou op 'enzovoort' te zeggen, te schrijven. Doe een poging het onderwerp uitputtend te behandelen, zelfs als dat potsierlijk of nietszeggend of stompzinnig lijkt."

Dit advies volgt hij zelf direct op. Juist door je intensief te richten op het alledaagse zie je soms iets bijzonders. Of je komt op nieuwe gedachten. Zo probeert hij zich een nutteloze ruimte in een appartement voor te stellen, een ruimte die geen functie heeft en nergens toe dient. Maar de taal schiet hierbij tekort.

Perec inventariseert de huizen en de buurten waarin hij heeft gewoond. Hij vraagt zich af wat een buurt is. Hij heeft vaak van buurt gewisseld. "Ik heb er niets op tegen me te verplaatsen, integendeel." Verschillende kamers hebben verschillende functies, maar waarom moeten deze zich in één huis bevinden? "Waarom zouden we niet de voorkeur geven aan versnippering?" Dus, een plek om te slapen, een plek in een ander huis om naar muziek te luisteren, een plek in weer een ander huis om te eten, een plek om te schrijven, een plek om de liefde te bedrijven.

Dit soort gedachten volgend op reeksen van beschrijvingen vind ik erg grappig. Soms staan er bizarre onderbrekingen in de tekst. Op pagina 17 voegt hij een voetnoot toe aan de tekst. Daarin vermeldt hij: "Ik hou erg van voetnoten, zelfs wanneer ik niets bijzonders te melden heb." Einde voetnoot.

Hij komt naast het nauwkeurig benoemen van concrete dingen als straten en huizen ook tot scherpe beschrijvingen van wat ruimere begrippen, zoals van reizen. "De verbazing en de deceptie van reizen. De illusie dat de afstand is overwonnen, dat de tijd is uitgewist. Ver weg zijn."

In de laatste alinea van dit opmerkelijke boek geeft Perec een definitie van schrijven: "pijnlijk nauwgezet iets proberen vast te houden, iets te laten voortbestaan: een paar scherpomlijnde brokstukken aan de groeiende leegte ontrukken, ergens een vore, een spoor, een afdruk of een paar tekens achterlaten."

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'Ruimten rondom' uit 1974 is geen verhaal, maar bij Georges Perec is het onderscheid tussen verhaal, essay of een reeks observa...