DUNCAN HALL, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

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DUNCANOLOGY PART 1

"IMMENSELY AMBITIOUS AND, MANY WOULD SAY, IMPOSSIBLE."(Bob Maxwell, Dean Emeritus of Princeton Fac. of Arch)

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Duncan Hall to the JOA project.

This is because of all of our projects, it is the single one which proves that human beings can, with no help from anything except their own will and wisdom, live in a civilised lifespace that is as extensive, large and generous as it is intellectually acute to the highest degree.

These are large claims. But Duncan Hall, situated on Rice Campus, proves them to be true, even of an everyday working building (an engineering faculty) built in the late 20C on a Campus less than 100 years old in what was, until rather recently, the 'Wild West'.

Duncan Hall proves that everything thought dead and gone in Architecture and City Planning, such as rigorous formality, big columns, colour, decoration, symmetrical facades, straight rows of trees, axes that link buildings for miles on end, entablatures, painted ceilings and inlaid floors etc, etc, -all absolutely taboo design tactics during the 20C - are not merely capable of 'revival', but are the very best tools with which to solve the real problems of the future.

This may not strike a non-Architect as a surprising idea. After all, why not? Nothing seems to make things any better, and nothing could be less like any of the Architectural and Planning solutions presently on offer.

But to many Architects, perhaps even most Architects, the mere recounting of this list will offend, indeed deeply offend. For my colleagues believe, with the obstinacy of a dogma reinforced by sacred taboos, that everything in my list is not merely old-fashioned, impractical, expensive, and ugly. They go further, much further. They hold that these things- formality, colour, decoration, columns and so on, which are all as old as Urban Planning and Architecture itself, are morally wrong and the cause and effect of every ethical vice and evil. There is nothing that can be said or shown to these Architects which can cause them to alter their opinions. They would die rather than abandon them. They defend them with the purity of heart reserved to Martyrs to the Cause, which, in this case they call 'True Modernism'.

I would like to persuade them, if for no other reason than to save both their profession and medium (which are also mine) from the extinction it faces today. But I have learned to turn away from them and seek out those amongst the Public who can still believe the evidence of what they see and experience with their own eyes and bodies. For to visit Rice Campus is to see and experience, even if it can not be to immediately understand (such is the profound illiteracy into which architectural culture has been allowed to fall) that what I aver above is literally true.

So, with no more delay, let us go to Rice.

WALKING INTO A 'LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS'.

In real life (that is to say not in the virtual world of the Web), I would walk you from the Main Gate, (No. 1 gate) termed a 'patte d'oie' in formal planning, through the 'forest of infinity' that is the delta-hypostyle up to the 'balcony of appearances' over the 'city-gate'. All of these ancient figures, and many, many more, were inscribed into the campus plan and the first buildings, back before the 1914 War, by the erudition of Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, followed by William Ward Watkin, Architects and Planners to the Founders of the University. Those who visit Rice, as they might any 'old' building, might pause to admire Lovett Hall, the first to be built, and, if they had the architectural literacy, note the inventiveness and ingenuity with which Cram weaves these devices into a coherent and sumptuous fabric.

FACING THE FUTURE

Then such a person would turn away, stepping forward in their mind to the present time, concluding that all such intellectual riches were dead and gone forever and raise their eyes to look for the 'Modern' buildings on this Campus. They would find them, of course, and not altogether devoid of literacy, but nevertheless at a remove from the original nucleus that befits their patent disregard for most of the concerns and culture of the founding architects. Henry Russell Hitchcock, one of the curators of the MOMA Exhibition that introduced 'white cement' Modernism from Europe to the USA (from whence exhausted spirits like Loos had originally brought it to an equally exhausted Vienna), decried Lovett Hall as "Byzantinoid".

A PLEASANT SURPRISE

But the expectations of this unusually literate visitor are in for a shock. For immediately to the right of the 'old' building (built in 1912!) looming through the dark limbs of the live oaks like some ruinous apparition discovered in a humid tropical jungle, rises an arched portico of four huge columns, six feet (1.8M) in diameter, that rise towards the brilliant blue sky to support an entablature in a 'style' never seen before! "What is this?", the Visitor exclaims, and drawn towards it, walks a few paces to enter under the long and generous (double-volume) arcade that will protect him from the torrential downpours and blistering sun that mark Houston's tropical latitude (slightly to the south of Cairo).

THE SHOCK - OF SHEETROCK.

When people enter Duncan Hall they raise their eyes to its ceiling. Each one of them, without fail, emits an exclamation.

For what they have found is no less exotic than any lost civilisation (bearing mind this is the last decade of the 20C). It is a huge room, ringed by giant columns, of strange and unforeseen design (one can walk straight through them - yes through the column itself, as if it was impalpable - and out the other side, for example), floored in polished marbles in strange patterns and, above it all, ceilinged by a vast and dazzling vault in which something 'momentous' is clearly 'going on'. Yet in this place freshmen and sophomores come and go, carrying their bicycles up the theatrical 'social stair', and studying on out-jutting balconies as if they were in any sheetrock and vinyl 'campus building'.

Nor should we be surprised at this because, behind the facade of this fascinating surface, Duncan Hall is, indeed, just another 'sheetrock city'. This manifestation of the lost world of formal planning and decorated architecture cost $133/sq.ft. It is, to transfer the epithet used to describe my House in Wadhurst Park : "built like a factory and finished like a palace".

We can dispel any doubts that remain concerning the practicality of the 'ancient devices'. All of them, every single one of them, without exception, have been unpacked from the 'discarded baggage' of the Architectural Tradition. In Lovett Hall one can see that they are all present and correct (but almost 100 years old). In Duncan Hall the amazed 'explorer' finds them, right at the other end of the 20C, bright and cheerful, working hard and making excellent conversation. All of this is happening in the Faculty of Computational Engineering - where complex physical designs are 'invented and tested on computers'.

How has this been done? How has this ancient world of carved stone and big solid columns, inlaid marbles and frescoed ceilings, been 'put to work'. Surely my Architectural colleagues are right. Surely I am deluded. It must be impossible. Such dreams exist only in Las Vegas. Well they are mistaken. Vegas is a rouged corpse. Vegas is a waxworks that has turned originality into error and art history into tablets of stone - or should one say hand-carved polystyrene.

One must have good footwork to work around these problems. Nimbleness is an intellectual quality. It compensates for lack of punch. One needs it on a Campus budget. Simplicity is important also. One must solve problems in a direct way.

THE 'BIG SHED' STRATEGY.

So Duncan Hall is just a big shed.

But then so was the Parthenon. But everyone knows that the Parthenon had huge columns made from solid Pentelic marble. Mark Twain wrote a poem about this Pentelic stuff. Why? He should have done his homework. We have known for almost 200 years, that the Parthenon, like all Greek temples, as well as the exquisite statues on them, were waxed and stained and polished in many colours. Their ivory eyes were ringed in kohl. Their rouged mouths were slick with lip gloss. Their oiled bodies shone in the sun like new automobiles. How else would one attract fickle Athena to take up residence in Athens? One had to keep the Gods in the style to which they were accustomed. The heaps of rotten old stone we see today are mere corpses. The only Ancient Greeks who would have loved them, in their present state, would have been necrophiliacs. 

So why make columns of solid stone? Is it, as Louis Kahn said, so as to "make good ruins". Was Kahn a closet Antiquarian? 

Of course he was, like every lover of Western Architecture! The 'Antique' is a sickness from which we lovers must cure ourselves if we are save the Medium to which we have lost our hearts. Antiquity must die, and rise again as a tough-minded, scientific archaeology if Architecture is to be given a new life beyond the grave of the beloved 15C Renaissance of Hellenic antiquity. 

FROM COLUMNS OF SOLID LIGHT...

So, eschewing stone for ever, I make my columns of 'solid light'. This is 'heavy' light. By which I mean polychromatic masonry . Light is colour, colour is light. Whatever else could it be, hardly a 'building material? By trapping bright pigments in synthetic stone, by mixing them all the way through concrete made from crushed stone, thousands of tons of it, I transfuse dark, lightless grey matter, sintered and ground from the ashes of clay and limestone, into pulsing waves of colour. Polychrome concrete abolishes the distinction between skin and body, surface and corpus, appearance and reality.

But even this does not go far enough. To substitute an all-through coloured concrete column for an all-through stone one is not enough to revive Architecture, not enough at all!

 

......TO RE-LAMPING THE ROBOT-COLUMN

In Duncan Hall JOA have compressed all of the functions of Architecture into the narrow compass of the Ancient 'trabeated' Orders. Our columns and beams are not 'merely' supportive in the old way of compressive masonry. Nor are they merely symbolic in the old way of carrying a load of fruit and horns and seeds and ropes and blood and sacrificial meats, as deciphered by Professor George Hersey. We ream out the superfluous interiors of the vast columns that one must use if one is to formalise, compartment, and 'steady' large compositions. Why leave them filled with anything as useless as 'matter'. We fill them, instead, with, the animated matter of machines - creating the Ordine Robotico, the Robot Order. JOA has been doing this on every project we have designed and built for more than 25 years.

Every one of our projects is a proof of the infinite capacity of the simple idea that the mechanical service duct, which Louis Kahn canonised in the 1950's, could be made congruent with a trabeated Architecture suited to our present needs. Pipes, tubes, wires and machines of all sorts hide inside our Order, as do the Engineers who service them, climbing up and down internal cat ladders and crawlways. Doors and hatches open on every floor for access. Lights slide in and out of them and service gondolas winch up and down. This is the 'all singing and dancing' Working Order. This is an Order that works in the way we understand 'working' today. 

That was the level of 'working' we achieved in 1995, after 20 years of building 'Working Orders', in the "Judge Institute of Management Studies" , Cambridge, England. 

THE 'WALK-IN ORDER' 

Rice took the whole project a series of quantum leaps forward. 

In Duncan Hall we added a whole new element to the Order, expanding its functions by one of the Vitruvian triads. In Houston JOA 'proved' a tool that I had invented in 1986, back in a Competition to build next to St. Paul's in the City of London. This was the "Walk-in Order" . We abolished the difference between column and corridor that powered the 'plan libre' of Le Corbusier, rendering it redundant. From 1997 onwards, the Architectural Column became a potential corridor route, making it possible to thread circulation routes directly through the giant columns needed to formalise big compositions. This was a device that was totally new to the 10,000-year history of Architecture. 

TEACHING THE ROBOTS TO DANCE. 

What this one invention does, like a key unlocking an ancient trunk filled with fabulous riches, is give access for contemporary architects to the full repertoire of planning devices created by the 'Beaux Arts'. 

The Beaux Arts became a taboo territory for 20C architects. Not only were all the vast columns made of stone and technically superfluous, they got in the way of everyone. Being able to walk through a big column on the inside of a building, and run all the services down big columns ranged around the outside of a building, means that nothing else, except the 'Working Order', is needed to plan and automatically formalise any and every building into 'Architecture'. Composing on the huge scale envisaged by the 'Beaux Arts' (which is the only way to formalise anything on the scale of a City) becomes not merely technically possible, but a technically efficient way to plan any and every building. 

THE PAYOFF

A main reason for this is that it allows the architect to put most of the mechanical services into the walls, rather than the floor or ceiling. This reduces the floor to floor height, making it easier for people to use stairs, which are better for their health and their social interaction. In both the Judge and Duncan I accentuated the role of the "Social Stair". 

Placing the services off the floor and ceiling, and especially the ceiling, makes it possible to use the ceiling as a thermal store or 'Thermal Flywheel', slowing the rise in temperature that occurs during the day. This lowers the demands on the cooling system made by the occupants.

Reducing the floor-to-floor height makes it possible to insert extra floors into buildings whose height is restricted by their adjacency to older buildings of quality - or just because buildings over a certain height have been prohibited in certain areas. This enables an essential component of urbane composition, the 'Cornice Line', to be recovered. 

Needless to say this 'Cornice Line' was reduced to a meaningless formal constraint by the illiteracy of Western Architecture. Whereas it is of real iconological functionality. It can be understood if one has deciphered the urban techniques instituted by L.B.Alberti in the 15C - a recondite subject of some importance to City Planning. 

'ICONIC ENGINEERING' AS 'SCRIPTING' 

When we then add decoration to the dramatically 'un-modern' girth of the Working Order and the Walk-in Order, we find that the 'bare' skeleton of the columns and beams of our 'trabeated' Order now perform every one of the three classic Vitruvian functions. The 'frame' supplies the Mechanical environment, the Social environment and the Conceptual environment. What this means is that all of the rest of the building can be made of glass, or to put it another way, freed from the burden of being 'Architecture'. 

PUTTING THE "CULTURAL LOAD" TO WORK 

My Working Order can carry the whole "cultural load" as Reyner Banham disparagingly described the Architectural Tradition. He advised Architects to shed this "superfluous baggage" if they wanted to "run with the Engineers". No advice could have been more disastrous for the Medium. Banham described himself to me, in 1956, as a 'failed Engineer. It is hardly surprising then, that he advised Architects to follow Buckminster Fuller - a maverick refugee from Marine and Aeronautical Engineering whose main achievement was to talk interminable technobabble while inventing a form of universal 'global' shelter that almost nobody either needs or wants. 

My Working Order proves that so far from the 'cultural load' of the Architectural Medium being a burden, it provides the long lost key to progress in lifespace design, or what used to be called 'Planning'.  

REDISCOVERING THE 'PICTURE-WINDOW'. 

This is not, however, the reason why the Architectural Order was invented. Nor is it the reason why we reconfigured its stony armature to 'work' today. Columns and Beams do far more than merely 're-present' themselves as 'architecture'. They bring into being 'scripted space®' , by clothing it in scripted surface®'. Moreover they do this in the simplest possible way. The columns and beams, of which an Order is made, frame space into cubes. Each of these, which we will avoid calling 'rooms' just for the moment, has six surfaces. If we stand inside one of these cubes of space we can look out through square views framed by the columns and beams of the Order. 

This is the state of Architecture in which the Abbe Laugier left it in his famous Essay, written just before the French Revolution. In short he left it the picturesque, picnic-worthy, ruin which the Mob would shortly realise by burning away all the antique rubbish that filled in between the framework of the Order, blotting out the 'view of Nature.' 

At least this is how the 20C understood the matter. My sense is that the 20C had it wrong. The Architectural Order was never invented to frame anything so intellectually frivolous as a 'picturesque view'. Only a culture, like that of 18C France, sufficiently blind to its own problems to bring itself to the point of self-destruction, could believe that. The 20C, feeling the power of its technology, reversed the priority. Instead of using the Architectural Order to bring a 'vision' into being, the early 20C proposed to make a 'vision' out of the 'view' by destroying all old cities and planting parks over their ruins. The 'white cement Utopia' proposed to revise the history of humanity and rewind us to the beginning, in short, as Corbusier described it (showing an unusual candour) - the re-installation of the Golden Age. Plus ca change. 

No, the Architectural Order was designed to empower not mere 'views', but rather 'visions' or views through some medium 'stretched', like a transparent veil, across the face of something that qualified for the status not of an accidental conjunction of light, water-vapour, some mammals and their vegetable habitat- however complexly we choose to comprehend the biomass (most people only notice the sunsets). The Order is designed not as a picnic pavilion, but more as a cave, descended from the grottoes of Lascaux, inside which humans could share a vision of the 'true reality' that they conceive as lying behind the beguiling appearances that come to the eye directly, up on the sunlit surface of the Earth. The cube is a 'camera lucida' rather than the camera obscura of 'landscape' (pretty view) painters). It is a vantage-point, dark and sunless, from which a 'sighting' may be had of the real circumstances that lie behind our environment. Moreover, given an effective method of 'projection' and 'reception' this view can be got to extend to the absolute limits of space and time, in so far as we 'know' them at any particilar time. 

RE-BOOTING THE BLACK SCREEN 

The collapse of the Architectural Medium that we have witnessed at the end of the 20C stems, at root, from the final implosion of Western 'painting', and its reliance on 'naturalistic' perspective, which took place 100 years ago. Gordana Korolija has demonstrated, in her unpublished PhD Thesis, which I have been privileged to consult, that the invention of 'perspectiva artificialis' by Leon Battista Alberti, in the 15C, was designed not, as the 20C commentator Panofsky argues, to apprehend nature scientifically, but to project a fictive space containing an illusion of reality. The question of why this technique should have been created is not, so far as I know, been persuasively answered. I make my own proposals, following on from Alberti, Camillo Sitte and my own field researches, as to the political purpose behind this 'fictive space' in my short essay replying to FAQ No 4: "Why are your buildings so colourful and highly decorated"?

All this is History, essential in order to understand what I am proposing. But it is not the proposition itself. To grasp that we must return to the 'simple idea of Architecture'. This is to 'script' the surfaces of the cubic box of space to reveal a 'view' out into a 'circumstance' that places the occupant of the space in the sort of place he wants to be. The Order is used to reduce and simplify the technique needed to bring this 'transposed' situation into being in such a way that its technique is merely 'graphic'. 

THE USES OF ICONIC LITERACY 

But one may ask: "Why so 'graphic'? Why not replicate the false and illusory 'site' naturalistically and literally? surely it would be more believable". 

ITS CONCEPTUAL ADVANTAGE 

It is true that this is what is done for the simple, iconically subliterate, people catered for by theme parks. But the advantage of not invoking mountains by throwing up polystyrene boulders, or even real rocks like a Chinese Emperor, is that abstracting and coding mountains into the 'idea' of them allows one to invent and use an iconic technique that has the advantage of language in invoking levels of meaning which attach to a symbol the more it is abstracted towards the status of a 'universal' sign. It is only in this way that one can progress such exercises in mere scenery-painting all the way up to the most rarefied metaphysical notions, like 'Time'. 

ITS FINANCIAL ADVANTAGE 

The other advantage, which is no less persuasive than the increase in intellectual horsepower brought along by a reduction of naturalistic 'scenery' to graphic abstractions, is that, with certain new, industry-standard, technologies, it is now surprisingly inexpensive to inlay, inscribe and paint ceilings, walls and columns, both inside and outside, with designs of an infinite subtlety and complexity. Well, cheaper than heaving up rocks and boulders anyway!

THE 'PROVING' OF IT 

Duncan Hall is the project in which, after ten years of researches and aborted projects, JOA finally, and triumphantly, proved that a form of 'painting' now exists which can reverse the slow and crippling decline from the high hopes of the Cinquecento that a form of 'architectural painting' could be developed which would enable Architecture to function as the 'camera lucida', the 'room of illumination', which it was always intended to be. Martell Hall, and especially the Shaper ceiling that vaults over it, prove that a complex iconological text can be woven out of a mix of specifically 'modern' literary and visual techniques. This is not the primordial, pre-verbal, or proto-verbal 'image writing' which Renaissance inventors like the author of the Poliphilia, and Athanasius Kircher, imagined the Egyptian hieroglyphics to be. My 'iconic engineering' has no such ambitions. The Shaper Ceiling, and the aborted ceiling planned for Den Haag are 'written' in a graphic that is both more and less than a sign-language. It is not a transcription of a natural language like speech. Nor is it merely an assembly of decorative motifs. 

My invention is founded on a modern standard of iconographical literacy. The word 'iconography' is a 20C one, coined by Aby Warburg in 1912. The shapes and colours that I use all have a history drawn from the many cultures who have used them. This gives them a provenance and a pedigree, just like any part of a 'given', pre-existing medium. For the most part this pedigree includes their use in Architecture, both as ideas scripting space and form, as well as scripting pure (graphic) surface. 

THE PLACE OF NATURALISM 

My inventions can also be read literally. Water is an undulating blue line. An iconically literate knowledge of this sign will connect it with the horizon and with the serpent, and with a 'boundary' condition that finally meets up with Time in the Infinite. I base my 'lexicon' of signs upon these two foundations. The first is congruences drawn from direct experience and the second is upon their use in History-including, most importantly, non-European sources. 

THE USE OF USE 

The third aspect is their 'projection in use today'. Not only is this an important aspect, for without it this whole affair would be academic rather than practical, but a 'coded' scheme improves with use, picking-up contemporary meanings that bring it into present use and liveliness. The Shaper Ceiling, being our first essay on its themes to actually be built, automatically now adheres to its locus, Rice-Houston-USA, rather than London-England where the ideas that motivate it were actually generated. That is America's gain and England's loss (and mine as well as I have to fly 4000 miles to be under the real thing!) 

Being completely novel, this side of my work, its 'present employment', suffers from being such an isolated dimension of the Architectural medium as a whole cultural phenomenon. Uniqueness is a disadvantage to a strategy that seeks to rely upon the universality of icons! But this is a state that one must approach with optimism. Someone must say the first word, or inscribe the first icon. Nor can the 'Eureka!' factor be avoided. Nothing ever came into a culture that was not brought about, at a singular moment, by a singular inventor, however widely it subsequently spread. This is often overlooked, perhaps because inventions increasingly involve so many people in their realisation that the role of the germinating agent is soon obscured and overlaid. 

THE'NATURAL' COMMUNITY. 

Putting all of this to one side for the moment, and assuming for the moment that it is all as I describe it, we may come to the rather more critical point and ask :"Well, what is it all for, then, bearing in mind its seeming 'eccentricity?" Here we can return to the simple beginnings of Architecture. For most buildings begin to 'turn into' Architecture when their promoter entertains the idea that the surroundings of a group of people can, somehow or other, be used to bring about an improvement in their working-together as a group, or let us call it (without, hopefully, invoking its negative aura), an Institution. 

This is a much-discussed subject. It is fundamental to every Architectural Project from an individual house to a whole University Campus. 20C Modernist Architecture has been so incapable of inventing a body of theory and practice that 'engineers' this aspect of building design that JOA have been obliged to create one of our own. It is one I have used consistently, at many ranges of scale, for 45 years. Indeed it was one of the very first 'intentions' that I brought to Architecture, coinciding with my decision to pursue the profession. 

I can best introduce it by quoting from Gustave Glotze, writing in 1921, "the Greek City and its Origins". He describes a thing for which there is no name in English. Our clumsy term for the "Poleis", or Polis, is neither a city nor a state, but the inadequate hybrid: "city-state". Glotze proposes that the Classical Greek "Poleis" was a 'valley'. 

He says: 

"The full embodiment of the Poleis was a piece of land formed by the geologically "drowned" river-valleys of Ionia, from the sea to the mountains. The attachment of the Greek was not to the buildings of a city, walled away from its surrounding hinterland. Nor was it to an abstracted State that extended far away, over lands that he could neither see nor walk upon . It was to the given, solid, real, natural, topography of his Valley. It was to his springs, sacred groves, rocky acropolis, earth, mountains, plants, sky and animals, as given by the Gods, cultivated by his own hands, and ultimately 'eaten' in a communal, sacrificial, Symposion that he gave his 'civic' allegiance. It was his little cockpit of a world that made the Poleis and that separated the Greek 'citizen' from his neighbours by deliberately-accentuated differences in custom, belief and cult". 

This description stems, perhaps, from the same kind of post-phenomenological ontology that Heidegger elaborates in his philosophy of 'dwelling', as well as his archaeologically implausible conjuring of the Greek Temple as a 'rocky extrusion'. I quote Glotze because his description has the brutal materiality that appeals to the modern mind. He serves to make my point, which is that just as the Hellenic poleis remains a touchstone of an ideal community (with all of its defects) so its embodiment, a "drowned river-valley", or "little cockpit of a world" also remains embedded in our ideas of what constitutes an ideal, or 'natural' environment for its 'pol-itics'. 

If Glotze maintains that the Greek Poleis was not its political constitution, (which we know were infinitely free and experimental), but its 'embodiment', in the corporeal reality of a drowned valley, open to the sea and ringed by mountains, he is making the astonishing proposal that the foundation of the 'state' to which all Western Politics has, somehow or other, aspired, is nothing more, nor less, than a fragment of (albeit naturally 'given') architecture! 

While I do not go so far as to claim that all that is now needed to solve our political problems is to manufacture these physical preconditions and move in to our new 'ideal communities'. I do argue that 'architecture' has a part to play, although it needs to be demonstrated what that is to a sceptical audience. Moreover, I hope to persuade some, at least, of my readers, that this architectural role still involves the form of what Glotze calls, with geographic (and a certain symbolic) exactitude: a "sunken (or is it an emerging?) valley". 

I will here remind them, and not for the last time, that this idea can also serve for a less-than-subtle blueprint for a 'natural building' made of rocks - shall we call it a 'Jardin Anglais' fitted with professionalised Hermits and Shepherdesses? We are never far from these comic regressions, especially after the anti-literate 20C - all grassed roofs and 'natural forms'. 

How do we escape these promoters of an uncritical 'Return to Nature', that would have us growing more fur and bigger teeth and living under real thatched straw? 

A CURIOUS TRICK OF FATE: "claude's key". 

Here I will play a trick on my readers that fate played on me. I will prove that the key to our escape from a world of polystyrene rocks and Palaeolithic kilts lies in the very dream of a 'Natural State' itself. I will turn to the very source of my own bewitchment, the vision that lies behind the Jardin Anglais, and all of its sad descendants, up to the full horrors of the Corbusian Civic Cemetery. 

I mean the painter Claude Lorraine, or alternatively, as is his natural name, Claude Gelee. 

In Claude, the historically genetic talisman of the Picturesque, I found all of the codes we need to decipher the figure of the 'drowned valley' in all of the most formal of the World's Architectures. Not only this, but Claude is the source of the codes that I have used to refigure Architecture and release all of its discarded powers. "Claude's Key" was my route away from the conceptually moribund traditions of 'Modernist' site planning, which veered from a vacuous tidyness to an arty confusion. It was in the Painter of soft ruins and pretty mythologies, suited to Noble collectors of Italian picture postcards, that I found the steely intellectual discipline with which to reconfigure the huge, flabby, corpus of 20C lifespace design. 

CLICK TO GO TO "DUNCANOLOGY PART TWO": " CLAUDE'S KEY."

 

 

 

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* JOA can be reached by E-Mail at anthony@johnoutram.com , by telephone on +44 (0)207 262 4862 or by fax on +44 (0)207 706 3804. We also have an ISDN number : +44 (0)207 262 6294.