Art and Architecture- Beauty and Chaos

  Just over a year ago a sign was hung up on the neighbor property announcing that building would commence that August, just a few months later. At that moment I began to be nervous. my stomach has been subconsciously clenched ever since,  but it wasn't until last week that the workers actually appeared. A very polished architect, enveloped in a well-cut suit, and sporting a chic haircut was all smiles and compromises. A world apart from the sweating, dirty men who a short day later were throwing hammers into the air to be caught by other sweating, dirty men dangling from cranes with large, swinging pieces of scaffolding.  Our terrace, which days ago was like a private treehouse hideaway has been swathed in a white fleece-like material and transformed into a veiled site of nameless horrors. Crashings, things being dropped, spilled, broken and who can only guess what else. The fact that it is hidden means that every crash comes without warning. Every bang remains a dark mystery. It is my humble opinion that Dante left a layer out of his purgatory. Construction work should have been included.

   I am not saying that the building which stood for so many decades, generations (?) was in any way attractive or appealing. It was an old, weathered, grey, garage for multiple cars. Used as a break room for smoking employees and a storage place for heaps of junk. Weeds grew in front of it and at night it created a little unlit cove off of the street. Yet it never bothered anyone and I was quite content to coexist next to it.
  While construction has always been one of the most unpleasant things I can imagine, it isn't that I don't appreciate architecture. I love urban sketching, which is in essence, little more than a pursuit in which the artist takes a cityscape or building and draws out the beauty in it in order to create a brief summary of its charms for the viewer. It is, to the building itself, what a cliff note is to a piece of literature. An outline of the important or interesting parts. Mark Twain categorizes a Classic as 'something that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.' I think of buildings in a similar way. I want to have a beautiful building next to me but I don't want to have to have it built there. The process lessens the joy of the finished product. Just think of all of the Cathedrals, how long they took to be built and what a strain they put on the inhabitance of their respective cities.

    But back to art, why do we invest so much time and effort into creating beauty in things that are fading, things which one day will be pulled down, sucked into the entropic chaos of the universe? I believe this love of beauty in everyday places reverberates back to a lost paradise. That the soul longs for an escape from the banality of life. A deeply seated longing not just to live but to delight in so doing. One of the most impressive things I have discovered in my many travels to Italy and along the Roman road is the incredible craftsmanship that was put into the most banal things. The size of the stones used in their mosaics, making ours look globby and childlike, the decorative borders, frescos, and tiles, the carved baths, pillars, and arches, the inscriptions, carved with a precision that is often missing from current signs, all speak of a value put on the beautiful.




   Even the Celts, a wild people, living off the land, decorated their houses, ornamenting not only themselves but the very pots they used over their fires. Pots which millennia later, blackened with use, and often pieced back together, reveal whimsical forms and delightful patterns. Primitive is often wrongly associated with simple but it is my observation that today, as a result of our great material wealth and affluence, we are much simpler in our tastes than our ancestors were.

   Why art? In a universe where entropy is a law and chaos is avoided only by discipline and determination, It seems the human soul longs for an unachievable paradise. If the desire were simply for relaxation and enjoyment we would not see time and effort being put into everything from our dwelling places, and yes, there is certainly time and effort going into that Dantesque realm next door, to our most basic of tools and household goods. The discussions, for example, of which toilet to buy, the nice one or the cheap one go one every day in families building or renovating their homes. Instead, we would see drunkenness, debauchery, filth and pirate-like abodes. But we strive above our basic, squalid instincts to capture a glimpse of that more beautiful, more divine, more perfect existence. In a word, we strive for paradise lost.

  Do you have a love hate relationship to architecture? Leave me a comment.

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