83 Line
Make_Line_Modern
Make is something sanguine.
'Ruddy' in complexion.
Often the blood rises to the forehead when making a mess of things, in an archetypal form, coming across a spark of genius.
Collotype printing leaves something sweet on the palette.
A credenza made to fit, beginning happiness to its user.
Pure decadence in chivalry, to make a thriving marriage.
However, there is an important, often deemed, shambolic rule to behold that of lining up modernity.
Take 9 squares in a larger square for example and take one away. I bet you knew I took the bottom right one away.
There is something about a sesqui-balance of 3:2 left to right, which likes the logical and abstract simultaneously. Now what do I do? I remove that one and move the one above down to the bottom right hand corner. You follow pat, then move the central one right and the above one down and the top left into the middle top, to the right, and I have crossed the square diagonally.
If you followed the same path, well, there are only so many ways of doing things, and if the mind has an aim it will use the most efficient way to get the fastest result.
Therefore, if I were to take a building, out of pure function alone, I would want to line things up. From the outside in and simultaneously: inside out, accounting for services, construction; but lining everything up: calculating to perimeter lines, superior absolutism and end points to the edge. This gives a near phased state of mind, but worth it: satisfaction, and a neo-post-classical-deep-modern-movement feel.
This becomes the goal, like a 1970's Bauhaus print, 1980's Bosch radio or new Monougi building, (Florian 'the architect' coming early 2020, Winchester UK and global). There is something antiquated about efficiency, the timber hut itself, the stone mason defining the timber hut layers on the portico eaves, and of course following into modernity, through all its historical niches; there is therefore ultimately something all-encompassing about modernity as well.
The 'anonymity', of Rossi (Aldo) and the 'death of the author', Barthes (Roland), the object becomes gestalt, in the synergy of all its designed parts.
The whole becomes more than the stars in their random formation, and the equality and uniqueness of the big bang from a possible collapse of a previous universe: this is still held as a coherent theory today.
Rossi states (Rossi, Aldo, The Architecture of The City, MIT press, USA, 1982, p.81): The residential district poses insufficiency for the rationalist. There are so many, varied solutions, that the term residential district 'Siedlung' does not account for them all in German urbanism.
Think of the layers of history here in Winchester, there is nothing but rationality, by pared down minimalism, to fit in conjunctively. This means lining things up, including artefacts and historical nodes of contact.
The iniquity of not lining things up is replete with morbidity yet deemed morbid itself. Why? Because it is time keeping anti-business. It is exactly the lack of explanation of the varied undefined residences we live in, that leads us there.
We now turn to "morbidity" (lining up) of detail. In Peter Zumthor's book he states (Zumthor, Peter, Thinking Architecture, Birkhäuser, Switzerland, 2006, p.50): The clients want us to build cheaply, and not get so technically involved with the craftsmen and women. To create such careful and elaborate details, almost like ornament to the building, in the precision of joints from one element of the building to another.
I am afraid to say God is in the detail and maybe the Devil according to Mies (Ven Der Rohe), and this entails that the architect: a good architect is always right, to line things up with due regard for waterproofing, it can be done, just pick up any Deutsche/English detail magazine to find an answer and work it up.
Therefore, we can line up the city: artefact, the building: interior, and finally our detail: finish. To the edge. We like neat square lines to a building, as the epitome of the arts, should always be.
Q. Does Purity exist in the World?
Or just your World? . . . . . .
Wait to be surprised by the result!
Purism, the making of an immediate history.
Purism as an anti-geist. Profaning to be something culpable of memory, and our own, when an immediate history is the thing that will give us a genuine theory on purism; this is despite the role of the classicists and historicism, regurgitating pastiche ideals. The historicist's still have no thorough dependency on a new treatise, something I wish to tackle, in the realm of modernity. Presently there is only a slight slant to a new purist order, we can call true purism, when authenticity and death of the author still allow for a signature, i.e. we can spot one a mile away! Therefore, purism is eradicating the past, for its unfettered purities, yet steeped in the past, for its traditionalist stance as a literary form. It is one of those modernist contradictions that is hard to encompass. Purism is in essence tradition, for tradition has been around for an age, left in the regal splendour of today for which we are governed, and is perfected in a modernist sense, by the classical rules and subjugation we have grown up with, learning new technologies along the way.
Purism whilst seen as contradictory, is also an 'agent of transfer', as described by Le Corbusier, and his painter friend, Amédée Ozenfant. It needed mathematical order, purity and logic to achieve the pared down style of painting moving away from Cubism, and into Purism, from 'Line Up/84' and into the newfound definition, of a new purist movement. It was very modern of its time, impersonal, and was dedicated to “universal forms”. Images of simple machine-made forms came into play, with objects of everyday life, i.e. in the form of an immediate history of the latest technology. Fernand Léger saw the machine aesthetic as delineated forms, simplified geometry, not just a perspective like Cubism but a harmonious finish. A return to order, tends to have a neoclassical idea, Le Corbusier's Pavillon L'Espirit Nouveau was built at the climax of Purism as somewhat a revolution in 1925. The movement began in 1918, but after the Pavilion was built, Ozenfant and Le Corb. split paths and went their separate ways.
Purism is also dogmatic, perfectionist, traditionalist, and sophist. Therefore, there is a complete contradiction in how Le Corbusier interpreted it, as an immediate history of the machine age, which is at once quite appealing, but we must first study the original definition. According to the Cambridge Dictionary a Purist is: 'Someone who believes in and follows very traditional rules or ideas in a subject. For example: 'Life was pure before children had to deal with modern contradictions'/ 'After purism, such commercialisation tainted the pursuit of natural philosophy'/ 'It is not so much the authentic past of items that is of interest to purists as it is the reception in a present'. There are modern contradictions even in the use of the word purism, a natural philosophy would seem more enviable in a world of recycling, and well the purist present is ultimately as time evolves the requirement of our new definition. There is therefore something of the onus on personal experience through a purist’s mindset, that self-contained contentment would encompass this requiem. An immediate history, of which historicism gets in the way of this is what pervades as today's purism.
If there were a pure filtered glass of water in front of you, you would enjoy it more to know it is the result of a purist new modern world. For also the mind and body, are pure depending on what we add to them. The Maldives show an image of purity, but we all know the sea is undergoing a serious bout of pollutive ingress. Therefore, is it an untouched part of the world, an element of the mind or body or children which pragmatically come from our inherently, prehistoric DNA? There could be an answer here, for would it be pure to begin with. Or replenished to become pure? If we come from water, it must have been purer than it is today. We can then uphold purism of today is our will to keep moving forward, a will based on the past, our past, the retrospective aspect of purity, and the future, the ever more perfectionist realm of thinking. For purism today is the will to keep changing until in Gods eye we are perfect at last, better and bolder, with no obstacles in our way. The technocrats stand on the fence and explain our lives through technology, and the broadband superhighways bringing this page to you. But if technology were purer than man, then surely it would overtake us. There is a limit by which, man-made technology, so a mind can be pure of all things, as if purity already exists. A pure heart is equally at ease in this world. Therefore, if it is not a piece of stainless steel that is the purist material known to man what it about that steel is. It could be an image. I would conclude that man’s new purism is an image of a will to aspire to a better world, which will one day be a purer world, once ironically man has cleared up from Le Corbusier's machine age. If in doubt do not keep pushing the dirt around become pure, stay pure and be ethically minded, that is ultimately the new purism of today.
A. Men.
