In reading Gogol's Dead Souls for the first time, I come across the following passage, which summarizes a lengthy description of a dilapidated estate overgrown by its garden:
In a word, all was somehow desolate and splendid, as it is given to neither nature nor art to devise, but as happens only when they join together, when across the often senselessly accumulated toil of man, nature passes a finishing touch of the chisel, lightens the heavy masses, eliminates the crudely palpable symmetry and the beggarly rips through which peers the unconcealed bare plan, and confers a wondrous warmth on everything that has been created in the chill of calculated purity and tidiness.
For a long time I have been trying to formulate what it is about much of so-called modern/minimalist architecture (as, for example, one may see lately in Dwell magazine) that doesn't sit well with me. It's in the geometry of the straight lines and right angles. There seems to be an arrogant assertion that inherent in the rectilinear structure is a sort of eternal truth. This seems to me to be based on an elementary school notion of geometry, which in turn is based on the discoveries of Euclid. Hasn't anything happened in the field of geometry since the year 300 BC when Euclid strolled about in his robes contemplating the shape of the universe? Are we really still stuck with 3 dimensions? Doomed to live in Skinner boxes? What about Fractals? Lobachevsky-Bolyai-Gauss geometry? New cosmologies?
Even Euclid contemplated the wonderfully distorted ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas, and would have welcomed even the torus and the Klein bottle, yet the anathematic curve seldom creeps into the design of new residential or commercial architecture. The urban dweller appears still to be living in slabs and structures that look like, well, giant architectural models. As though to be taken seriously, one must be making ARCHITECTURE, which bears no relation to nature or the natural environment of sky, water, air, minerals, growing things, but only to other ARCHITECTURE. It even has the gall to thrust itself into the wilderness and suppose that it is in harmony with nature merely because it has some big guillotines of glass glued to the sides of it.
And, what about all the wasted space? What can you put in a corner? There's a reason children were made to go stand in one as punishment.
Not to mention the fact that all these sharp edges of furniture and builtins are bound to be dangerous to the elderly, the disoriented and the intoxicated.
There is also a false and pathetic sense of order in the rectilinear, as though the dweller's ego were so fragile that it would crumble to pieces if not propped up by the supposed perfection of the lines and the sterile placement of one slab in relation to another.
Well I guess I'm just carping here. What can a know-nothing like me presume to offer to ameliorate this state of affairs? All I can think to say, is, ladies and gentlemen, think on how the birds and the bees build their dwellings; think on the amorous bower bird especially; think on the majestic spiral which occurs in the cochlea of the human ear and in the shell of the shy nautilus and in the magnificent tornado (yes, thank god for the Guggenheim). Think on the forms developed by Nature, which has had infinite resources, infinite time, to try everything, to fail at everything, and to hit upon what is successful in form and function and attractiveness (yes, even that, for, after all, the flower must attract the bee and provide a lovely environment in which to linger for a critical and languid moment).
