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2006.03.03 11:27
I want to write about architecture....How?
Ah, the design of a banquet...
A Preprandial Aperitif
Cucumber Slices, Caviar and 'Sociables' Crackers
Spinach and Mushroom Salad
A Glass of Blue Nun Wine
Sketches cum Napkins
A Trip to the Rest Room
Coquille St. Jacques
Pears Helene
The Speeches
Dried Fruit and Nuts
Australian Port and a Cigarette
The Ride Home
Plop Plop Fizz Fizz
I wonder how many others have figured out that the title of QBVS was initially inspired as antidote to Tafuri's "we end up with a kind of typological negation, an "architectural banquet of nausea," a semantic void created by an excess of visual noise."
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2006.03.03 11:48
Has anyone read Platform?
I just got an email notice from the circulation desk at Paley Library and someone else requested Platform, thus I have to return the book by 15 March. I'm just over half done reading Platform, and so far I'm enjoying it a bit more than The Elementary Particles.
I like how the real estate cliche "location, location, location" is expanded in the travel industry to "packaging, packaging, packaging."
Maybe that's the same metaphor/cliche for "star" architecture these days.
"In the future, everything will be an advertisement."
--Rita Novel
"So what then is architecture? Is it a hard, 'simple', 'natural' protective shell that enenders the continuation of life? Or is it a soft formlessness forever redesigning an applied shell it doesn't naturally have."
--QBVS1, p. 148.
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2006.03.03 16:29
God's will as urban planning?
Regarding "the continuing discrimination they have against women," you might be interested in Church Fathers, Independent Virgins by Joyce E. Salisbury, which shows how and when a lot of the discrimination started. Ironically, in its early centuries, Christianity very much empowered women; it may well have been one of the first human "institutions" where women had a chance to make a choice about their lives. Granted, their choice was to remain virgins, as opposed to being told who they had to marry, but a choice women never even had before, nonetheless. Plus, as usual I suppose, the more wealth a Christian woman had, the more choices she could make for herself. This female freedom even got the pagan Romans upset, and thus even fueled the Great Persecution of the early 4th century.
In Church Fathers, Independent Virgins we see the lives and choices of some notable Christian women, and we see how some notable Church fathers, in their sermons, letters and writings, very much did not like the independence of these women, and thus laid out a whole new restrictive life for Christian woman.
Personally, I see the women as having made the far better choices. Melania the Younger and her grandmother Melania the Older are two of my favorites, besides Helena and Eutropia, of course.
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