https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_Rizzoli
Achilles Gildo Rizzoli (1896–1981), anonymous during his lifetime, has since his death become celebrated as an outsider artist. He is an unusual example of an "outsider" artist who had considerable formal training in drawing.
Born in Point Reyes, California, Rizzoli lived in San Francisco, where he was employed as an architectural draftsman. In the 1930s he showed his work in exhibits held in his home, which he called the Achilles Tectonic Exhibit Portfolio (A.T.E.P.). After his death, a group of elaborate drawings came to light, many in the form of maps and architectural renderings that described an imaginary world exposition (much of which was designated "Y.T.T.E.", for "Yield To Total Elation"). The drawings include "portraits" of his mother (whom he lived with until her death in 1937) and neighborhood children "symbolically sketched" in the form of fanciful buildings.
3/ In architecture, "Neoclassicism" is dated back up to ca. 1730. Despite (as stated in 2/ quote) this story still goes on (somehow or other) even in 21st century, the heyday of neoclassical architecture lasted from ca. 1730 til ca. 1930 (this heyday having its heyday from ca. 1760/1770 til ca. 1810/1830). Since ca. 1920 (since the confrontation with Modernity and its affinity to abstract shapes), Neoclassicism is surviving in the form of "Stripped Classicism". Postmodernism (since 1972) brought back full-fledged neoclassical vocabulary in its extensive quotations. Besides, neoclassical heritage has also its dark side because a few psychopathic autocrats with imperial leanings favored it. Thus in the broad neoclassical family can be counted also "Nazi Classicism" (1933-1945), or "Socialist Classicism" also called "Stalinist Empire" (1931-1955).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism was a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born in Rome largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, at the time of the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but its popularity spread all over Europe as a generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. The main Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th century, laterally competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style continued throughout the 19th, 20th, and up to the 21st century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_Classicism
Stripped Classicism (or "Starved Classicism" or "Grecian Moderne") is primarily a 20th-century classicist architectural style stripped of most or all ornamentation, frequently employed by governments while designing official buildings. It was adapted by both totalitarian and democratic regimes. The style embraces a "simplified but recognizable" classicism in its overall massing and scale while eliminating traditional decorative detailing. The orders of architecture are only hinted at or are indirectly implicated in the form and structure.
4/ (As shown in 3/) during the long neoclassical period, many neoclassical subgenres emerged. The one that I didn't mention yet but that is crucial, as far as Achilles Rizzoli is concerned, is called "Beaux-Arts Classicism" (from ca. 1830 til ca. 1930).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaux-Arts_architecture
Beaux-Arts architecture was the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, particularly from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. It drew upon the principles of French neoclassicism, but also incorporated Gothic and Renaissance elements, and used modern materials, such as iron and glass. It was an important style in France until the end of the 19th century. It also had a strong influence on architecture in the United States, because of the many prominent American architects who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, including Henry Hobson Richardson, John Galen Howard, Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan.
The first American architect to attend the École des Beaux-Arts was Richard Morris Hunt, between 1846 and 1855, followed by Henry Hobson Richardson in 1860. They were followed by an entire generation.
2/In the late 19th century, during the years when Beaux-Arts architecture was at a peak in France, Americans were one of the largest groups of foreigners in Paris. Many of them were architects and students of architecture who brought this style back to America.
3/The "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago was a triumph of the movement and a major impetus for the short-lived City Beautiful movement in the United States. Beaux-Arts city planning, with its Baroque insistence on vistas punctuated by symmetry, eye-catching monuments, axial avenues, uniform cornice heights, a harmonious "ensemble," and a somewhat theatrical nobility and accessible charm, embraced ideals that the ensuing Modernist movement decried or just dismissed.
4/ And in one of such architectural studios (fancying Beaux-Arts Classicism), Achilles Rizzoli worked as a draftsman. However, he brought the Beaux-Arts esthetics up to the undreamt-of level by drawing in his spare time (as his hobby) buildings like f.e. this enchanting "Shirley's Temple" that is the emblematic building of my "Builders UnLtd." Genre.The first American university to institute a Beaux-Arts curriculum is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1893, when the French architect Constant-Désiré Despradelle was brought to MIT to teach. The Beaux-Arts curriculum was subsequently begun at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. From 1916, the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York City schooled architects, painters, and sculptors to work as active collaborators.
--------------------------------------------------https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/795532.A_G_Rizzoli
He has been compared to Blake, Piranesi, and Escher, and his imaginative architectural drawings have been described as "the find of the century." Outwardly, he was a recluse who had few companions except for his mother and children in the neighborhood; inwardly, he was the creator of fantastic renderings, including an attempt late in life to transcribe a third testament of the Bible. He is A. G. Rizzoli (1896-1981), visionary artist extraordinaire.
The discovery of Rizzoli's Beaux Arts-style drawings in San Francisco came in 1990, when they were brought to the attention of a keen-eyed dealer. Since that time, Rizzoli has acquired a fame that would astonish this shy, conflicted man. Essays about Rizzoli's life, analyses of his work and writings, and sources of his inspiration are presented in this first-ever survey by scholars John Beardsley, Roger Cardinal, and Jo Farb Hernandez.
A. G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions brings together for the first time a dazzling array of works. In addition the book includes a chronology, glossary of terms (for the artist was an acrobatic linguist), and list of pseudonyms and self-referential titles. Today Rizzoli is regarded as one of the most astonishing visionary or outsider artists, with an avid following from California to New York. This book will accompany a major traveling exhibition in the U.S., organized by the San Diego Museum of Art.
jiri kino ovalis wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 11:16 pm
From out the ruins and fire
there stood but these columns
lone "Portals of the Past"
through them one day a fairy came...
https://letterboxd.com/film/story-of-jewel-city/
https://youtu.be/jQnj1VY9Sw8
Panama–Pacific International Exposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama%E2 ... Exposition
Tower of Jewels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Jewels_(PPIE)It was covered with more than 100,000 1-7/8 inch (47 mm) diameter Novagems, cut glass faceted "jewels", that sparkled in the sunlight, and were illuminated at night by more than fifty spotlights. Originally named just The Tower, the "appellation 'of Jewels' became an addition to the original title, after the tower was thus gorgeously arrayed.
...
It was demolished following the Exposition. The Novagems that adorned the tower were removed prior to demolition, and a small brass medallion attached to each "jewel" indicating that it hung on the tower during the exposition. These jewels were individually boxed and sold for $1.00 each.
Executive Order Promotes 'Beautiful' Federal Civic Architecture
https://www.treehugger.com/executive-or ... re-5093301
President Trump Wants to Make ‘Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’ With a New Executive Order That Echoes Fascist History
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/trump ... paign=news
AIA opposes President Trump's draft rules for Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/05/makin ... trump-aia/
2/Trump's Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again decries brutalist and deconstructivist architecture
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/10/trump ... brutalism/
Executive Order 13967 of December 18, 2020
Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Purpose. Societies have long recognized the importance of beautiful public architecture. Ancient Greek and Roman public buildings were designed to be sturdy and useful, and also to beautify public spaces and inspire civic pride. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, public architecture continued to serve these purposes. The 1309 constitution of the City of Siena required that “[w]hoever rules the City must have the beauty of the City as his foremost preoccupation . . . because it must provide pride, honor, wealth, and growth to the Sienese citizens, as well as pleasure and happiness to visitors from abroad.” Three centuries later, the great British Architect Sir Christopher Wren declared that “public buildings [are] the ornament of a country. [Architecture] establishes a Nation, draws people and commerce, makes the people love their native country . . . Architecture aims at eternity[.]”
Notable Founding Fathers agreed with these assessments and attached great importance to Federal civic architecture. They wanted America's public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, DC, on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome. They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.
Washington and Jefferson personally oversaw the competitions to design the Capitol Building and the White House. Under the direction and following the vision of these two founders, Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed the Nation's capital as a classical city. The promise of his design for the city was fulfilled by the 1902 McMillan Plan, which created the National Mall and the Monumental Core as we know them.
For approximately a century and a half following America's founding, America's Federal architecture continued to be characterized by beautiful and beloved buildings of largely, though not exclusively, classical design. Examples include the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York City, New York. In Washington, DC, classical buildings such as the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court, the Department of the Treasury, and the Lincoln Memorial have become iconic symbols of our system of government. These cherished landmarks, built to endure for centuries, have become an important part of our civic life.
In the 1950s, the Federal Government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modernist ones. This practice became official policy after the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space proposed what became known as the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (Guiding Principles) in 1962. The Guiding Principles implicitly discouraged classical and other traditional designs known for their beauty, declaring instead that the Government should use “contemporary” designs.
The Federal architecture that ensued, overseen by the General Services Administration (GSA), was often unpopular with Americans. The new buildings ranged from the undistinguished to designs even GSA now admits many in the public found unappealing. In Washington, DC, new Federal buildings visibly clashed with the existing classical architecture. Some of these structures, such as the Hubert H. Humphrey Department of Health and Human Services Building and the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, were controversial, attracting widespread criticism for their Brutalist designs.
In 1994, GSA responded to this widespread criticism that the buildings it had been commissioning lacked distinction by establishing the Design Excellence Program. The GSA intended that program to advance the Guiding Principles' mandate that Federal architecture “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government.” Unfortunately, the program has not met this goal.
Under the Design Excellence Program, GSA has often selected designs by prominent architects with little regard for local input or regional aesthetic preferences. The resulting Federal architecture sometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people who the buildings are meant to serve. Many of these new Federal buildings are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings.
For example, GSA selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs as “art-for-art's-sake” architecture, intended primarily for architects to appreciate. While elite architects praised the resulting building, many San Franciscans consider it one of the ugliest structures in their city. Similarly, GSA selected a modernist architect to design Salt Lake City's new Federal courthouse. The architectural establishment and its professional organizations praised his unique creation, but many local residents considered it ugly and inconsistent with its surroundings. In Orlando, Florida, a coalition of judges, court employees, and civic leaders opposed GSA's preferred modernist design for the George C. Young Federal Courthouse. They believed it lacked the dignity a Federal courthouse should embody. The GSA nonetheless imposed this design over their objections.
With a limited number of exceptions, such as the Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse and the Corpus Christi Federal Courthouse, the Federal Government has largely stopped building beautiful buildings. In Washington, DC, Federal architecture has become a discordant mixture of classical and modernist designs.
It is time to update the policies guiding Federal architecture to address these problems and ensure that architects designing Federal buildings serve their clients, the American people. New Federal building designs should, like America's beloved landmark buildings, uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public, and, as appropriate, respect the architectural heritage of a region. They should also be visibly identifiable as civic buildings and should be selected with input from the local community.
Classical and other traditional architecture, as practiced both historically and by today's architects, have proven their ability to meet these design criteria and to more than satisfy today's functional, technical, and sustainable needs. Their use should be encouraged instead of discouraged.
Encouraging classical and traditional architecture does not exclude using most other styles of architecture, where appropriate. Care must be taken, however, to ensure that all Federal building designs command respect of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of America's ideals.
Sec. 2. Policy. (a) Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public. They should also be visually identifiable as civic buildings and, as appropriate, respect regional architectural heritage. Architecture—with particular regard for traditional and classical architecture—that meets the criteria set forth in this subsection is the preferred architecture for applicable Federal public buildings. In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.
(b) Where the architecture of applicable Federal public buildings diverges from the preferred architecture set forth in subsection (a) of this section, great care and consideration must be taken to choose a design that commands respect from the general public and clearly conveys to the general public the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of America's system of self-government.
(c) When renovating, reducing, or expanding applicable Federal public buildings that do not meet the criteria set forth in subsection (a) of this section, the feasibility and potential expense of building redesign to meet those criteria should be examined. Where feasible and economical, such redesign should be given substantial consideration, especially with regard to the building's exterior.
(d) GSA should seek input from the future users of applicable public buildings and the general public in the community where such buildings will be located before selecting an architectural firm or design style.
Sec. 3. Definitions. For the purposes of this order:
(a) “Applicable Federal public building” means:
(i) all Federal courthouses and agency headquarters;
(ii) all Federal public buildings in the District of Columbia; and
(iii) all other Federal public buildings that cost or are expected to cost more than $50 million in 2020 dollars to design, build, and finish, but does not include infrastructure projects or land ports of entry.
(b) “Brutalist” means the style of architecture that grew out of the early 20th-century modernist movement that is characterized by a massive and block-like appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of exposed poured concrete.
(c) “Classical architecture” means the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio; such Enlightenment masters as Robert Adam, John Soane, and Christopher Wren; such 19th-century architects as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter; and such 20th-century practitioners as Julian Abele, Daniel Burnham, Charles F. McKim, John Russell Pope, Julia Morgan, and the firm of Delano and Aldrich. Classical architecture encompasses such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.
(d) “Deconstructivist” means the style of architecture generally known as “deconstructivism” that emerged during the late 1980s that subverts the traditional values of architecture through such features as fragmentation, disorder, discontinuity, distortion, skewed geometry, and the appearance of instability.
(e) “General public” means members of the public who are not:
(i) artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, instructors or professors of art or architecture, or members of the building industry; or
(ii) affiliated with any interest group, trade association, or any other organization whose membership is financially affected by decisions involving the design, construction, or remodeling of public buildings.
(f) “Officer” has the meaning given that term in section 2104 of title 5, United States Code.
(g) “Public building” has the meaning given that term in section 3301(a)(5) of title 40, United States Code.
(h) “Traditional architecture” includes classical architecture, as defined herein, and also includes the historic humanistic architecture such as Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture historically rooted in various regions of America.
(i) “2020 dollars” means dollars adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Economic Analysis's Gross Domestic Product price deflator and using 2020 as the base year.
Sec. 4. President's Council on Improving Federal Civic Architecture. (a) There is hereby established the President's Council on Improving Federal Civic Architecture (Council).
(b) The Council shall be composed of:
(i) all of the members of the Commission of Fine Arts;
(ii) the Secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts;
(iii) the Architect of the Capitol;
(iv) the Commissioner of the GSA Public Building Service;
(v) the Chief Architect of GSA;
(vi) other officers or employees of the Federal Government as the President may, from time to time, designate; and
(vii) up to 20 additional members appointed by the President from among citizens from outside the Federal Government to provide diverse perspectives on the matters falling under the Council's jurisdiction.
(c) The Council shall be chaired by a member of the Commission of Fine Arts designated by the President. The Chair may designate a vice-chair and may establish subcommittees.
(d) The members of the Council shall serve without compensation for their work on the Council. However, members of the Council, while engaged in the work of the Council, may receive travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by law for persons serving intermittently in the government service, pursuant to sections 5701 through 5707 of title 5, United States Code.
(e) To the extent permitted by law and within existing appropriations, the Administrator of General Services (Administrator) shall provide such funding and administrative and technical support as the Council may require. The Administrator shall, to the extent permitted by law, direct GSA staff to provide any relevant information the Council requests and may detail such staff to aid the work of the Council, at the request of the Council.
(f) Insofar as the Federal Advisory Committee Act, as amended (5 U.S.C. App.), may apply to the Council, any functions of the President under that Act, except that of reporting to the Congress under section 6 of that Act, shall be performed by the Administrator in accordance with the guidelines and procedures established by the Administrator.
(g) The Council shall terminate on September 30, 2021, unless extended by the President. Members appointed under subsections (b)(vi) and (b)(vii) of this section shall serve until the Council terminates and shall not be removed except for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.
Sec. 5. Responsibilities of the Council. The Council shall:
(a) submit a report to the Administrator, recommending updates to GSA's policies and procedures to incorporate the policies of section 2 of this order and advance the purposes of this order. The report shall explain how the recommended changes accomplish these purposes. The report shall be submitted prior to September 30, 2021.
(b) recommend to the Administrator changes to GSA policies for situations in which the agency participates in a design selection pursuant to the Commemorative Works Act (chapter 89 of title 40, United States Code), in furtherance of the purposes of this order and consistent with applicable law.
Sec. 6. Agency Actions. (a) The Administrator shall adhere to the policies set forth in section 2 of this order.
(b) In the event the Administrator proposes to approve a design for a new applicable Federal public building that diverges from the preferred architecture set forth in subsection 2(a) of this order, including Brutalist or Deconstructivist architecture or any design derived from or related to these types of architecture, the Administrator shall notify the President through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy not less than 30 days before GSA could reject such design without incurring substantial expenditures. Such notification shall set forth the reasons the Administrator proposes to approve such design, including:
(i) a detailed explanation of why the Administrator believes selecting such design is justified, with particular focus on whether such design is as beautiful and reflective of the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American system of self-government as alternative designs of comparable cost using preferred architecture;
(ii) the total expected cost of adopting the proposed design, including estimated maintenance and replacement costs throughout its expected lifecycle; and
(iii) a description of the designs using preferred architecture seriously considered for such project and the total expected cost of adopting such designs, including estimated maintenance and replacement costs throughout their expected lifecycles.
Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
DONALD TRUMP
THE WHITE HOUSE, December 18, 2020. Filed 12-22-20; 8:45 am, FR Doc. 2020-28605, Billing code 3295-F1-P
https://www.federalregister.gov/documen ... chitecture
So, you mean, Aquamarine? Or Rose Tourmaline? Or Amethyst? Make a priority list!Made in Bohemia, the Novagems came in several colors...
THE TOWER OF JEWELS AND ITS SHIMMERING NOVAGEMS
http://www.sanfranciscomemories.com/ppi ... ewels.html
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2483
Catalog of the exhibition...
https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_ ... 1605829802
2/ K. Michael Hays, ed. — Architecture Theory Since 1968 (The MIT Press, 1998)https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_ ... 1605829802
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art from October 29 through January 4. Directed by Arthur Drexler, Director of the Museum's Department of Architecture and Design, in collaboration with David Van Zanten of the University of Pennsylvania, Neil Levine of Harvard University and Richard Chafee of the Courtauld Institute, London, the exhibition of more than 200 original drawings examines the dominant ideas of 19th-century French academic architecture against which modern architecture rebelled.
...
Many of the drawings in the show — some as large as 18 feet wide and astonishingly beautiful — had not been unrolled since they were submitted by students to their professors 80 or 100 years ago and more than two-thirds have never been published. The selection, made primarily in the storerooms of the Ecole in Paris, is intended to illustrate the nature of architectural instruction and the debates which influenced the evolution of 19th-century French architecture, and to indicate sources of much pioneering American work by such architects as H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan.
2.1/This anthology presents forty-seven of the primary texts of architecture theory, introducing each with an explication of the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation.
2.2/Peter Eisenman — Post-Functionalism (Oppositions 6, Fall 1976), pp.236-239
The critical establishment within architecture has told us that we have entered the era of “post-modernism.” The tone with which this news is delivered is invariably one of relief, similar to that which accompanies the advice that one is no longer an adolescent. Two indices of this supposed change are the quite different manifestations of the “Architettura Razionale” exhibition at the Milan Triennale of 1973, and the “Ecole des Beaux Arts” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1975. The former, going on the assumption that modern architecture was an outmoded functionalism, declared that architecture can be generated only through a return to itself as an autonomous or pure discipline. The latter, seeing modern architecture as an obsessional formalism, made itself into an implicit statement that the future lies paradoxically in the past, within the peculiar response to function that characterized the nineteenth century’s eclectic command of historical styles.
What is interesting is not the mutually exclusive character of these two diagnoses and hence of their solutions, but rather the fact that both of these views enclose the very project of architecture within the same definition: one by which the terms continue to be function (or program) and form (or type). In so doing, an attitude toward architecture is maintained that differs in no significant way from the 500-year-old tradition of humanism.
The various theories of architecture which properly can be called “humanist” are characterized by a dialectical opposition: an oscillation between
a concern for internal accommodation—the program and the way it is materialized—and a concern for articulation of ideal themes in form—for example, as manifested in the configurational significance of the plan. These concerns were understood as two poles of a single, continuous experience. Within pre-industrial, humanist practice, a balance between them could be maintained because both type and function were invested with idealist views of man’s relationship to his object world. In a comparison first suggested by Colin Rowe, of a French Parisian hoˆtel and an English country house, both buildings from the early nineteenth century, one sees this opposition manifested in the interplay between a concern for expression of an ideal type and a concern for programmatic statement, although the concerns in each case are differently weighted. The French hoˆtel displays rooms of an elaborate sequence and a spatial variety born of internal necessity, masked by a rigorous, well-proportioned external fac¸ade. The English country house has a formal internal arrangement of rooms which gives way to a picturesque external massing of elements. The former bows to program on the interior and type on the fac¸ade; the latter reverses these considerations.
With the rise of industrialization, this balance seems to have been fundamentally disrupted. In that it had of necessity to come to terms with
problems of a more complex functional nature, particularly with respect to the accommodation of a mass client, architecture became increasingly a social or programmatic art. And as the functions became more complex, the ability to manifest the pure type-form eroded. One has only to compare William Kent’s competition entry for the Houses of Parliament, where the form of a Palladian Villa does not sustain the intricate program, with Charles Barry’s solution where the type-form defers to program and where one sees an early example of what was to become known as the promenade architecturale. Thus, in the nineteenth century, and continuing on into the twentieth, as the program grew in complexity, the type-form became diminished as a realizable concern, and the balance thought to be fundamental to all theory was weakened. (Perhaps only Le Corbusier in recent history has successfully combined an ideal grid with the architectural promenade as an embodiment of the original interaction.)
This shift in balance has produced a situation whereby, for the past fifty years, architects have understood design as the product of some oversimplified form-follows-function formula. This situation even persisted during the years immediately following World War II, when one might have expected it would be radically altered. And as late as the end of the 1960s, it was still thought that the polemics and theories of the early Modern Movement could sustain architecture. The major thesis of this attitude was articulated in what could be called the English Revisionist Functionalism of Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, and Archigram. This neo-functionalist attitude, with its idealization of technology, was invested with the same ethical positivism and aesthetic neutrality of the prewar polemic. However, the continued substitution of moral criteria for those of a more formal nature produced a situation which now can be seen to have created a functionalist predicament, precisely because the primary theoretical justification given to formal arrangements was a moral imperative that is no longer operative within contemporary experience. This sense of displaced positivism characterizes certain current perceptions of the failure of humanism within a broader cultural context.
There is also another, more complex, aspect to this predicament. Not only can functionalism indeed be recognized as a species of positivism,
but like positivism, it now can be seen to issue from within the terms of an idealist view of reality. For functionalism, no matter what its pretense, continued the idealist ambition of creating architecture as a kind of ethically constituted form-giving. But because it clothed this idealist ambition in the radically stripped forms of technological production, it has seemed to represent a break with the pre-industrial past. But, in fact, functionalism is really no more than a late phase of humanism, rather than an alternative to it. And in this sense, it cannot continue to be taken as a direct manifestation of that which has been called “the modernist sensibility.”
Both the Triennale and the “Beaux Arts” exhibitions suggest, however, that the problem is thought to be somewhere else—not so much with functionalism per se, as with the nature of this so-called modernist sensibility. Hence, the implied revival of neo-classicism and Beaux Arts academicism as replacements for a continuing, if poorly understood, modernism. It is true that sometime in the nineteenth century there was indeed a crucial shift within Western consciousness: one which can be characterized as a shift from humanism to modernism. But, for the most part, architecture, in its dogged adherence to the principles of function, did not participate in or understand the fundamental aspects of that change. It is the potential difference in the nature of modernist and humanist theory that seems to have gone unnoticed by those people who today speak of eclecticism, post-modernism, or neo-functionalism. And they have failed to notice it precisely because they conceive of modernism as merely a stylistic manifestation of functionalism, and functionalism itself as a basic theoretical proposition in architecture. In fact, the idea of modernism has driven a wedge into these attitudes. It has revealed that the dialectic form and function is culturally based.
In brief, the modernist sensibility has to do with a changed mental attitude toward the artifacts of the physical world. This change has not only
been manifested aesthetically, but also socially, philosophically, and technologically—in sum, it has been manifested in a new cultural attitude. This shift away from the dominant attitudes of humanism, that were pervasive in Western societies for some four hundred years, took place at various times in the nineteenth century in such disparate disciplines as mathematics, music, painting, literature, film, and photography. It is displayed in the non-objective abstract painting of Malevich and Mondrian; in the non-narrative, atemporal writing of Joyce and Apollinaire; the atonal and polytonal compositions of Scho¨nberg and Webern; in the non-narrative films of Richter and Eggeling.
Abstraction, atonality, and atemporality, however, are merely stylistic manifestations of modernism, not its essential nature. Although this is not
the place to elaborate a theory of modernism, or indeed to represent those aspects of such a theory which have already found their way into the literature of the other humanist disciplines, it can simply be said that the symptoms to which one has just pointed suggest a displacement of man away from the center of his world. He is no longer viewed as an originating agent. Objects are seen as ideas independent of man. In this context, man is a discursive function among complex and already-formed systems of language, which he witnesses but does not constitute. As Levi-Strauss has said, “Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reason and of which man knows nothing.” It is this condition of displacement which gives rise to design in which authorship can no longer either account for a linear development which has a “beginning” and an “end”—hence the rise of the atemporal—or account for the invention of form—hence the abstract as a mediation between preexistent sign systems.
Modernism, as a sensibility based on the fundamental displacement of man, represents what Michel Foucault would specify as a new episteme. Deriving from a non-humanistic attitude toward the relationship of an individual to his physical environment, it breaks with the historical past, both with the ways of viewing man as subject and, as we have said, with the ethical positivism of form and function. Thus, it cannot be related to functionalism. It is probably for this reason that modernism has not up to now been elaborated in architecture.
But there is clearly a present need for a theoretical investigation of the basic implications of modernism (as opposed to modern style) in architecture. In his editorial “Neo-Functionalism,” in Oppositions 5, Mario Gandelsonas acknowledges such a need. However, he says merely that the “complex contradictions” inherent in functionalism—such as neo-realism and neo-rationalism—make a form of neo-functionalism necessary to any new theoretical dialectic. This proposition continues to refuse to recognize that the form/function opposition is not necessarily inherent to any architectural theory and so fails to recognize the crucial difference between modernism and humanism. In contrast, what is being called postfunctionalism begins as an attitude which recognizes modernism as a new and distinct sensibility. It can best be understood in architecture in terms of a theoretical base that is concerned with what might be called a modernist dialectic, as opposed to the old humanist (i.e., functionalist) opposition of form and function.
This new theoretical base changes the humanist balance of form/function to a dialectical relationship within the evolution of form itself. The
dialectic can best be described as the potential co-existence within any form of two non-corroborating and non-sequential tendencies. One tendency is to presume architectural form to be a recognizable transformation from some pre-existent geometric or platonic solid. In this case, form is usually understood through a series of registrations designed to recall a more simple geometric condition. This tendency is certainly a relic of humanist theory. However, to this is added a second tendency that sees architectural form in an atemporal, decompositional mode, as something simplified from some pre-existent set of non-specific spatial entities. Here, form is understood as a series of fragments—signs without meaning dependent upon, and without reference to, a more basic condition. The former tendency, when taken by itself, is a reductivist attitude and assumes some primary unity as both an ethical and an aesthetic basis for all creation. The latter, by itself, assumes a basic condition of fragmentation and multiplicity from which the resultant form is a state of simplification. Both tendencies, however, when taken together, constitute the essence of this new, modern dialectic. They begin to define the inherent nature of the object in and of itself and its capacity to be represented. They begin to suggest that the theoretical assumptions of functionalism are in fact cultural rather than universal.
Post-functionalism, thus, is a term of absence. In its negation of functionalism it suggests certain positive theoretical alternatives—existing fragments of thought which, when examined, might serve as a framework for the development of a larger theoretical structure—but it does not, in and of itself, propose to supply a label for such a new consciousness in architecture which I believe is potentially upon us.
Robert A. M. Stern — Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism, or, Up and Down from Orthodoxy (L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 186, August-September 1976, reconstructed for this anthology), pp.242-245
At the outset of this brief essay, I would like to suggest that the “White and Gray” debate is not (as has been suggested in the press) an encounter between polarities such as might have occurred in 1927 between advocates of the Beaux-Arts and apostles of International Style modernism. Rather, this debate, beginning at the University of California at Los Angeles in May 1974, has grown into an ongoing dialogue between two groups of architects who, in their built work and theoretical investigations, share our active to chart out and clarify a direction which architecture can take now that the orthodox Modernist Movement has drawn to a close.
Peter Eisenman, to my mind the principal theorist among the “White” architects, sees this new direction in a particular way, which he labels
“Post-Functionalism.” Eisenman seeks to free architecture from explicit cultural associations of any kind. My view of this new direction differs from Eisenman’s: I call it “Post-Modernism” and see it as a kind of philosophical pragmatism or pluralism which builds upon messages from “orthodox Modernism” as well as from other defined historical trends.
For “Post-Modernism,” and probably for “Post-Functionalism” as well, it is safe to say that the orthodox Modernist Movement is a closed
issue, an historical fact of no greater contemporaneity than that of nineteenth century academicism; and though messages can be received from both these historical periods, as from the past in general, nostalgia for either cannot be substituted for a fresh, realistic assessment of the issues as they are now. The struggle for both groups, then, is to return to our architecture that vitality of intention and form which seems so absent from the work of the late Modernists.
“Post-Modernism” and “Post-Functionalism” can both be seen as attempts to get out of the trap of orthodox Modernism now devoid of philosophic
meaning and formal energy, and both are similar in their emphasis on the development of a strong formal basis for design. Beyond this, however, they are widely divergent, in that “Post-Functionalism” seeks to develop formal compositional themes as independent entities freed from cultural connotations, whereas “Post-Modernism” embodies a search for strategies that will make architecture more responsive to and visually cognizant of its own history, the physical context in which a given work of architecture is set, and the social, cultural, and political milieu which calls it into being. Contrary to what was said at the end of the 1960s, “Post-Modernism” is neither a sociology of the constructed nor the technico-socioprofessional determinism of the orthodox Modern Movement; it affirms that architecture is made for the eye as well as for the mind, and that it includes both a conceptualized formation of space and the circumstantial modifications that a program can make this space undergo.
Implicit in this emergent Post-Modernist position is a recognition that the more than fifty-year history of the Modernist movement has been
accompanied by no notable increase in affection on the part of the public for the design vocabulary that has been evolved. This is partially so because that movement has been obsessively concerned with abstraction and has eschewed explicit connections with familiar ideas and things. (Even the pipe railings of the 1920s are by now, for most of us, cut off from everyday reference; who among us has been on an ocean liner in the last twenty-five years?) For a Post-Modernist attitude to take root in a meaningful way, an effort must be made toward recapturing the affection of architecture’s very disaffected constituency, the public.
The exhibition of drawings of the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was presented in 1975 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the discussion of the significance of that exhibition in the press, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, at the Architectural League of New York, and within the frame of seminars at the School of Architecture at Columbia University, made it possible for architects of New York—many of the “Whites” and “Grays,” in particular—to begin to reweave the fabric of the Modern period, which was so badly rent by the puritan revolution of the Modern Movement. It is not surprising that the tradition represented by the Ecole des Beaux Arts—the poetic tradition of design—should be examined with renewed sympathy, and that one of the hallmarks of the Ecole’s design methodology, the beautiful drawing, should be restored to a position of influence. A large part of the work of the “Grays” tends to establish connections with the formal, spatial, and decorative invention of the nineteenth century.
For the “Grays,” at least, Venturi and Moore have laid the foundation for the philosophical structure of Post-Modernism. In the search for an architectural position able to draw on historic issues, including both Modernism and nineteenth-century eclecticism, they have reminded us of the power to achieve symbolic meaning through allusion—not only allusion to other movements in architectural history, but to historical and contemporary events of a social, political, and cultural nature as well. In organizing the Beaux Arts exhibit, Arthur Drexler,
long associated with the position of orthodox Modernism, has also made a contribution to the philosophical structure of Post-Modernism. The Beaux Arts exhibit suggests that Modern architecture might find a way out of the dilemma of the late Modern Movement by entering a period where symbolism and allusion would take their place alongside issues of formal composition, functional fit, and constructional logic. In his introduction to the Beaux Arts show’s catalogue, Drexler admonished that “we would be well advised to examine our architectural pieties ‘in the light of an increased awareness and appreciation of the nature of architecture’ as it was understood in the nineteenth century.”
The Beaux Arts exhibition reminded us of the poverty of orthodox Modern architecture: trapped in the narcissism of its obsession with the process of its own making, sealed off from everyday experience and from high culture alike by its abstraction and the narrowing of its frame of reference within the Modern period to the canonical succession of events and images and personalities delimited by Giedion and Pevsner, and drained of energy as a result of a confusion between the values assigned to minimalism by a Mies van der Rohe with those assigned by an Emery Roth.
The work of the “Grays” presents certain strategies and attitudes that distinguish it from that of the “Whites.” These strategies include (in no particular order):
x The use of ornament. Though ornament is often the handmaiden of historical allusion, the decoration of the vertical plane need not be justified in historical or cultural terms; the decorated wall responds to an innate human need for elaboration and for the articulation of the building’s elements in relation to human scale.
x The manipulation of forms to introduce an explicit historical reference. This is not to be confused with the simplistic eclecticism that has too often in the past substituted pat, predigested typological imagery for more incisive analysis. The principle is rather that there are lessons to be learned from history as well as from technological innovation and behavioral science, that the history of buildings is the history of meaning in architecture. Moreover, for the Post-Modernist these lessons from history go beyond modes of spatial organization or structural expression to the heart of architecture itself: the relationship between form and shape and the meanings that particular shapes have assumed over the course of time. This Post- Modernist examination of historical precedent grows out of the conviction that appropriate references to historical architecture can enrich new work and thereby make it more familiar, accessible, and possibly even meaningful for the people who use buildings. It is, in short, a cue system that helps architects and users communicate better about their intentions.
x The conscious and eclectic utilization of the formal strategies of orthodox Modernism, together with the strategies of the pre-Modern period. Borrowing from forms and strategies of both orthodox Modernism and the architecture that preceded it, Post-Modernism declares the past-ness of both; as such it makes a clear distinction between the architecture of the Modern period, which emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century in western Europe, and that puritanical phase of the Modern period which we call the Modern Movement.
x The preference for incomplete or compromised geometries, voluntary distortion, and the recognition of growth of buildings over time. This is manifest in a marked preference for the Aalto of the fifties over the Corbusier of the twenties, for the plans of Lutyens over those of Voysey, and for the long love affair with the American Shingle Style of the nineteenth century. These preferences are paired with an architecture that appeals to Platonic geometry, particularly in its general composition. Thus, geometrically pure rooms are linked together in an unaccustomed manner and create larger and frankly hybrid forms, tied together visually by the envelope of the exterior walls. These hybrid forms are rarely perceptible at first glance. For lack of a more appropriate term, I would call this an “episodic composition,” which must be distinguished from the determinist composition of Modernist orthodoxy.
x The use of rich colors and various materials that effect a materialization of architecture’s imagery and perceptible qualities, as opposed to the materialization of technology and constructional systems that remain so overtly significant in brutalist architecture.
x The emphasis on intermediate spaces, that is, the “poches” of circulation, and on the borders, that is, on the thickness of the wall. From this comes an architecture made of spaces whose configuration is much more neutral and supple, from a functional point of view, than the so-called continuous spaces of the orthodox Modern Movement.
x The configuration of spaces in terms of light and view as well as of use.
x The adjustment of specific images charged with carrying the ideas of the building. It is thus possible for the architect to create simultaneously two premises or spatial units within one building or two buildings in a complex that do not resemble each other even if their compositional elements are the same. An attitude of this sort permits us to see the work of Eero Saarinen in a new light.
To return to the philosophical intentions of “Gray” architecture, the importance of the writings of Vincent Scully is evident: his vision of architecture as part of a larger whole, which is at the heart of the cultural formation of the “Grays” (many of whom were his students at Yale), often runs counter to arbitrary stylistic and cultural categories and puts a particular emphasis on the interrelationship of the building, the landscape, and culture. Scully has begun to influence not only architects but also historians like Neil Levine who, in his account of the Beaux Arts, assigns great importance to questions of communication and in particular to that of an architecture parlante. He has equally influenced George Hersey, whose studies on the associationism of mid-nineteenth-century English architecture make an important contribution to the philosophical foundation of the eclecticism emerging in the “Grays.”
Not surprising, then, that Hersey should have been a client for whom Venturi achieved one of his most stunning houses. One finds at the root of
the “gray” position a rejection of the anti-symbolic, anti-historical, hermetic and highly abstract architecture of orthodox Modernism. Grayness seeks to move toward an acceptance of diversity; it prefers hybrids to pure forms; it encourages multiple and simultaneous readings in its effort to heighten expressive content. The layering of space characteristic of much “gray” architecture finds its complement in the overlay of cultural and art-historical references in the elevations. For “gray’’ architecture, “more is more.”
“Gray” buildings have facades which tell stories. These facades are not the diaphanous veil of orthodox Modern architecture, nor are they the
affirmation of deep structural secrets. They are mediators between the building as a “real” construct and those allusions and perceptions necessary to put the building in closer touch with the place in which it is made and beliefs and dreams of the architects who designed it, the clients who paid for it, and the civilization which permitted it to be built; to make buildings, in short, landmarks of a culture capable of transcending transitory usefulness as functional accommodation. “Gray” buildings are very much of a time and place: they are not intended as ideal constructs of perfected order; they select from the past in order to comment on the present.
however, PPIE was (allegedly) the first world fair that used film for its promotion.After his work at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge travelled widely and gave numerous lectures and demonstrations of his still photography and primitive motion picture sequences. At the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Muybridge presented a series of lectures on the "Science of Animal Locomotion" in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition. He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public. The Hall was the first commercial movie theater.
Alexander Stirling Calder (sculptor, daddy)was born in Scotland, had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868
Alexander "Sandy" Calder (sculptor, son)In 1912, he (Alexander Stirling Calder) was named acting-chief (under Karl Bitter) of the sculpture program for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, a World's Fair to open in San Francisco, California, in February 1915. He obtained a studio in NYC and there employed the services of model Audrey Munson who posed for him – Star Maiden (1913–1915) – and a host of other artists. For the exposition, Calder completed three massive sculpture groups, The Nations of the East and The Nations of the West, which crowned triumphal arches, and a fountain group, The Fountain of Energy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... acy-theory
by Zach Mortice
Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture
On YouTube videos and Reddit boards, adherents of a bizarre conspiracy theory argue that everything you know about the history of architecture is wrong.
In 1908, architect Ernest Flagg completed the Singer Building in Lower Manhattan, a Beaux-Arts showstopper made for the Singer sewing machine company. From a wide base, a slender 27-story tower rose, topped by a mansard roof and a delicate lantern spire.
Every inch dripped with sumptuous detail inside and out; vaulted roofs, marble columns with bronze trim, window mullions with spiral fluting. The lobby was said to have a “celestial radiance.” A book was written just about its construction. For a year, it was the tallest building in the world at 612 feet, and a celebrated landmark for decades after that.
But not for too much longer. Despite its great height, the pencil-thin tower lacked office space. In the 1960s the company sold its ornate headquarters; demolition proceeded in 1967. It’s the tallest building to ever be peacefully demolished.
By any account, it’s a fantastical tale: Once the tallest building in the world and a New York icon, knocked down in just a handful of decades.
For some, it’s too fantastical to believe … or perhaps not fantastical enough. A dedicated group of YouTubers and Reddit posters see the Singer Building and countless other discarded pre-modern beauties and extant Beaux-Arts landmarks as artifacts of a globe-spanning civilization called the Tartarian Empire, which was somehow erased from the history books. Adherents of this theory believe these buildings to be the keys to a hidden past, clandestinely obscured by malevolent actors.
Who? Why? To what possible end? As in many other, more high-profile conspiracy theories, this baroque fantasy doesn’t offer much in the way of practical considerations, logic or evidence. But it’s grounded in some real anxieties, pointing toward the changes wrought by the modern world in general and modern architecture specifically — and rejecting both.
Tartaria rises
Tartarian-themed content is produced for YouTube videos that get picked over on Reddit. The r/Tartarianarchitecture sub, which began in December 2018, has 3,300 members, though not everyone who posts and comments appears to be a true believer. A larger and more general sub that appeared around the same time, r/Tartaria, has 8,700 members. As conspiracy theories go, Tartaria remains obscure; Twitter user @cinemashoebox brought it to many people’s attention last year with this thread, and pseudoscience-debunking writer Brian Dunning recently devoted an episode of his podcast, Skeptoid, to the Tartaria theory, which appears to have first emerged in 2016 and 2017.
The Tartaria storyline is not directly related to the adrenochrome-harvesting Satanic-pedophile cabal that lies at the heart of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that crashed into the real world in 2020. But it shares some of what Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in conspiracy theories, calls QAnon’s “cafeteria quality:” There’s no overarching narrative or single authorial voice interpreting events. It’s just a gusher of outlandish speculation; adherents can pick and choose which elements they want to sign on to.
The overall premise is an alternative history. A vast, technologically advanced “Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia or thereabouts, either influenced or built vast cities and infrastructure all over the world. (Tartaria, or Tartary, though never a coherent empire, was indeed a general term for north-central Asia.) Either via a sudden cataclysm or a steady antagonistic decline — and perhaps as recently as 100 years ago — Tartaria fell. Its great buildings were buried, and its history was erased. After this “great reset,” the few surviving examples of Tartarian architecture were falsely recast as the work of contemporary builders who could never have executed buildings of such grace and beauty, and subjected them to clumsy alterations.
“I think that it was one worldwide civilization,” says Joachim Skaar, a 26-year-old Norwegian who runs The Tartarian Meltdown YouTube channel. “It was all based on unity, oneness, peace, love, and harmony, which we don’t see in today’s society.”
There’s an arch-traditionalism present in the theory, too. The pre-modern buildings that we venerate are sometimes said to be more than 1,000 years old. “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” Skaar says.
Reached at his recording studio, Skaar, who works as a plumber, is not an architect or historian, but he has strong opinions on both disciplines. “We have two very different types of architecture,” he says. There’s modern architecture “with the name Brutalism,” which he describes as “square concrete boxes which are designed to be produced very fast, very cheap and very effective.”
And then there’s Tartarian architecture, a label that gets applied to anything that’s particularly ornate and pre-modern, encompassing many Western styles: Classical, Beaux-Arts, Second Empire. The term is also sometimes used for some non-Western structures, like the Taj Mahal. Structures that seem geographically or culturally dislocated, like the Beaux-Arts commercial buildings in Shanghai’s Bund district, are particularly attractive to this theory, as are those that are impressively massive, like the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China (built, the theory goes, by Tartarians to keep the Chinese out). Anywhere there’s a perceived gap between the refined craftwork of an old building and the “primitive” technology of the horse-and-buggy-era people building it, space for Tartarian speculation pops up.
American cities of the 19th century are often rich with Tartarian appropriation, especially the young settlements of the West, when grand public structures seemed to emerge from the wilderness, surrounded by wood hovels and muddy streets. State capitol buildings and city halls are frequently fingered as palaces of ancient Tartaria rather than Gilded Age municipal buildings. (These photos of the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines highlight the contrast Tartarian theorists point out.)
The Tartarian milieu is an intensely visual medium, occupied with riffing on photos and maps, picking out apparent inconsistencies and making one-off conjectures instead of weaving together comprehensive timelines. The theory is notably light on reasoning as to why and how the greatest cover-up in history was undertaken, but it does offer a few options for how Tartaria was erased and the great reset propagated. Many say that an apocalyptic mud flood buried its great buildings; some suggest the use of high-tech weaponry to tactically remove Tartarian infrastructure. A consistent theme is that warfare is an often-used pretext to wipe away surviving traces of Tartarian civilization, with the two world wars of the 20th century finishing work that may have begun with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
Despite their interest in architecture, most Tartaria theorists do not appear to have backgrounds in the building trades: Many of the more easily refuted arguments spring from very basic misunderstandings of how the built environment works, as well as broader confusion about how buildings function in the economy and culture. An abundance of posters appear convinced that below-grade basement windows in older buildings, for example, are evidence that the building had been “mud flooded,” and the rest of the structure is actually buried deep underground. Sometimes this will get some skeptical pushback (“I think they didn't have lights in the cellar so they build in windows for them?” was how one poster responded), but that’s more of an exception than the rule.
Similarly, their grasp of historic labor and material costs is shaky. Before the Industrial Revolution, labor was cheap, so paying artisans to sculpt elaborate masonry — even for relatively humble structures — wasn’t the great expense it seems today, when labor prices are higher and factory-made steel, concrete and glass is cheap; that’s why we see so much of these materials in buildings today, and so much less filigreed terra cotta. One of the most adamant denials in Tartarian circles is that public buildings like schools and post offices were ever built with monumental proportions and elegant aesthetics. They sneer at the wedding-cake-topper Second Empire buildings designed by Alfred Mullett after the Civil War, for example. “How many stamps did you sell to build yourself a post office like this?,” says popular Tartarian YouTuber JonLevi in one of his videos. “Absolutely ridiculous. The post office has always struggled.” (He has more than 100,000 subscribers.)
Some of this confusion is unfamiliarity: Mullett’s U.S. Customs House and Post Office in St. Louis, for example, was a huge federal project, built to process the mail of 10 states and four U.S. territories, not a neighborhood letter depot. But beyond that, there’s a broader refusal to believe that public architecture could ever have been built in an atmosphere of generosity and abundance. This is echoed by their astonishment at the double-height grand lobbies and arched doorways of old buildings, which they see as artifacts not meant for us. (Some theorists surmise that ancient Tartarians were giants.) The Tartarian community seems to have internalized the current era’s predilection for public sector austerity and the resulting aesthetics, which they abhor, more than they realize.
At its core, the theory reflects a fear of how quickly things change. As they look at today’s cityscapes, Tartaria believers see an eerie and alienating place, filled with abstract monoliths that emerged out of nowhere in a brief period of time. They’re skeptical of the rapid rise and development of the U.S., and even more suspicious of how quickly Modernism came to dominate the landscape. One favorite case study, useful for illustrating this aesthetic whiplash, is the grand domed Henry Ives Cobb Chicago Federal Building, built in 1905. Like the Singer Building, it was razed after just 60 years in favor of an icy black Mies van Der Rohe tower.
In one sense, the Tartaria theory is right: With modern architecture, a revolutionary new consensus on how the built environment should look and work did take hold in a very short period of time, conveniently overlapping with the world wars that these theorists see as the tail end of Tartaria’s influence. The world of 1960 indeed looked radically different from the world of 1920. Led by obscure and poorly understood forces (architects), architecture schools truly did throw out the history books to build a new world. But instead of making this excision the work of a colossal global mega-conspiracy worthy of a pulpy airport mystery novel, they wouldn’t shut up about it.
In the Tartarian worldview, we’re a society that doesn’t properly understand or value the built environment, because we’ve been misled about who really built it. When he’s decrying the lack of regard for the cultural legacy of old buildings, Skaar sounds less like a conspiracy theorist than a board member of a preservation nonprofit. “The problem is that people don’t recognize these buildings,” he says. “They walk past them all the time, and they’re fascinated, but they don’t think any more deeply about it. They don’t know what they’re looking at because they have been told something else.”
In search of a fabricated empire
This disregard for architecture’s “true” history moves into a wider rejection of how disposably cheap and commodified the culture at large seems to be. As such, one canonical belief of Tartarian aficionados is that the elaborate temporary pavilions built for late 19th century and early 20th century World’s Fairs were in fact Tartarian capital cities. It strikes them as improbably wasteful that anyone would erect these magnificent complexes, full of fluted columns, domes and pediments, out of plaster of Paris, hemp fiber, and straw, as was done for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. In Tartarian lore, these sites were ancient monuments that were co-opted to teach a falsified history of the world and make a few bucks selling popcorn and Ferris Wheel rides. Then they were demolished, to erase the handiwork of the real builders.
In pointing out the eradication of an ancient culture by an expanding imperial power, Tartarian believers again stumble on something real, but they scramble the protagonists. In the European colonial era, Western nations fanned out over the globe, subjugating and destabilizing numerous non-white civilizations — and building many examples of what’s now considered Tartarian architecture as celebration of these victories. But when YouTuber JonLevi marvels at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank and the rest of the 1920s banking infrastructure built along Shanghai’s Huangpu River, he doesn’t see the wealth-extracting handiwork of a rapacious 20th century empire: In the Tartaria-verse, these are the stately remnants of a far older and more benevolent one. The theory posits that only Tartarians, not British bankers or Belgian rubber barons, could move culture like architecture across geography.
“You see these capital domes all over the world, which, to me, proves that the same people built everywhere,” says Skaar.
Bastion star forts are another building type that Tartarians are obsessed with: They often point out that these cannon-resistant military fortifications, popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, are found all over Western Europe, like Portugal and the Netherlands, but also quite mysteriously, far away in Asia, in Sri Lanka. But since Sri Lanka was a Portuguese and Dutch colony, it’s not really very mysterious. Military historian Jeremy Black, author of two books on the history of fortifications, says that the geographic reoccurrence of the style reflects how effective Europeans were in spreading this technology across the globe.
This ahistoricism can make the Tartarian architecture community occasionally receptive to reactionaries, racists and anti-Semites. A survey of videos and discussions will turn up all manner of other conspiratorial threads. Along with flat-Earth advocacy, anti-vaccination sentiments and 5G scaremongering, there’s talk of anti-Semitic banking cartel conspiracies and Holocaust denial. Some Tartarian histories recast populations of Central Asia, like Genghis Kahn’s Mongol Empire, as red-haired, blue-eyed, white people — “Silk Road Aryans.”
The persistence of anti-Jewish tropes within current conspiracy theories is likely the result of cultural inertia, says UC-Irvine scholar Ditto. As successive generations of the conspiracy-minded seek evidence to back up their diverging worldview, they find it in texts that may go back centuries, which are riddled with anti-Semitism.
But the face of the villains in the Tartarian narrative is not clearly defined. Skaar blames quasi-mystical “parasites” who thrive off pain and strife, and laments that contemporary life has become a place where “everything is based on tyranny, greed, and slavery.” The Tartaria commentariat is laced with economic discontent; they often decry the evaluation and disregard of buildings purely as salable commodities, untethered from broader notions of cultural legacy and achievement. There’s a reoccurring and implicit understanding that buildings, like the Singer Building, get torn down when they stop making money — the only thing that really matters — and that the world is a vast field of predation, where the rich and powerful consume the poor and weak.
In fact, the governing ideology of the modern architecture that Tartarians despise was a critique of this system. Modernism argued for an egalitarian architecture that would help break the shackles of the past, rejecting backbreaking representational craftsmanship to honor omnipotent kings and divine beings in favor of simple, universal forms that would leverage restraint and efficacy into a broad uplift for the masses. Minus the weirdest stuff — the global mud flood, the ancient energy weapons, the vanished race of giants — the Tartaria theory is just an extreme form of aesthetic moralism, the idea that traditional architecture styles are inherently good and modern architecture is the product of a degenerate culture.
The tastes of the community generally align with traditional architectural revival proponents (some of whom also embrace reactionary and white nationalist politics). This sort of aesthetic nativism flourished during the Trump era, and it appears to have fresh converts in Congress: Recently, representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar formed a new caucus dedicated to “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.” The language is different, but the sentiment wouldn’t appear out of place in r/Tartaria.
Holding back a flood of conspiracies
Though the Tartarian Empire seemed to wink into existence in the past few years, the themes its believers explore are familiar ones. Conspiracy theories are a way to channel restive populism in the face of rapid social and demographic change, Ditto says, and there’s plenty of that going around. They are also a way to gather up amorphous fears and put them in a specific place, to make them more manageable. Ditto calls this “over-intentionalization.
“If your fate is controlled by impersonal, systemic forces, it doesn’t offer you much control over your own destiny,” he says. “But if you can localize it to a small group of people whose motives you understand — they are out to get you — then it at least offers some hope that you can overcome their malevolent intentions.”
Belief in conspiracy theories can also be driven by loneliness, isolation and economic hardship, which made a pandemic a fertile Petri dish, and helped QAnon’s believers storm the Capitol by force and through the ballot box. The social atomization forced on us by Covid-19 is a hyperbolic retelling of the Tower of Babel (which has a special place in Tartarian lore) and its attendant anxiety at fracturing and divided cultures. The great reset that erased that tower — and the fabulous, fictional empire that built it — continues to reverberate, splintering us into ever-stranger factions.
And Ditto says it does seem like reality is getting harder to decipher. The internet has made it easier to disseminate misinformation while eroding faith in the media hierarchies that once filtered it out. Polarization and a lack of trust in government and institutions creates a feedback loop, where leaders can’t solve problems because their political bases are too narrow, and the resulting failures engender more distrust. It’s not a new cycle — despite a spike in media attention, there’s not much evidence that conspiratorial thinking is more common now than in years past — but technology can make these currents of collective delusion more powerful, and harder to ignore.
The basic human desires for community, stories (the more outrageous the better) and the need to feel like a protagonist in a wider struggle are what pulls us from moments of real social, economic and cultural dislocation into fabricated histories. Buildings and cities are made to grow old, to outlast people, and to be a testament to these cultural histories. They’re a yardstick for a culture’s ability to endure. When they’re not given the chance to do this, the contradiction can break something loose, and send people scavenging for cultural memory that feels ancient enough to anchor them in an uncertain now.
i sense "The Other Side" (by Alfred Kubin) vibes.“Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia
Tartaria - San Francisco - Mud Floods - Panama-Pacific International Expohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847 ... Other_Side
The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Perle, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconscious. Or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'.
Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was one of the major graphic artists of the 20th century who was widely known for his illustrations of writers of the fantastic such as Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink and Edgar Allan Poe. In his combination of the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque, in his evocations of dream and nightmare, his creation of an atmosphere of mystery and fear he resembles Mervyn Peake.
"I know what you did, so leave me alone."
Also interesting to note is Jackson's art for the 'Dangerous' album cover as well, filled with symbolism & I believe a story of our past.
Jackson had over 10 000 books at Neverland Ranch and many of them are what about what we go over in this group.
Most his videos and music are basically him vs the masonics or the cult at the to of the pyramid (they are the ones who killed him) He does sprinkle a little bit of truth and hints there though. I noticed in the original "leave me alone" video at the start there was an islamic mosque, and latter in the video the mosque disappeared when the giant michael started destroying everything (he saved the mosque from destruction?). But in the video that is on michael jackson's official youtube channel the mosque was not there at all, it was covered up or cut (by the cult) from the side of the video. Also in the original black or white video (the long version) you see michael destroying some symbols, and at the end he does a counter clock-wise 7 times and sits down on his knees, (reference to Muslims circling around the kaaba 7 times and praying), and the "Royal" sign behind him burns and falls. In conclusion, whatever michael has to do with islam, and his constant insults and call-outs on the cult, its defenitly worth cheking out and investigating.
You folks are on the right track. I'll post pic of the dangerous album cover which will be easy to view and decode.
Damn you beat me to it, I was planning on making a thread similar to this last year but with a different setting. in the movie Ghosts Michael Jackson and his disfigured ghosts are seen in a giant ass house. and don’t get me wrong I don’t have hate for the guy but since November I’ve been tryna decode that video and in a certain scene Michael Jackson turns into a Giant and I’m talking about 8 feet to 10 feet tall. after that scene he goes inside the man throat and posses him. when you’re a high class celebrity you’re going to see stuff the public has yet to see. and the Ghosts and Leave Me Alone were very very EYE TELLING
That video is filled with Masonic messaging as well, the floor tiling for example. Michael was hella deep with his creativity, so deep it got him murdered.
I don't really see it. He's a giant under an amusement park who gets up and destroys it. Lots of symbols. I think MJ was possibly born female and might still be alive. Prince's death was probably a hoax. I think Prince is alive and changed roles into being his "sister."
https://rawvision.com/news/josep-pujiul ... -1937-2016
Internationally-renowned art environment builder Josep Pujiula i Vila died suddenly of a heart attack on the morning of June 2, 2016. He was 79 years old.
Beginning in the 1970s, Pujiula built a series of monumental open-work structures out of willow branches and found objects in a wooded area just west of the village of Argelaguer, in the Pyrenean foothills of Catalunya. But because he didn’t build on his own property, again and again he ran into challenges with authorities from the municipality, the electrical company, and the agencies in charge of water, electricity and highways. Responding to their demands, he destroyed and then rebuilt four complete art environments in this area; each one unique, but each also utilising what became his iconic material and motif: arched tunnels created from the flexible branches of the saplings found by the nearby Fluvià River. He lashed these slim limbs together to erect numerous towers reaching 40 meters (130+ feet) high, and labyrinths that curved around the hillsides, snaking up and stretching over a kilometre in length. Shelters, passageways strung 20 meters (65 feet) in the air, stairways, and bridges added to the complexity of the maze.
In the last 15 years, Pujiula also constructed a lyrical fountain area from concrete and iron, increasing the durability of his work and the immortality of his name. Hugging the hillside and ornamented with kinetic steel and stone sculptures, these cascading ponds finished in a natural pool below.
Most recently, he hacked out his own “Pharaonic Tomb” from the rocky hillside with simple hand tools, covering the exterior façade as well as the interior walls with hieroglyphics that represented images from his life.
Finally, after decades of fighting the authorities, in October 2014 Pujiula’s site was officially recognised as a local heritage site – a worthy recipient of county funding and support. In summer 2015 he was a finalist for the International Award for Public Art, representing all of Europe including the Russian Federation. He was flown down to New Zealand for the award ceremony, his first major trip beyond Catalunya.
In recent weeks, Pujiula manifested a creative explosion that astonished his family. “He was thinking only about building”, his son-in-law told me three weeks ago, “as if it would be the last act and legacy of his life.”
https://rawvision.com/articles/josep-pujiula-i-vila
...For almost twenty years, a spectacular art environment had been rising alongside a curve in the shallow Fluviá river in northwestern Catalunya, Spain. Nestled among the medieval villages of La Garroxta, this fantastic sprawling construction at once harmonized and collided with the well-worn stones, deep valleys, and verdant volcanic landscape of the local surroundings. Locally known as a ‘wild park’ (parc salvatge) or ‘wild village’ (poblat salvatge), the seven soaring towers, innumerable bridges, shelters, and walkways, and, above all, a labyrinth, 1.5 kilometers long, had all been created by the labor of Josep Pujiula i Vila. The entire intricate construction covered more than one hectare of land, and the towers soared some 30 meters high, jauntily capped by Catalan flags and banners. It had been an unaffected open-air sanctuary, a devilishly enjoyable maze, the ‘Sagrada Familia of Art Brut’, in an appropriate aesthetic and conceptual reference to one of Spain’s most recognizable architectural treasures, Barcelona’s cathedral, designed by Antoni Gaudí.
Yet on June 18, 2002, Pujiula began the process of dismantling his work, the result of a meeting held the week before with representatives of the Generalitat of Catalunya and the mayor of Argelaguer, the owner of the land upon which Pujiula had – illegally – built his masterpiece. The mayor and his family were concerned about public safety, particularly the possibility of visitors being hurt while climbing on the structures. Pujiula’s wife and daughter shared these concerns. The provincial government’s Department of Public Works (MOPU) has also been improving the infrastructure of roads and public buildings throughout the region, and it determined that National Route 260 must be slightly rerouted and widened to eliminate a dangerous c.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lab ... ep-pujiula
JOSEP PUJIULA I VILA WAS at odds with the government. The former Spanish textile worker had actually been in opposition to the government for over 30 years, since he began working on creating his own amazing city out of natural landscape.
In 1980, Pujiula i Vila began by crafting a labyrinth alongside the Fluvia, a river in Catalonia, Spain. After creating his initial labyrinth, he began to make other structures in the area as well. Pujiula made towers out of branches and trees stretching 30 meters into the air. He coiled wood into tube-like tunnels and walkways and he even made a small livable cabin.
As his world grew, the community took notice. Families came there with their children to solve the labyrinth and wander through the woodsy environment. Sadly, there were not only curious visitors to his creation. Along with wonderstruck children and their parents, came homeless people sleeping in the cabin, vandals and worst of all, the Spanish government.
Inspecting the area, which was built on public land, the government quickly deemed Pujiula i Vila’s homemade park a dangerous environment. Over growing concern for visitor safety, he was pushed toward dismantling his work. Although safety was seen as a pretext for government action on the land, officials also wanted to use the land to create a new highway.
In 2002, they got their wish and Pujiula i Vila took apart his creation to make room for government roads. While he was beaten by the government fair and square, he refused to give up. Shortly after, he began to create a similar site near his previous work.
Although not quite as grand as his wonderland, he never gave up on his dream. Slowly, he worked to rebuild it, and a masterful tubed walkway and tower stand as a monument to his perseverance and architectural skill.
Pujiula i Vila passed in June 2016. Since, some of his works have been taken down. The labyrinth still retains many fantastical tower structures, walkways, and tunnels full of creepy items and carvings.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... learn-why/
Neuroscientists Learn Why Some People Like Surprises
Even if you think you don't like surprises, your brain does, according to a study published in this week's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Scientists from Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine set out to identify the biological reasons for why some people enjoy the unexpected. They used a machine to squirt either fruit juice or water into the mouths of test subjects-sometimes predictably, sometimes unpredictably-and recorded the participants' reactions. Meanwhile functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recorded changes in the subjects' brain activity.
"Until recently, scientists assumed that the neural reward pathways, which act as high-speed Internet connections to the pleasure centers of the brain, responded to what people like," Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine explains. "However, when we tested this idea in brain scanning experiments, we found that reward pathways responded much more strongly to the unexpectedness of stimuli instead of their pleasurable effects." In other words, the subjects' brains were more active when they were exposed to the unanticipated.
"We find that so-called pleasure centers in the brain do not react equally to any pleasurable substance, but instead react more strongly when the pleasures are unexpected," Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns adds. "This means that the brain finds unexpected pleasures more rewarding than expected ones, and it may have little to do with what people say they like."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Towers
The climax of the 1976 blaxploitation movie Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde takes place at the towers.
https://youtu.be/1Y_4NjQ2XmQ?t=277
The 1991 movie Ricochet, starring Denzel Washington, climaxes with Denzel's character swinging on the towers.
https://youtu.be/SLzDDyjQW-8
The 1993 movie Menace II Society shows the towers at the beginning of the 1993 introduction.
https://youtu.be/7lNtm3tCSho
The 2016 movie La La Land shows the film's main characters visiting the towers in a montage sequence.
https://youtu.be/puLfYRobgQc?t=82
In the 1967 movie Good Times, Sonny & Cher danced around in one of the towers.
https://youtu.be/G4Q0rPw-kwg?t=77
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Build_the_Tower
I BUILD THE TOWER has been praised by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns as "wonderful, lyrical and compelling", and by film critic Leonard Maltin as "heartfelt and fascinating... a real discovery".
and whoever will not have enough, he/she can also watch THE SECRET LIFE OF EDWARD JAMES (Patrick Boyle, 1978)I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;
therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,
surrounded by the forests, the great green gloom
of trees my only gloom – and the sound, the sound of green.
Here amid the warmth of the rain, what might have been
is resolved into the tenderness of a tall doom
who says: 'You did your best, rest' – and after you the bloom
of what you loved and planted still will whisper what you mean.
And the ghosts of the birds I loved, will attend me each a friend;
like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.
You, through the trees, shall hear them, long after the end
calling me beyond the river. For the cries of birds
continue, as – defended by the cortege of their wings –
my soul among strange silences yet sings.
