Modernism @ MindSay

Once, in Dublin, I beheld a sign painted on the closed shutters of a building marked "Civil Arts Inquiry" and this is what it said:

ART CHANGES PEOPLE
PEOPLE CHANGE THE WORLD

I agree with this. I think this is why it is important to create art. A song on a lonely road, a night at the cinema, a painting that captured the imagination; these things change people in a major way. And that changes the world: oh, how it changes us . . .

Here's the other side of the shuttered doors:

WE ARE DOING NEW WORK
AND THAT IS OUR
DOWNFALL

Now, the whole point of modernism is not really too much of anything definable excepting that it breaks from its past in a major, groundbreaking way. That's how the oddly geometrical, cubist paintings came out, how E.E. Cummings could be so hideously irreverent, and how Ezra Pound could mix a thousand myths and feel like he didn't have to explain himself. It was new and it was shocking.

Was. It was new.

Reactions to modernism can also be considered modernist even if nothing else in their philosophies agrees with another. Gerard Manley Hopkins' reaction was to retreat to an even more ancient past, to early strains of the English language. Was that modernist? There are other questions to this, too; how big of a break does it have to be? does it just have to do with style or is it thought also? a mixture of the two, perhaps?

I've always operated under the principle that there really is nothing new under the sun, and that thought colors my perspective on most subjects; these stenciled shutters make sense to me, though.  

We consistently try to find truth and show it to others in a way that will reach them where they are. We try to disarm and dismay people with our swords of truth and beauty (and whatever other principles we stand for at the moment). That happens in art--from Titian to Picasso--but the newness wears off, becomes faded and shabby. Who is shocked by Andy Warhol's bright Marilyn Monroe pictures now? What is it to us to pick up a copy of Walt Whitman's writhing, hot verses?

I wonder, sometimes, whether my work is also my downfall. No, no, no; it isn't. I'm not writing new things. I'm writing for people to know the truth--I'm writing for them to want the best for other people. I'm writing to help people understand why other people do things. And humanity is humanity the world round; my writing will be culturally dated, it will be stylistically accounted for and conceptually mundane, but I will change the world in my own small-but-maybe-artistic way. I am doing real work, and that is my salvation.

Or just to at least label your country as "Advanced".

1. True equality for all citizens
2. A higher education system with open access for everyone that can compete anywhere in the world
3. Free quality health care for everyone
4. Well-rounded education, free, for all children, ensuring they are raised to think critically and are well-versed in the history of the world leading up to this particular point in time.
5. Housing
6. An understanding that one is part of the environment and must respect it. Less a focus on harnessing of resources, more a focus on integrating within the environment, ensuring as little disruption as possible, and preservation of resources for future generations.
7. A plan to help other nations (who want to) find their way to prosperity that builds on these same tenets, and incorporates new ones as they are discovered (perhaps an idea or way of being arising from the same nation one is helping!)
8. Openness in understanding that the spiritual path is often unique to the individual, seems to have infinite  entry points, and looks a little different for everyone.
9. Cohesiveness within one's social group, state, nation, and within the world coupled with forward planning for recovery effort in the face of natural or man-made disasters.
10. Profound respect for life and all its stages: birth, childhood, initiation to adulthood, sexuality, marriage or union, child-rearing and family relationships, aging, disease, and death.

Got more? Add 'em!

A turn-up for the books
By Edwin Heathcote
June 10 2005 09:51
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/883841ae-d7dd-11d9-8fa7-00000e2511c8.html

“The universe (which others call the library)” is the opening line of 
one of Jorge Luis Borges’ best-known stories. “The Library of Babel” 
strides straight into the equation of the library with the known 
world. For Borges, the library was a cipher for knowledge and for the 
human mind itself. The semi-mythical library at Alexandria, founded 
by Ptolemy in 260BC, was said to contain all the knowledge in the 
world, written on more than half a million scrolls.

Similar claims are now made for the internet: that ultimately all 
information (note the change from knowledge to information) will be 
stored electronically and be accessible at the touch of a key. For 
now, though, we still need books. Google anything with a whiff of 
intellect and it will direct you to a bookseller’s website or a 
bibliography. Our current, absurdly random, searches remain a world 
away from that idealised cyber-library - until books are surpassed, 
we will need libraries.

In an increasingly commercialised and privatised civic realm, 
libraries remain the most public of public buildings. In a seemingly 
extraordinary twist of fate, just as their demise is being 
prophesied, so library building is enjoying one of its greatest and 
most wilfully eclectic periods. With a radical megastructure in 
Seattle, the home of information technology, a new monument in 
Alexandria and a slew of sleek and architecturally sophisticated 
reinterpretations of that seemingly most moribund and dreary of 
buildings, the municipal library is arguably the most vibrant area of 
contemporary architecture.

What we are seeing is a major shift based on a radical rereading of 
our relationships with books and with information. The internet has 
seen knowledge (or at least information) break free of architecture. 
Where there is a terminal, a laptop, or a BlackBerry, information 
flows - yet the book, the journal and the newspaper survive and, in 
some case, thrive.

With every new technology come the jeremiads - every new advance 
entails the death of the past. “The book will kill the edifice... “ 
proclaimed the archdeacon in Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 
“ ...printing will destroy architecture.” The cathedrals of 
Quasimodo’s era had been stories in stone, mountains of graphic and 
sculptural information for the illiterate masses. The Reformation 
encouraged reading of the Bible and the abandonment of the Latin 
mass, and, as it did, the art of reading architecture was lost, as 
completely as the knowledge of Alexandria. But architecture survived.

Libraries will survive, too, not only because books will always be 
there but because they are pivotal centres of the community, the last 
bastions of the public realm and, crucially, because they are symbols 
of democracy. No society can be truly free unless it makes not only 
the knowledge of the surrounding world but also its own records 
available to its citizens. Library architecture is, and always has 
been, a symbol of the way society views itself - or would like to see 
itself.

The library developed from the big Babylonian warehouse, storing clay 
tablets through the decorated columbaria of the classical world, in 
which earthenware jars holding scrolls were stored in wall niches. 
With the collapse of Roman civic society the responsibility for 
manuscripts fell to the Church. This shift from secular to religious 
is fundamental, because the holy texts - the raison d’etre of these 
libraries - were holy of themselves. The cathedrals of the middle 
ages held books in secure carrels, which developed into the familiar 
unit of desk, chair, shelves and window in which St Jerome appears in 
Renaissance paintings - and which is as applicable to sitting at a 
terminal as it is to reading a book.

Libraries returned to the secular realm with the establishment of 
universities. With the Renaissance the familiar library halls 
emerged, although with the books chained to lecterns in the aisles, 
and the memory of the book’s spiritual value survived. The advent of 
the printing press from the 16th century made books more available 
and more plentiful. Rather than the few hundred sparse volumes of 
even the biggest institution, private libraries could contain 
thousands of books. With this new abundance, books began to line, to 
obscure and to subsume the walls, so that the structure appeared to 
be the spines of thousands of volumes.

The new libraries were built on the word, on language and literature. 
The Enlightenment reinforced the importance of learning, the 
authority of reference books (Johnson’s Dictionary, Diderot’s 
Encyclopedia) and the arrival of the novel. It also reinforced the 
library as a symbol of democracy, with access for all.

In the visionary designs of Etienne Louis Boullee for a French Royal 
Library (1785), the library interior became a structural terrace, a 
huge volume of volumes dwarfing toga-clad users, like cells in a huge 
brain. The logical step from here was to use the mind itself as the 
model. The dome, representing both cranium and the infinity of the 
heavens, became the omnipresent motif. The twin engines of 19th-
century library design, the British Museum Reading Room (1854-57) in 
London and Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale (1865-68), were based 
around domes. These rooms celebrated knowledge but also national 
identity - nationhood through text and literature. The British Museum 
Reading Room was a perfect sphere of knowledge at the heart of the 
world’s greatest museum. It was the culmination of a notion of an 
ordered world, of catalogued exhibits and books, a grand survey from 
an imperial perspective.

Modernism smashed all that. Modern physics and science, increasing 
specialisation and a rejection of the imperial narrative led to a 
more fragmented and organic architecture. The domed, circular reading 
room implies a knowable world, centred, finite and complete, viewed 
from a single privileged point. With Modernism and Post-Modernism 
that confidence broke down. Hans Scharoun’s free-flowing Berlin 
library, begun in 1967, was a reaction to Prussian and Nazi 
stolidity, and to the symmetrical perfection of earlier libraries; 
his is a new world view of books as liberating, not containing, of 
text opening up new perspectives. Sir Colin St John Wilson’s complex 
and wonderful British Library, Britain’s first major new public 
building since the early 1950s, somehow managed to develop these 
notions despite inconceivable adversity; though Paris’s new 
Bibliotheque Nationale has returned to a more rigid symbolic realm, 
its impractical hothouse glass towers standing like open books at the 
corners of an imperiously raised plinth.

The extraordinary new Central Library in Seattle ups the pace. A huge 
building with enormous civic presence, its architect, Rem Koolhaas, 
has built a structure that competes with the mall in terms of scale 
and theatre. The circulation through the glass structure spirals 
upwards past bookstacks containing 780,000 titles, working through 
the Dewey Decimal System as it goes from 000 to 999 - it is literally 
built around the classification of books. Koolhaas presents us with 
the library as a marketplace for knowledge, what he refers to as “the 
last public institution”, but infected with the aesthetics and ideas 
of corporate capitalism. He conceives the building as a space of 
competition between the different types of media.

The structure is both a critique of contemporary urban space (setting 
up, as does the mall, internal streets, plazas and marketplaces) and 
eloquent riposte to reports of a death greatly exaggerated. It is a 
parasite, the last outpost of social responsibility juxtaposed 
against its corporate neighbour, Microsoft, and the semi-
dysfunctional US downtown.

In London, David Adjaye is also playing with the conflict between 
public space and corporatisation, via an exercise in branding. He is 
creating a series of “Idea Stores” in Tower Hamlets, the plan being 
to reintegrate the libraries of one of Britain’s poorest boroughs 
into its teeming streets. By placing the new buildings in prominent 
shopping centres and using the language of retail, it is hoped 
libraries will again become centres of community as people are 
seduced into Adjaye’s sleek, thoughtfully designed spaces. These new 
libraries become communication centres: e-mails can be sent, contacts 
kept, advice given. The library attracts people by offering web 
access and DVD rental, and hopes to smuggle in books almost by 
stealth. The success of the first Idea Store in Bow, designed by 
Bisset Adams, suggests the approach is working; the second in 
Whitechapel, by Adjaye, is almost complete.

Abalos Herreros’ exquisite Usera Library in Madrid is one of the 
finest of recent years. It uses thick shutters to close out the 
bright light that appears like open books, while the irregular slot 
openings in the facade are placed to resemble the spines on a shelf. 
Meanwhile, the world-dominating architects of Tate Modern, Herzog de 
Meuron, recently completed an extraordinary library in Cottbus, 
Germany with an amorphous plan. This is the diametric opposite of 
their rational library in their native Basle, in which a web of 
photos and press cuttings combines to create a powerful, complex 
facade, screen-printed into the concrete and glass.

McCullough Mulvin Architects, based in Dublin, have built two 
sophisticated libraries at Trinity College and Waterford, both 
intelligently integrated into the historic urban fabric; while Rab 
Bennett’s recently completed Brighton library represents a rare 
successful PFI initiative. Even old Alexandria has an updated, if 
slightly cheesy, library, a hieroglyph-coated cylinder designed by 
Snohetta of Norway.

There is perhaps no other field of architecture displaying this blend 
of intense activity and intellectual and aesthetic achievement. Yet, 
unlike art museums or theatres, libraries rarely become the kind of 
icons that attract what has tediously become known as the “Bilbao 
effect”.

Questions are always being asked about their future. What form will 
libraries take? Will they still be here? Perhaps these are the wrong 
questions and the concern is misguided. In the UK, spending on 
libraries has increased in recent years. Although the number of book 
issues is slowly falling, the number of library visits has risen 
(currently 323 million a year). This suggests that libraries remain 
important. And they survive as places of free resort - there is no 
pressure to consume. For the old, the lonely and the derelict there 
is an equality and a dignity to be found in the library that cannot 
be found elsewhere. It is crucial to preserve these most public 
places. In a country with a rotten climate and negligible culture of 
external public space, libraries become piazzas - more about people 
than about books.

But the most frequently asked question is that prompted by the 
information revolution. Panic sets in as we begin to believe our own 
hyperbole about computers destroying our need for human contact - 
surely libraries cannot survive the online onslaught? It is easy to 
forget that in its 3,000-year history the library has already adapted 
to extremely diverse forms of media - from scrolls to illuminated 
manuscripts, from books to newspapers, through microfiches and on to 
CDs, each of which would have been a culture shock to the previous 
generation. What is happening is that as our libraries become more 
dependent on IT than on books, our interactions are increasingly 
being made through cyberspace, not physical space.

Cyberspace is nowhere - it is the ether. To compensate, the library 
must be made into somewhere, and that task falls to architects. It is 
an irony that at a time when books are being marginalised, library 
buildings are becoming more important. In our increasingly 
privatised, commercialised environment, the library is growing in 
status as the final outpost of knowledge (versus information), public 
(versus private) and real (versus cyber) space. In a post-industrial 
age all that is left is information. If that information is power, 
libraries should be power stations, not dreary municipal outposts - 
they need to fulfil Borges’ vision as the mirrors to the universe.