What is worth knowing 2 (newsletter from the hotel architecture)
I just came back from walking in the thin drizzle here in North Wales. A delight to put on a raincoat here. The weekend snow has finally disappeared from the hills, and there is a promise of warmer weather. Though nothing like Texas. I have been writing most of the last two weeks,
so the Glenlivet whisky has remained relatively untouched. I guess you are all off on spring break now polishing up the narratives that tell us about each other in ways we never thought we could. I'd like to tell you all about the book I am writing right now called 'Architecture or Life',
but I guess it will have to wait until it is published next year. It is about the Finnish architect
Reima Pietila with whom I spent off and on nearly 20 years. I decided to write about an architect's mind: the meanderings, the routes he took to convince people of his work, or the stories he told, the inventions, the chaotic musings. It will be drafted by the time I return to seminar class in early April. Here, for example is an extract of the way he thought.
It is a piece from my journal kept about our meetings in the crucial year 1989. Enjoy spring break. I will be in Paris for the weekend and will try and send you a mail from a cybercafe
or Beaubourg. Though I have been to Paris many times, this time it is like the first time.
The thrill is immeasurable. We dream Bataille's 'impossible' into reality and we will, I promise, take a 'calvados' for you all!
7.4.1989 “guidelines not credos.. .not the Marxist way…I cannot say what rules are good, what rules are bad…. A return to history will save us…. I am much more naïve like a real animal…someone asks me what is ‘transcendental’ but I am unable to understand it in a proper way.” ………..There is often a pause between these sentences, the statements he makes. Breathing pauses, I think. Or re-thinking pauses, a chance to deflect or alter the thought as it emerges from the mind and makes its way out into the public. Strange but we don’t speak of this. I think back to the Dipoli manifesto. The challenge on good taste. Really, Dipoli is the summa of all his thinking. This was why I came to this country, it is what I have ended up with and it is what I will take away. Or is this completely wrong: a grand cognitive illusion; the alibi for my own life, nothing to do with architecture at all? “I am changing my opinion about matters so fast that some of my recent ‘letters’ are now out of date…Ålander used to say that Pietilä has no permanent principles…but I am very consequent…is that how to say it…about changing my mind…” This sums him up. To be serious about how the mind changes, how one changes one’s mind...to know at least this. I think of this as Pietilä’s anti-machine. “The Steiner school uses the literal metaphor, the image…Wright uses process and Corb….Corb used both...process and image. It’s the word realm I am interested in. Regionalism is too complex for me…local is better. When I mix images I do it chaotically, not in any ordinary way…I always have done.”
Then came one of his dialogue-stopping lines. His attempt to keep the conversation going suddenly comes to a stop. “K is trapped in such things as ‘transcendentalism. I have no problem with this because elks do not have any transcendental ideas…” Elks with no transcendental ideas! I laugh. He laughs too. The rules of this unruliness force us into a rather wild laughter. Yet there is a painful reality behind this continuous talk and I let the laughter subside. He continues: “certain times of the year, certain aesthetics are not acceptable…a kind of deconstruction…the building is there but it does not exist...existing means that one can compose such and such whereas the Graeco-Roman idea of existence…” He trails off. The hand seeks something. It begins to draw the word in thin air, shaping it. “What is it then? I cannot imagine something existing. Using other ways to think destroys K. (Who is K? Why did I not ask?) I must rely on the non-verbal, things I cannot see or touch but I am convinced they are there somehow….like a hunter always in the present and aware of the present before it becomes visible, that zone between the future and the past which we no longer call the present…this is Pietilä’s thinking machine, a strange idea in grammar…the ‘sanamaa’.”
I remember this Finnish word, sana=word: maa=land. It has come up very often over the years. The word-world, the realm of the word, and the land of words: I remember Hollo’s translated lines of the poet Haaviko:
We fly
Against the door-jamb
Of the air
The air
Weeps for us
We were the King’s bowmen
We are leaves on the trees
The leaves
Touch air
Not heavy
Like the king’s treasure
We go
Trees
Into the reddening glow.
Good or bad translation, good or bad fiction. I would award the Nobel Prize to Haavikko and I dream of that ceremony and the curmudgeon finally recognised.
After this, nothing stops; Pietilä continues disrobing, undressing his own words, his own text, his own thinking. The machine is unstoppable.
so the Glenlivet whisky has remained relatively untouched. I guess you are all off on spring break now polishing up the narratives that tell us about each other in ways we never thought we could. I'd like to tell you all about the book I am writing right now called 'Architecture or Life',
but I guess it will have to wait until it is published next year. It is about the Finnish architect
Reima Pietila with whom I spent off and on nearly 20 years. I decided to write about an architect's mind: the meanderings, the routes he took to convince people of his work, or the stories he told, the inventions, the chaotic musings. It will be drafted by the time I return to seminar class in early April. Here, for example is an extract of the way he thought.
It is a piece from my journal kept about our meetings in the crucial year 1989. Enjoy spring break. I will be in Paris for the weekend and will try and send you a mail from a cybercafe
or Beaubourg. Though I have been to Paris many times, this time it is like the first time.
The thrill is immeasurable. We dream Bataille's 'impossible' into reality and we will, I promise, take a 'calvados' for you all!
7.4.1989 “guidelines not credos.. .not the Marxist way…I cannot say what rules are good, what rules are bad…. A return to history will save us…. I am much more naïve like a real animal…someone asks me what is ‘transcendental’ but I am unable to understand it in a proper way.” ………..There is often a pause between these sentences, the statements he makes. Breathing pauses, I think. Or re-thinking pauses, a chance to deflect or alter the thought as it emerges from the mind and makes its way out into the public. Strange but we don’t speak of this. I think back to the Dipoli manifesto. The challenge on good taste. Really, Dipoli is the summa of all his thinking. This was why I came to this country, it is what I have ended up with and it is what I will take away. Or is this completely wrong: a grand cognitive illusion; the alibi for my own life, nothing to do with architecture at all? “I am changing my opinion about matters so fast that some of my recent ‘letters’ are now out of date…Ålander used to say that Pietilä has no permanent principles…but I am very consequent…is that how to say it…about changing my mind…” This sums him up. To be serious about how the mind changes, how one changes one’s mind...to know at least this. I think of this as Pietilä’s anti-machine. “The Steiner school uses the literal metaphor, the image…Wright uses process and Corb….Corb used both...process and image. It’s the word realm I am interested in. Regionalism is too complex for me…local is better. When I mix images I do it chaotically, not in any ordinary way…I always have done.”
Then came one of his dialogue-stopping lines. His attempt to keep the conversation going suddenly comes to a stop. “K is trapped in such things as ‘transcendentalism. I have no problem with this because elks do not have any transcendental ideas…” Elks with no transcendental ideas! I laugh. He laughs too. The rules of this unruliness force us into a rather wild laughter. Yet there is a painful reality behind this continuous talk and I let the laughter subside. He continues: “certain times of the year, certain aesthetics are not acceptable…a kind of deconstruction…the building is there but it does not exist...existing means that one can compose such and such whereas the Graeco-Roman idea of existence…” He trails off. The hand seeks something. It begins to draw the word in thin air, shaping it. “What is it then? I cannot imagine something existing. Using other ways to think destroys K. (Who is K? Why did I not ask?) I must rely on the non-verbal, things I cannot see or touch but I am convinced they are there somehow….like a hunter always in the present and aware of the present before it becomes visible, that zone between the future and the past which we no longer call the present…this is Pietilä’s thinking machine, a strange idea in grammar…the ‘sanamaa’.”
I remember this Finnish word, sana=word: maa=land. It has come up very often over the years. The word-world, the realm of the word, and the land of words: I remember Hollo’s translated lines of the poet Haaviko:
We fly
Against the door-jamb
Of the air
The air
Weeps for us
We were the King’s bowmen
We are leaves on the trees
The leaves
Touch air
Not heavy
Like the king’s treasure
We go
Trees
Into the reddening glow.
Good or bad translation, good or bad fiction. I would award the Nobel Prize to Haavikko and I dream of that ceremony and the curmudgeon finally recognised.
After this, nothing stops; Pietilä continues disrobing, undressing his own words, his own text, his own thinking. The machine is unstoppable.
posted by frank heron at 7:52 AM
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