architecture WAS Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

> some good subject matter is the "Picturesque"
> English landscape tradition - followed by Capability Brown and the other
> landscape architects of the 1800's. The idea was that you would populate your
> large country estate full of Greek temples, ruined castles, pagodas, pyramids,
> etc,  placed amongst trees, so as not to be viewed all at once. The experience
> of walking the estate would be that of discovery, and the discovery would be
all
> the world's cultures, represented architecturally. The estate owners had
> generally done the Grand Tour of greater Europe, as it was called, and the
> garden worked on several levels: it worked as a visual "photo album" memory
> trigger, it showed off to others where the owner had been, but most
importantly,
> it symbolised the Victorian ideal of compartmentalising and collecting, and
thus
> taming and making safe the . As an aside, these garden estates also had their
> fences concealed in large ditches below general ground level, called
mini-hahas
> (yes!). This gave the impression that the owner's land stretched on forever.

The British Empah, on which the sun never set ...

It had a lot to do with wealth, status and ostentation, but it was mainly
about ownership I think. The landed gentry built these mazes and fake ruins
and follies as a display of their cosmopolitanism but it was also a
statement about the pre-eminence of England and English culture. All the
treasures of the world were simply theirs for the taking -- exotic spices
from the Far East, liveried servants from the Indies, wild animals from
Africa, the Elgin Marbles -- and all the cultures of the world were viewed
as inferior, subservient, merely to be appropriated and transplanted to the
English countryside as decorative appurtenances, or colonialised and
converted, subsumed at will to the greater glory of the Empire.

The incredible decadence of the era is exemplified in William Beckford,
whose Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire was a huge country house done up in
ecclesiastical garb. At Beckford's insistence the Gothic monstrosity with
its gigantic 280 foot tower was constructed at insane speed in the late
1790s, with up to 600 men working day and night by the light of huge
bonfires. In 1825 when the tower collapsed (apparently the specified
foundations had not been laid) Beckford was at his London club: when told of
the calamity, he simply regretted that he had not been there to witness the
spectacle.

http://www.headstrong.demon.co.uk/fonthill.htm
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/single_image/0,5716,1610+asmbly_id
,00.html
http://www.hum.gu.se/~litwww/Fonthill.html

The 'Picturesque' tradition was directly descended from Walpole -- the
Gothic Revival in architecture and the Gothic Novel. The era also saw the
advent of literary hoaxers like Thomas Chatterton ('Thomas Rowley') and
James MacPherson (the 'Ossian' poems), the emergence of Romanticism and the
concept of the sublime, and, of course, King Lud and those transvestite
Luddites -- all very Pynchonesque, too.

I think there is an ironic attitude in the reification of these impulses and
styles in postmodern literature and architecture which wasn't there in the
originals. I'm not sure if this makes it more or less decadent, however;
something which probably needs to be gauged on a case by case basis.

best


----------
>From: pporteous at worley.co.nz
>To: "Dave Monroe" <monroe at mpm.edu>, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: architecture WAS Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Tue, Jul 4, 2000, 1:40 PM
>