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

Dave Monroe monroe at mpm.edu
Tue Jul 4 07:40:56 CDT 2000


... ah, thank you, couldn't recall Beckford's name.  As I recall--though keep in
mind that my recollection is not what it should be--there's a nice essay on him (the
author of which I can't recall, either) in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds.,
Museum Culture: Histories Discourses, Spectacles ... will forward further info. when
I get a chance to get home, check the shelves ... but "the" sublime is a particular
interest of mine, any thoughts on the sublime in Pynchon, the Pynchonian sublime,
anybody?  Let me know ...

jbor wrote:

> 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.




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