GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

As I said, here is where you make the jump to metaphysics....
Souls in stones! Ha!
Of course few sane individuals aspire to a universal synthesis, and the
urge to generate a "system" to organize one's response to all possible
questions must fail at best, or be a monstrous political/philosophical
disease at worst.  Does holding such an opinion make me modern? or
post-modern, or post-pre-modern?  About the best one hopes for is a
local synthesis, and the most interesting buildings, to me at least,
are those that suggest or promote a legible and humane order within a
complex and changing context, and perform this ticklish trick while
making the context itself look *good*.  Venturi and Scott-Brown sum
this up, ambiguously, in the phrase "making more of what's there." 
Good karma, one brick at a time... The important thing is to have some
idea of what joy might be, and to try to increase the sum available to
others.

Mark

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> >> 
> >> >> OK:
> >> >> epistemological question - what is the world like?
> >> >
> >> > Look around as carefully as you know how, suspending judgement
> for
> >> a
> >> > while...
> >> >
> >> >> ontological question - which (and whose) world is this?
> >> >
> >> > Why *this* one, uh, ours.
> >>
> >> There's the jump into postmodernism. My world isn't yours, or
> perhaps
> >> is,
> >> but might not be.
> >
> > And *there* is the jump into metaphysics, which a week ago y'all
> were
> > trying to transend...
> 
> Not at all. There is a jump into a realisation that that rational and
> pragmatic world handed down to us by Plato and Science and the
> Enlightenment
> is perhaps more of an abstraction or hoax, and a convenient and
> self-serving
> one at that, than all of metaphysics and what-all crackpot theories
> put
> together. Sure, it's a lump of luke-warm rock wobbling around a big
> hot
> vaguely-spherical gas blob thingy, and there are lakes and birds and
> cars
> and stuff on it, but it's not within the human ken (or barbie for
> that
> matter) to comprehend and intuitively or intellectually synthesise
> the
> universal totality of everything all at once. One can never be sure
> that one
> is spot on, and there simply isn't any room for error when you start
> to
> design rules and systems and syntaxes and load-bearing walls to
> account for
> and regulate this totality. The best we can ever do is approximate
> (cf. pi).
> 
> There are still peoples for whom there is a Soul in ev'ry Stone, so
> to
> speak, and in every creature and tree, for whom the heavens contain,
> well, a
> Heaven or Heavens, and you, or I, or Venturi, cannot speak for them
> and
> their relationship with this our world which is *their* world, too,
> and
> *not* ours at the same time that it *is* ours in that pragmatic
> Realpolitik
> sense of which you speak. In the best of all possible worlds there
> would be
> all possible worlds ...


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