Atdtda22: [43.8i] Work is work, however you look at it, 633-634

[Monte Davis]

Mark Kohut sez:
 
> TRP, with an architecture joke, saying more about the results of
rationality 
> in the world we have inherited?..... 
 
> I know next to nothing about architecture, but I have felt, amidst high,
rectilinear 
> "modern' glass buildings that there is no "there there" as that phrase
goes...   I 
> can't say it about a Cathedral from centuries ago..... 
 
Not unrelated to that Roger Fry passage that Paul quoted, with its last
line: "If everything [in the designed environment] were merely clean and
serviceable [the average man] would proclaim the place bare and
uncomfortable."
 
I think this is P's dig in the ribs for many of the "purist" tendencies of
modernism, including (paradoxically) the most austere functionalism in
architecture. It's the triumph of the meta, in which the reception of a
built/painted/sculpted/written artifact -- how it makes its way in the world
-- becomes secondary to how perfectly it embodies a theory, how many
articles and seminars it inspires, and whether or not it portends the Next
Big Thing.
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