Morning brooding . . .
Below is an edited version of a conversation I had via email this morning with my important teach at Auburn, Robert Faust:
I am writing to him in response to his thoughts on our planned rendezvous this weekend at Auburn. A reunion of sorts, and a time for Bob and me and a few others to reflect on where we have been, our paths over the last forty-five years, and how we got to where we are now . . .
Bob,
I read your email again this morning before breakfast, from my usual sunrise brooding spot in the corner of my living room, sitting in my Eames chair. (This chair, always desired and only purchased, finally, a few years ago, has always represented for me, when I look at it, some curious memory of my early years of considering architecture as a way of considering the world.) (As I read your words and thought about them, I turned my head and made a picture, attached – above – for your consideration of my morning drift.)
I then made some notes in response to what you wrote. I will offer some of those here, though you may hear them again soon. These thoughts are somewhat random:
☛ I believe my first recognition – and it was a true epiphany – at Auburn of a direction for making, truly making in the way you frame the question, Bob, came to me somewhere during my fourth year at Auburn, in conversation with my classmate Glenn Currie (in your absence as my teacher, Bob, I probably learned more from Glenn than anyone else at Auburn). Glenn advised me that the impulse to architecture exists in what he called the second look. That is, that we move every instant through a swamp of images, absorbing what we can. Suddenly one image appears, arrests our attention (and he demonstrated in gestures) which stops us in our tracks. We turn briefly away, then suddenly turn back, to look again. It is in that turn, that second look (and here he turned his head to fix this idea in my culpable yet still impressionable twenty-year-old brain) that architecture exists.
☛ My second such epiphany (yes, there is often a long dry spell between true epiphanies) came to me twelve years later, in my first masters’ studio at Harvard (I had done my apprenticing and had my own practice for six years in Mississippi before for some mad reason I decided to go to graduate school) when my great teacher Stanley Tigerman said to me and my fellow travelers, on our first meeting day: “Life is fabulous. If only architecture could be more like it.” Stanley’s gauntlet went through me like a red heat, and has never left me since.
☛ Maybe in some semblance to the thinking of Herb Greene, Adrian Stokes has inspired me through the years. Stokes said that art (architecture – architecture being, as Auburn teacher Robert Samuelson first said to me, the mother of all art) is a form of externalization. I took this externalization as necessarily following Currie’s second look and Tigerman’s great wish as the prerequisite internalizations of living an observant life. Attentive architects observe the world as a dazzling, mystifying panoply of enchantments. Those architects worthy of the name see the enchantments of the world as what must surely be answers to infinite questions, from the quite commonplace to the primordial, and the nature of their making must then be the attempt, never ending, never satisfied, to make concrete not the answers, but the questions.
☛ My most important teacher at Harvard, not unlike Currie at Auburn, was my dear friend and classmate Douglas Darden (who died in 1996), who admonished me to never forget (and admonished me quite literally until the day he died): “Architecture can never touch bottom.”
☛ Darden’s essentialist thought echoes that of perhaps the first teacher of my adulthood, William Faulkner: “If you ever got it right, you’d have nothing left to do but slit your wrists.”
☛ I’ll close this morning’s drifting with a thought on my continuing self-doubtings, this one being, why I did not accept offers from several STARchitets to work with them, so that I too could become a STARchitect. The response to what seems to me my general refusal to accomplish such a thing comes from E.B. White: “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
These are the kinds of things I think about when I sit cuddled in my mornings in Charles Eames's leather and plywood arms, and which I may talk about during our show and tell this weekend . . .
Morning brooding . . .
Below is an edited version of a conversation I had via email this morning with my important teach at Auburn, Robert Faust:
I am writing to him in response to his thoughts on our planned rendezvous this weekend at Auburn. A reunion of sorts, and a time for Bob and me and a few others to reflect on where we have been, our paths over the last forty-five years, and how we got to where we are now . . .
Bob,
I read your email again this morning before breakfast, from my usual sunrise brooding spot in the corner of my living room, sitting in my Eames chair. (This chair, always desired and only purchased, finally, a few years ago, has always represented for me, when I look at it, some curious memory of my early years of considering architecture as a way of considering the world.) (As I read your words and thought about them, I turned my head and made a picture, attached – above – for your consideration of my morning drift.)
I then made some notes in response to what you wrote. I will offer some of those here, though you may hear them again soon. These thoughts are somewhat random:
☛ I believe my first recognition – and it was a true epiphany – at Auburn of a direction for making, truly making in the way you frame the question, Bob, came to me somewhere during my fourth year at Auburn, in conversation with my classmate Glenn Currie (in your absence as my teacher, Bob, I probably learned more from Glenn than anyone else at Auburn). Glenn advised me that the impulse to architecture exists in what he called the second look. That is, that we move every instant through a swamp of images, absorbing what we can. Suddenly one image appears, arrests our attention (and he demonstrated in gestures) which stops us in our tracks. We turn briefly away, then suddenly turn back, to look again. It is in that turn, that second look (and here he turned his head to fix this idea in my culpable yet still impressionable twenty-year-old brain) that architecture exists.
☛ My second such epiphany (yes, there is often a long dry spell between true epiphanies) came to me twelve years later, in my first masters’ studio at Harvard (I had done my apprenticing and had my own practice for six years in Mississippi before for some mad reason I decided to go to graduate school) when my great teacher Stanley Tigerman said to me and my fellow travelers, on our first meeting day: “Life is fabulous. If only architecture could be more like it.” Stanley’s gauntlet went through me like a red heat, and has never left me since.
☛ Maybe in some semblance to the thinking of Herb Greene, Adrian Stokes has inspired me through the years. Stokes said that art (architecture – architecture being, as Auburn teacher Robert Samuelson first said to me, the mother of all art) is a form of externalization. I took this externalization as necessarily following Currie’s second look and Tigerman’s great wish as the prerequisite internalizations of living an observant life. Attentive architects observe the world as a dazzling, mystifying panoply of enchantments. Those architects worthy of the name see the enchantments of the world as what must surely be answers to infinite questions, from the quite commonplace to the primordial, and the nature of their making must then be the attempt, never ending, never satisfied, to make concrete not the answers, but the questions.
☛ My most important teacher at Harvard, not unlike Currie at Auburn, was my dear friend and classmate Douglas Darden (who died in 1996), who admonished me to never forget (and admonished me quite literally until the day he died): “Architecture can never touch bottom.”
☛ Darden’s essentialist thought echoes that of perhaps the first teacher of my adulthood, William Faulkner: “If you ever got it right, you’d have nothing left to do but slit your wrists.”
☛ I’ll close this morning’s drifting with a thought on my continuing self-doubtings, this one being, why I did not accept offers from several STARchitets to work with them, so that I too could become a STARchitect. The response to what seems to me my general refusal to accomplish such a thing comes from E.B. White: “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
These are the kinds of things I think about when I sit cuddled in my mornings in Charles Eames's leather and plywood arms, and which I may talk about during our show and tell this weekend . . .