Bad and ugly architecture in Greece
democracystreet.blogspot.com/search?q=despoiling
www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d68273!2d19...
Long ago while picking up for a Shropshire farmer, rough shooting on the moors above Strathnairn, I sat in the heather chatting with his wife, and I asked how she thought the world would end - by our hand or nature's? "Our world you mean?" "Yes I suppose I do," "When it's all been discovered," "So we're nearly there".
Now that Everest has to be regularly cleared of visitor’s rubbish and cruise ships visit Captain Scott country; you know where you are in the Amazon to six metres using SatNav (OK it's satellite imagery that exposes predatory cattle ranching on rain forest), and the world’s on Googlemap, this chase for the 'unspoiled' is becoming outmoded - though it keeps metropolitan travel touts employed, along with all those academics researching the marketability of destination. We’re moving on - from commodified discovery to how we share an earth we're despoiling. At times I am enveloped in a venomous detestation of things seen, sharing in Evelyn Waugh's misanthropy at the hand of man on the land, at:
'... the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounds all English experience in this century and any understanding of the immediate past…incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is accepted as a dominant condition, sometimes for mere sentimental apathy, sometimes poisoning love of country and of neighbours.'
Given a moment to reflect, I'm not of that deep green conviction that hates the human race, consciously or unconsciously wishing it out of the picture.
'The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence.'
I agree with these words of J B Jackson, an American who thought about landscape all his life. I also agree, almost fervently, with those lines in Matthew Arnold's greatest poem, whose near final lines make the same point about the impotency of landscape as a source of human consolation or joy:
'...the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...'
It's way, I suppose, of saying that if Lin and I quarrel, no landscape will join us - though gazing over the olive groves across the ageless Kerkyra Sea to the dappled uplands of Epirus provides opportunity for making peace; even cues for my better self. Friends came to supper; he from the estuary end of Essex, she a Corfiot born in the village where they live - a cluster of lights we glimpse at night astride a rise between us and the southern Pantokrator. Their company office overlooks the plataea, near the family taverna, opposite a fine town house, used as Wehrmacht HQ during the Occupation, next to a house of many cats owned by the old musician who advised us not to buy a traditional piano - “unless you re-tune it weekly in the heat and humidity” – and found us a good electronic substitute.
Our friends have a benign rule about building or restoring houses on the island which, if observed, might do more than any other to reduce the spread of unattractive building everywhere. “Build what you like, how you like, but think of the effect of your work on other people’s views”. For their business, they employ workmen conscientious about their craft. Our once leaky roof is proof. The new one made by their people, done in three days last February at fair cost, has kept the house dry through the rainiest of winters. They’ve no wish to impose views on anyone, except those they employ. “You can’t resist human nature – especially on a small island”, but I wonder if you can't try to arrive at an understanding among neighbours, that they respect other’s subjectivity when building, while local government can, in making rules and giving guidance to builders and their clients, strive to maintain this principle of thinking about other's views when creating one's own.
This simple principle was formulated because so frequently and blatantly ignored. Thus, an entrepreneur knowing the potential of a sublime panorama, defaces it for those not paying to gaze on it from the windows of their multi-floored concrete box, or another, seeing the same scene, sets up a beach restaurant whose tacky front becomes invisible to customers sat inside; and others construct, on a green mountain ridge, an extended line of ill-proportioned apartments and villas from which residents - temporary and permanent - can look down on a heart stopping landscape of sea and cliffs, patchworked with shifting shades and colours beneath the changing sky. This aggregation of unlovely buildings, accurately christened ‘Beautiful View’, blights that view for those who pass below. Or perhaps one of the worst breaches of the principle - no longer permitted in Corfu - multi-floored hotels stacked on headlands affording guests panoramas for miles around, blighting the shoreline for everyone else. Our friends’ principle is universal. It's disobeyed globally; so that when I see a certain place - and they exist everywhere, sometimes where least expected – my heart warms with affection and respect for those who've recognised, protected, recreated or recovered a genius loci. Thus gazing down at our distant reflections in the clear well in the courtyard of the church and monastery above Paleokastritsa I felt that all could be well if humans could create, respect and maintain such a place - one of the cracks between the concrete we humans spread so enthusiastically on the earth. On leaving we thanked the two dames, chatting as they worked, tending plants with deft hands, for stewardship that might save us. I realise that nearly all our friends on Corfu, if not on boats, live inside villages - Ano Korakiana itself, Agios Ioannis, Temploni, Skripero, Ayios Markos and Corfu town.
Friendship is far too important to be inhibited by address, but just as a good friend with a sturdy 4X4 gets teased by me and gives as good as he takes by chaffing me for flying when I'm not on my bicycle, I shall tease those friends who contribute to urban sprawl by buying and building houses outside the island's traditional settlements. "One advantage of the current economic down-turn" said one friend, advocate of the principle praised here, "is that that kind of thing may be slowed down." To look at the problem in context - how can government or civil society slow down the spread of isolated villas or cloned estates of ticky-tak on the remains of Corfu's green countryside when wealth which once came from olives, oranges, lemons, sheep, goats, milk, cheese, meat and wool now comes, primarily, from the space it provides for a house. So great is the contrast between the return on produce and the return on concrete, that some will even set fire to the trees that get in the way of laying the latter. This human problem should not be seen as an Hellenic issue - though it will be the decisions of Greek politicians, for better or worse, that will be engraved on the historic record. When it comes to bulldozing olive groves, individuals make economic choices to benefit themselves and their families in a global market for houses in Greece.
democracystreet.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/think-of-effect-of...
Bad and ugly architecture in Greece
democracystreet.blogspot.com/search?q=despoiling
www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d68273!2d19...
Long ago while picking up for a Shropshire farmer, rough shooting on the moors above Strathnairn, I sat in the heather chatting with his wife, and I asked how she thought the world would end - by our hand or nature's? "Our world you mean?" "Yes I suppose I do," "When it's all been discovered," "So we're nearly there".
Now that Everest has to be regularly cleared of visitor’s rubbish and cruise ships visit Captain Scott country; you know where you are in the Amazon to six metres using SatNav (OK it's satellite imagery that exposes predatory cattle ranching on rain forest), and the world’s on Googlemap, this chase for the 'unspoiled' is becoming outmoded - though it keeps metropolitan travel touts employed, along with all those academics researching the marketability of destination. We’re moving on - from commodified discovery to how we share an earth we're despoiling. At times I am enveloped in a venomous detestation of things seen, sharing in Evelyn Waugh's misanthropy at the hand of man on the land, at:
'... the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounds all English experience in this century and any understanding of the immediate past…incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is accepted as a dominant condition, sometimes for mere sentimental apathy, sometimes poisoning love of country and of neighbours.'
Given a moment to reflect, I'm not of that deep green conviction that hates the human race, consciously or unconsciously wishing it out of the picture.
'The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence.'
I agree with these words of J B Jackson, an American who thought about landscape all his life. I also agree, almost fervently, with those lines in Matthew Arnold's greatest poem, whose near final lines make the same point about the impotency of landscape as a source of human consolation or joy:
'...the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...'
It's way, I suppose, of saying that if Lin and I quarrel, no landscape will join us - though gazing over the olive groves across the ageless Kerkyra Sea to the dappled uplands of Epirus provides opportunity for making peace; even cues for my better self. Friends came to supper; he from the estuary end of Essex, she a Corfiot born in the village where they live - a cluster of lights we glimpse at night astride a rise between us and the southern Pantokrator. Their company office overlooks the plataea, near the family taverna, opposite a fine town house, used as Wehrmacht HQ during the Occupation, next to a house of many cats owned by the old musician who advised us not to buy a traditional piano - “unless you re-tune it weekly in the heat and humidity” – and found us a good electronic substitute.
Our friends have a benign rule about building or restoring houses on the island which, if observed, might do more than any other to reduce the spread of unattractive building everywhere. “Build what you like, how you like, but think of the effect of your work on other people’s views”. For their business, they employ workmen conscientious about their craft. Our once leaky roof is proof. The new one made by their people, done in three days last February at fair cost, has kept the house dry through the rainiest of winters. They’ve no wish to impose views on anyone, except those they employ. “You can’t resist human nature – especially on a small island”, but I wonder if you can't try to arrive at an understanding among neighbours, that they respect other’s subjectivity when building, while local government can, in making rules and giving guidance to builders and their clients, strive to maintain this principle of thinking about other's views when creating one's own.
This simple principle was formulated because so frequently and blatantly ignored. Thus, an entrepreneur knowing the potential of a sublime panorama, defaces it for those not paying to gaze on it from the windows of their multi-floored concrete box, or another, seeing the same scene, sets up a beach restaurant whose tacky front becomes invisible to customers sat inside; and others construct, on a green mountain ridge, an extended line of ill-proportioned apartments and villas from which residents - temporary and permanent - can look down on a heart stopping landscape of sea and cliffs, patchworked with shifting shades and colours beneath the changing sky. This aggregation of unlovely buildings, accurately christened ‘Beautiful View’, blights that view for those who pass below. Or perhaps one of the worst breaches of the principle - no longer permitted in Corfu - multi-floored hotels stacked on headlands affording guests panoramas for miles around, blighting the shoreline for everyone else. Our friends’ principle is universal. It's disobeyed globally; so that when I see a certain place - and they exist everywhere, sometimes where least expected – my heart warms with affection and respect for those who've recognised, protected, recreated or recovered a genius loci. Thus gazing down at our distant reflections in the clear well in the courtyard of the church and monastery above Paleokastritsa I felt that all could be well if humans could create, respect and maintain such a place - one of the cracks between the concrete we humans spread so enthusiastically on the earth. On leaving we thanked the two dames, chatting as they worked, tending plants with deft hands, for stewardship that might save us. I realise that nearly all our friends on Corfu, if not on boats, live inside villages - Ano Korakiana itself, Agios Ioannis, Temploni, Skripero, Ayios Markos and Corfu town.
Friendship is far too important to be inhibited by address, but just as a good friend with a sturdy 4X4 gets teased by me and gives as good as he takes by chaffing me for flying when I'm not on my bicycle, I shall tease those friends who contribute to urban sprawl by buying and building houses outside the island's traditional settlements. "One advantage of the current economic down-turn" said one friend, advocate of the principle praised here, "is that that kind of thing may be slowed down." To look at the problem in context - how can government or civil society slow down the spread of isolated villas or cloned estates of ticky-tak on the remains of Corfu's green countryside when wealth which once came from olives, oranges, lemons, sheep, goats, milk, cheese, meat and wool now comes, primarily, from the space it provides for a house. So great is the contrast between the return on produce and the return on concrete, that some will even set fire to the trees that get in the way of laying the latter. This human problem should not be seen as an Hellenic issue - though it will be the decisions of Greek politicians, for better or worse, that will be engraved on the historic record. When it comes to bulldozing olive groves, individuals make economic choices to benefit themselves and their families in a global market for houses in Greece.
democracystreet.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/think-of-effect-of...