Pinter

Harold Pinter, playwright, 1930 - 2008.

He put meaning in what is not there.

Pause.

Pinter inserted a clearing, full of meaning, into the verbiage of our lives.

His evacuation to Cornwall and Reading from London during 1940 and 1941 before and during the Blitz and facing "the life-and-death intensity of daily experience" at that time influenced him profoundly. "His prime memories of evacuation today [circa 1994] are of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works" (Billington, Harold Pinter). - Wikipedia

Inwardness

He does not care foremost about appearances. We are always looking at what's inside. At the interior.

We all should look inside ourselves.

Quotes to help explain

Meister Eckhart 14th c German mystic.

"There's a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no creative thing can touch."

Irish Poet John O'Donohue:

What that means is there's "a place where there is a tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer, and spirituality and love, is now and again to visit that kind of inner sanctuary."

Eckhart:

Gd becomes, and Gd unbecomes.

John O'Donohue explains: Gd is only our name for it. And the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be Gd.

Quotes to help explain

-Irish poet John O'Donohue:

"It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you."

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"The visible world is the first shoreline of the invisible world"

"The body is in the soul, not the soul just in the body. And in some way the poignancy of being a human being is that you are the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way."

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John O'Donohue on Beauty:

"We feel most alive in the presence of beauty. It returns us to our highest selves. A neglect of beauty is at the heart of our deepest modern crises....

"Beauty is not a luxury, but I think it ennobles the heart, and reminds us of the infinity that is within us."

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"What we're afraid of is not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us."

-Nelson Mandela

Mies' favorite Mieses

From a TIME magazine interview:
(published around 1966)

Mies singled out from a lifetime's work his half-dozen favorite buildings. In order, they are:

> Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall, a single glass-walled room, measuring 120 ft. by 220 ft. and spanned by four huge trusses. The structure simply encloses an envelope of space; the functions within can be changed by shifting movable partitions.

> The Chicago Federal Center, still under construction, and Mies's largest complex of high-and low-rise buildings.

> Manhattan's Seagram Building, the skyscraper city's most tranquil and most costly tower.

> Chicago's 860 Lake Shore Drive apartments, his dramatic demonstration of open planning for tall apartment living behind all-glass facades.

>The project for a Chicago Convention Hall where 50,000 people could gather in unobstructed space beneath a gigantic trussed roof 720 ft. square.

> The German Pavilion (since destroyed) in Barcelona's 1929 International Exposition, a jewel-case structure employing the open planning first developed by Frank Lloyd Wright that combined the richness of bronze, chrome, steel and glass with free-standing walls.

Read the interview.

"A Style of Our Time" - in the first half of the 19th c.

"More than anything, the architectural discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century was conditioned by the problem of self-expression: how to conceive and craft a 'style of our time.'
...
The debate rested on two related assumptions. First, it relied on a notion of style understood as the relative character of time and place. Second, it presupposed that history could be seen as a succession of epochs that evolve according to laws and manifest themselves by means of style."

Mari Hvattum
Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism
pp. 149-150

Goethe - "It is a living whole"

The Gothic cathedral, in its overall composition as well as its most minute detail formed a harmonious, purposeful unity, indeed an organic whole. (1)

"This...is the only true art. It becomes active through inner, unified, particular and independent feeling, unadorned by, indeed unaware of, all foreign elements,...it is a living whole."

(1) Mari Hvattum

Goethe - appear both natural and beyond nature

The highest form of imitation is

"for an artist to penetrate into the depths of things as well as into the depths of his own soul, so as to produce in his works not only something light and superficially effective, but, as the rival of nature, something spiritually organic, and to give it a content and a form by which it appears both natural and beyond nature."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Introduction to Propylaen

Vitruvius, Laugier, Mies

Vitruvius relates the orders to human proportion. Laugier's origin theory evoked an architecture that represented nothing but its own structural principle.
-Mari Hvattum

Mies unites the two by emphasizing architecture's structural principle and human proportion.

Laugier's method gives clarity

I asked myself how to account for my own feelings and wanted to know why one thing delighted me and another only pleased me, why i found one disagreeable, another unbearable. At first this search led only to obscurity and uncertainty. Yet I was not discouraged; I sounded the abyss until I thought I had discovered the bottom and did not cease to ask my soul until it had given me a satisfactory answer. Suddenly a bright light appeared before my eyes. I saw objects distinctly where I had only caught a glimpse of haze and clouds.
- Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769) Essai

look up

An equally lonely search for 'clear and distinct' truths had been described by Descartes more than 100 years before. - Mari Hvattum

Laugier on simplicity

"Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendours of architecture ever conceived have been modelled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of the first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved." - Marc Antoine Laugier (1713-1769)

"Allegory of Architecture Returning to its Natural Model"

Charles Eisen
frontispiece to M.-A. Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture

Like Schinkel's Altes Museum.

Crown Hall is
on a plinth.

One room school house

Crown Hall

Aufklärung

In German the word for the Enlightment is der Aufklärung. Klär as in clear. That's a virtue. As in Alles klar! - Everything is clear, everything is understood, everything is allright.
--
Clear glass. Clarity of space.

Semper

Semper saw art as an inscrutable source and symbol of meaning; yet at the same time, he tried to render this source into a transparent and accessible object for the science-historian.
-Mari Hvattum
"Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism"

--
As is Crown Hall