Hi! I haven't been here for a while because I decided not to write until I have something to say.
This time I found this wonderful piece of art: La Folia. It's an early music piece coming from Spain and it was rewritten and  performed in countless variations across the Europe. We architects should learn from it. It's about creating different patterns coming from one initial phrase played in the beginning. Countless variations, just like in the streets of European cities.



Performed by Jordi Savall.

Let's have a look what happened to our cities in the 20h century. Massive metastatic disease of inferior urbanism spread around old city cores irreversibly destroying the space. The effect was so big that 90-80% of urban area is occupied by inferior urbanism. While designing them man was reduced to a number, car got the advantage over pedestrians, bureaucratic space zoning was widely used and many unsustainable suburbs where created. Such a shortsigthed worldview. There has not been a place on earth untouched by this approach. Everybody knows it was a bad thing except the architectural elite. They call it revolutionary.

Here are four examples from the four sides of Europe. They all used to be lovely towns.

Indigo color represents the old core, regulated by organic intuition, strong hierarchy, adapted to the pedestrian, compact area with a charm.

Yellow mostly represents the 20th century, regulated but inferior urbanism, no hierarchy, advantage of car over pedestrian.

Orange represents highly unregulated space or illegal construction.

London, Great Britain

A big city. The core is surrounded whit endless terraced housing. They follow the contour of the streets, but they have no hierarchy. It's an endless sprawl.
UK is the place where tradition and modernity mix sometimes very well. Traditional urbanism is practiced there which is so rare in Europe today. Together Prince Charles and architect Leon Krier also launched the construcition of the famous Poundbury. The result? Even if their designs are often accepted by the locals the Prince is being mocked every day for what he is and Leon Krier is ignored completely by the profession.

Lisabon, Portugal

The Mediterranean. New parts of the town are scattered all around the landscape. You must use the car. It is opposite of the traditional dense Mediterranean city.
Portugal was the host of the New School of Architecture and Urbanism in Viseu, which was a part of Catholic University of Portugal and which promoted traditional urbanism. The school lasted from 2001 until 2004 when it's program was violently interrupted by the totalitarian modernist clicque. They could not stand the different point of view on architecture. I wonder what happened to their eyes?

Zagreb, Croatia

Once a lovely and multicultural Central European town (Agram) it has become an urbanist failure of the 20th century. The people here decided to completely forget their Slavic and Austria-Hungary roots and embraced an universal modernist approach mixed with illegal construction. This is how they consciously created the unmistakable flavour of ugliness that characterizes the new parts of the city.
The perspective? While the architects give awards to each other on an annual basis the government has decided to legalize the illegal construction. How stupid can a man become.

Dresden, Germany

Used to be a beautiful city on the Elbe river until WWII reduced it to rubble. It was reconstructed in the spirit of the 20th century but evidently from the map all those workers' settlements don't have the intuition to build the city the right way. But there is some hope - today the city core is unexpectedly being rebuilt in the old style though Germany is the homeland of Bauhaus school. Several blocks and Frauenkirche are already finished and hopefully much more. Who knows how far will they go, but at least there is some hope for the Continent.

drawing by Joaquin Lorda

I have stumbled upon this wonderful website of the University of Navarra which contains some lessons on classical architecture written for Spanish students. It covers the main principles, lots of building types and some famous treatises on architecture. The literature has also been specified so you can explore beyond the website. 

What I liked the most are those drawings in the first chapter, lesson 5. 3. Level two: the outlines. Here you can see a great idea in which each part of the image contains the entire picture. It is definitely not just about  the design, it represents a certain worldview represented by many traditional teachings and contemporary scientists like David Bohm and Benoit Mandelbrot.

Wikipedia Creative Commons

I'd like to start our review of traditional European architecture with affordable housing. Very often today it becomes a sterile and brutal place were poor are supposed to live while the authorities think they've done their best they can to help them. It has not always been so.

In 16th century Augsburg, Germany, a merchant called Jakob Fugger the Rich founded this social housing enclave to help the needy citezens. A noble idea - and it is still in use today! While the urban plan is organic but quite schematic the main value of this settlement except being cheap is that it actually has quite some charm. It makes a life more humane - it goes beyond function. Small number of floors and urban density mixed with picturesque roofs and gables makes it a pedestrian friendly place and even a model for social housing today. If you build it beautifully you will love it after 500 years. Not the case with modern social housing.

A map

A typical unit

Hi! I'd like to post some examples of traditional european architecture both urban and rural on this blog. By "traditional" I mean that of all social classes. Before I do that we must have a look at this map of cultural landscape in Europe which I will always refer to so that we see how the influences mix together. There are different opinions and criteria and not everything can be shown in one map but this is a general overview (a mixture of climate, geography and culture/architecture) of a cultural landscape that mostly influenced architecture during the past 2000 years in Europe. Finally you must know that this is an amateur map so if you have some suggestions of how to improve it and you think your part of the world has been neglected be free to write some comments.

Hi! I hope the "smart talk" in my recent posts is not too much for you. Today I will show you something worse which reminds me of the vocabulary of many arhchitects who try to sell their desing. They are called bullshit generators - just click and you'll get a pointless fancy phrase:


http://www.ruderal.com/bullshit/bullshit.htm
http://www.m3ntalcontraband.com/journal/archives/000844.html
http://www.empourdelo.com/ (in greek)


http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
http://www.novasio.com/bs_generator.htm
http://www.rightmousebutton.com/bull.html


and so on..


Contrary to all those links there is this web site: http://www.francescocorni.com/disegni.php. You can see that the true language of the architect is that of a form.

Abandoned neighborhood by EVOL

Ok, this is my story:

          European medieval culture began to emerge at the time when man had already begun to forget the use of symbolic language of spatial relations and cosmic symbols. The Renaissance has preserved some of that previous knowledge however the emphasis in art fell on the beauty of proportion and grandeur but with further development of technology man became heavily dependent on machines, so architecture too became subjected to them. Today we count years from the twenties of the 20th century, we have completely forgot our tradition and we are proud of that. We are confined to use the logic of efficacy and mass production. The principles, skills and knowledge, craftmanship and elegancy of our ancestors seem to have completely disappeared. This shift in perspective is called evolution.

Nothing is absolute and without flaw. Historical periods were often cruel, dogmatic, undemocratic, and ruled by an aristocratic or intellectual minority, but even then they were capable of making beautiful places we enjoy today. The priviledged aristocratic minority lived in ornate houses and we all agree today that was morally disgusting. The modernist reaction was creating another extreme instead of taking the best of each period. The impoversihed idea of simplified geometry and urban zoning has done damage to virtually any city in the world, all at the price of progress. The totalitarian regimes are gone today, but those in art still exist. Every deviation from their idea is penalized and all those architecture professors and assitants, metropolitan experts, cultural analysis studios, theoreticians, international award wining offices and all that creme de la creme are ready shoot you with their logic. A parrot's talk:

You're uneducated, you slept through the entire 20th century. You are going against a whole generation of modernism hundred years old. You're going against the tide of time. You can't resurrect a dead man! How anachronistic of you. How retarded. That is so not working today. Where'd you get that? But, we are modern today. How dare you. How very dare you. It is plain kitsch, it is not even architecture. You must be out of your mind! What will the world say? We have evolved much beyond this. We must use new materials, we must build with the spirit of our time. Our thechnology is far more advanced today. That's pastiche! We must follow the trends. You are going the wrong way.

Why? What trends? Who's uneducated? What is the right way?

Abstraction

Modernism is also closely linked to the emergence of abstraction which is its main foundation. The use of abstraction as something very deliberate and elite (and all at the expense of aesthetics), blends perfectly with the mass production by creating a visual, physical and emotionally impoverished spaces.The concept of sincerity is introduced, which dogmatically rejects any solution that is not derived from the logic of the material. Aesthetics is always the result of a function or at least a happy combination of functionality and aesthetics. It should never be the result itself. This kind of disbalance in favour of function almost perfectly describes modernism.

The use of abstraction inevitably leads to Euclidean geometry, which is strange to a natural environment. Human have difficulties blending with such environments, they refuse it and find it alien. Such layered and orthogonal spaces create bad communities – but they are still being built - all in the name of progress. Fractal environments, such as nature itslef, makes one to relate to it and to recognize it, proportions and spatial relations are repeated at every scale down to details, which makes the space much more natural.

Yet no one can deny that the abstraction is ideal for expressing universal concepts and feelings. This is the main reason why it should be used, and not because of ideas like "honesty". It should also be said that there are many excellent achievements of modernism, but which still constitute a minority of our space. Because they rely on mass production and on the Euclidean geometry these spaces are very sensitive. They are easily destroyed by alterations, the grow old ugly, and they are beautiful only if they are new and clean. Since they are like machines they must be cleaned and serviced permanently otherwise they become ugly. Those euclidean designs can work excellently in small scale buildings and interiors, graphic design, product design and furniture but they become horror when they are scaled to whole areas. They are, of course, fashionable and very often built for a rich elite. High-tech infills of large windows or roof lofts with a lot of glass look chic just because they are inserted in the old architecture. Such buildings can't build the city itself. They lack the intuition of the fractal architecture. To confirm it we can have a look at our city blocks and cities of the 20th century and see that they failed miserably. They were all designed by the architectural elite mentioned earlier.

Ornament

Unnecessary embellishments and love for the high aesthetics and moody atmosphere of 19th century Europe produced a resistance to the ornament. The extensive use of ornament by morally corrupted people of the past resulted in banning it. An essay "Ornament and Crime" was written by Austrian architect Adolf Loos who claims that any decoration that is not the result of a production process or a material in its natural state is criminal and minded. Everything else is a true ornament. If you're a simpleton or a snob then you love decorating. Adolf Loos was certainly not aware of how much emotional and spiritual impoverishment of space around us will his idea cause, all in the name of progress. Suddenly, so called ethics began to import it's laws to visual arts, forgeting that they have their own laws.

Ornament is a crucial thing to any design. It adds coherence to the desgn, it enriches the human experience and it tells a story. Ornament serves as an analogy of any greater structure around as.

The sins of the past created among intellectual artists of the 20th century a new totalitarianism (don't forget that totalitarian political regimes were coined by intellectuals too), rather than to seek a balance that is always the key. Aesthetics and the man were disqualified once again to support a civilization of machines and all that is purely rational. Today, deep in the age of progressive materialization this dogma is still largely applied.

What does it mean to be modern? The reality is how we make it. We have a will to choose.

If you want to read better quality and more in depth text on this topic try reading Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander or Nikos Salingaros.

Tame Flower Tree by Leif Podhajsky

Why is it important? Listening to a great piece of music or standing in front of a sublime temple certainly raises emotions. We feel awe, nobleness of every possible kind, great emotional depth, graciousness, joy, charm, happiness, absolute fascination, another level of existence. We feel the infinity of our being. The mere fact that we can feel it reminds us of who we are!

Artwork by Lynn Meyers

Our age is an anthitesis of what timeless tradition would want it to be - a reflection of the cosmos - as above, so below.

Instead it as an age of disequilibrium, progressive materialization and negation of the higher order. It is all about forgeting. Once our focus shifted to lower spheres we began to consider them as the only reality and began to develop in that way. That is why one of the essential features of this age is a strong desire for action, functionality and specialization while sensibility and introspection is for losers. There is no unity. Science, arts and religion are striving into different directions. We have seen a strong rise of science whose main purpose is to produce practical applications - an idea that blends perfectly with materialization. That is why investment in this kind of science is so important today. It is not longer seen as an analogy of the higer orders but it has become a specialized skill of collecting facts. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is considered an unusal attraction.  Action and being new is valued, irrelevant of the results. Even the revival of tradition is accepted if brings certain benefit.

Everything is involved. The rise of individualism has made us live for ourselves and think that our ideas are unique and ours only, forgeting that a true idea belongs to everyone. In arts emphasizing functionality (so called honesty), and seeking for truth (at the expense of aesthetics) is a key point of modernity. Aesthetics are subject to machines and functionality. The schools suppress the tradition and teach the student to reform (ironically the original meaning of the word is to restore something into original condition) the old and explore the new concepts. They learn them how to forget. A strong urge for new results in so many experimental concepts revealing nothing, only some of which really make sense. Art is seen by different groups of people as something unecessary since it does not produce anything or as a tool whose influence is used to conquer the rest of the world. Arts using analogy to reflect the knowledge beyond material spheres are considered an unusual attraction too. To appreciate beauty itself is considered unproductive.

Our schools are infected by pseudo wise professors of learned ignorance trying to produce as much as their clones as possible. Bureaucratic engineering and all kind of analyisis is used to prove their own efficacy and achievements, forgeting that failure is also a part of learning. If you happen to fail then you buy ETCS points. Our civilization par exellence. The present state of society where everybody can do anything (including me writing this post) and whose imbalance is in favor of action and materialization prevents from making serious changes.

This is the summary that descirbes the the roots of our problem. It is a text which is just a derivation of ideas coming from Rene Guenon and Konrad Paul Liessmann. Posting it could help us in restoring the lost meaning of tradition.

 Often times i think to myself that there is no something they call "new". Either something is worthy of a human being or it's not. Modernity is all about "new", denying the past and disclosing the bourgeois at the expense of the aestehitcs. Every improvement made in the rational realm is called "evolution" and change for change's sake is valued. Here comes tradition. One of it's purpose is not to keep things untouched, but to create hierarchy and order that reflects one found in nature, so that we always may be connected to our true source. For tradition everything is reflected in all. If it is true that the material world is only a reflection of the higher worlds then what does the ugliness and lack of detail around us mean?

Hi, let’s celebrate the launching of this new blog on architecture!