It’s 12:15 AM and I’m dead tired from writing proposals all day. So here’s a quote from Le Corbusier’s ‘The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning’ that I found especially profound.
We prefer Bach to Wagner, and the spirit which inspired the Parthenon to that which created the cathedral… This modern sentiment is a spirit of geometry, a spirit of construction and synthesis. Exactitude and order are its essential condition… Our trend is towards higher and more impartial gratifications, by reason of the mathematical spirit which inspires us; we can create in a detached and pure manner. Such are the epochs which we call classical.
Safe to say, after Hans Bellmer and Jasper Johns I’m beginning to find the wild world of urban planning and architecture to be strangely attractive. A lot of that stuff is like mathematical physics of the most abstract kind. I guess it can’t be helped. They all strive toward some manipulation of space. One with vectors, the other with human life.
Lately, no matter where my eyes turn toward to I see artscience in birthpain.
Am I the only one who thinks the very nature of sciences and academia is on the cusp of radical change? The difference we see will be tantamount to the difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, a significant one for anyone who knows how to read between the lines. The change will be slow, of course. Any worthwhile changes are. I give it a century to fully grow into a visible sap.
Of course, I'm usually somewhat cautious about talking about these things around my every day colleagues... There are so many crackpots in the field of sciences that everyone's pessimistic about practically anything new. Excited, but pessimistic.
Architecture, artscience, physics and mathematical music. I know tonight's dream will be a strange one.
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