Words and meditation
My first thought is to pop a block of Green and Blacks into my 38 year old mouth. Bibi searched high and low in this dry town to find it for me yesterday. Bless..
Then we went for a walk and got hot. We trekked to a Pentecostal Church nearby up a hill. The singing and music sounded lovely, gospelly, full of passion...
Then I had a long and lovely chat with my beloved sister Victoria. She gossiped about her magnificently unique in-laws, she told me about her plans to move near to the Devon coast and her upcoming course learning to be a hypnotherapist/counsellor.
Then, I read these words:
I live in an attic apartment under a tin roof. The strongest and most pleasurable experience of home occurs during a heavy storm when rain beats on the roof, magnifying the feeling of warmth and protection. At the same time, the beating of rain just centimeters away from my skin puts me in direct contact with the primal elements. These sensations are lost for the dweller of today's standard flat squeezed between concrete slabs.
Cooking by fire is immensely satisfying because one can experience a primal causality between the fire and the hearth. Again, this causality is lost with the electric stove - or even more with the microwave oven. Even food loses its connections with the natural world and turns into a synthetic and de-mystfied matter.
Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Essays
Waiting for anyone who wants is an alternative tradition of Western thinking which links experiential phenomenology with design with ecological thinking with profound analyses of embodied being and its relation to memory, ritual and place. It also links quite deeply with Japanese thinking and writing. You might start with The Poetics of Space or In Praise of Shadows.
Posts
4 comments:
ah.... Jeremy now you have my heart!!! Gaston Bachelard and Junichiro Tanizaki's exquisite books, I think these should be standard reading for every nigerian architectural student.
Might I add Jane Jacobs life and death of great american cities Christian Norberg-Schulz' ' Architecture: Presence, Language, Place, plus Hilde Heynen's Architecture and Modernity... then Olu Oguigbe's Culture Game . all these will awaken the sensibilties of any aspiring architect.
Regarding design; it is very cerebral, it seems that's what we are missing.
Appears it is human nature to want what we dont have or to have what we no longer want.
Many in the West hanker for a closer connection to the earth, simplicity, to turn away from modernism or the consumerism that appears to define it. Those everywhere else cant wait to get more than a tin roof between them and cruel nature, would like to have microwave meals so they can spend less of their lives eking an existence. Unfortunately, they also have little time nor opportunity to write eloquently about it.
If you need another bar of Green and Blacks, just buy this month's Glamour magazine. There's a free bar included (butterscotch). Bibi would have a great magazine to read and you would have great chocolate.
Excellent observation, naapali.
Post a Comment