... In my "style" of building I want to approach this divine analogy. Inspired by music, creation, and salvation history I want to proceed- finding elemental seed motiffs.. that generate parts.. that add up to entities.. that mature into insight.. that makes way for Inspiration... Like revelation shining light upon its own parts and the larger things that flow from them I want to find the largest- who, containing the complexity of all things within himself, has no parts.
(Friday, April 1, 2005 1:59:17 PM)
(This text confuses even me in places, and I wrote it! It was hastily and un-selfconsciously written (being intended only for my own idea sparking). The result is something honest and unstudied, but also ponderous and, at times, embarrassingly incomprehensible. Caveat browseor.)
Analogy in creation: layers of meaning
Analogy in art: layers of details
I just remembered while making the above linked entry regarding sfg boxes that I had gotten (back then) as far as summing up my idiom and design direction as a layering of design elements.
As the memory rekindles in my mind now I can recall being struck by musical compositions whose elements build and change one another as the song progresses until the "punchline", comes and they've built into a crescendo or climax. A climax that (while exhilerating in and of itself) is both partially inexplicable without its precedant parts and is also the full explanation of these same part's reasons for being and their function. Think of Gorecki's simple swelling repetitions that build until the time comes for them to cease, making way for the Soprano's iteration. Think also of many of Joe's songs, but especially in Crystal planet's fast-as-thought facets that in the end weave back and forth. One more most-obvious example is the amen at the end of Brahm's Geistliches Lied.
Another parallel process (or perhaps it's that process itself that I am trying to make more explicit in my idiom) is salvation history with its symbols, signs, types, and archetypes: signs as prefigured in the old testament, and then sacraments in the new: making more explicit these signs, and sacramentally making "present" their fulfillment in eternity where they are no longer signs, symbols, or even sacraments but "the thing" Himself .
The physical motif-> element-> room-> wing-> building-> town-> cultural-style relationships, it seems to me, have approached this procession of maturing symbolism in many places and styles. However, never as effectively as they could, and certainly never as effectively as musical details have done within their limited ethereal existence inside a movement of a symohony or a phrase in particular song. Odd.
And this Music/Architechture ethereal/material paradox sparks musings still further up the intellectual food-chain:
What might it mean for God to have made a different "new" dimension of existence from the spirit, intellect, and will of the Angel: why matter, energy, form (organic life), and humanity? God the maker has made "substance" to have being all its own.... why? What could have been "lacking" in spiritual existence "before" that "time"? Is there a reason? Or is it solely because it's God's nature To Be overflowing existence?
Furthermore... why even have Angel? It's impossible that there could be anything missing in God that he should make little spirits to keep him company or serve him or glorify him.
What's going on "here" I seem to be getting washed upstream from design motiffs fast as thought..... Lets start by jumping back into the middle....
I have a very hard time thinking that there's a lack of solidity, for lack of a better word, in the manner of knowing and existing of the angels: that they could need stone to understand how rock-solid are things with God. But at the same time I know that there's a unity of Reason permeating all things that God has made: like his litlle types, the Great Artist wastes no strokes of the brush....hmm, lets wade a little further downsteam.... art.....brushtrokes...hmmm
While there neither is nor was any absolute "need" for physical matter to reveal/teach a man of God nor Man to "teach" angels of God, nor little spirits to glorify and serve the big Spirit, they still do. In the same way, music/poetry with ( because of?) their ethereal nature , don't lack and therefor need to be fulfilled/solidified by more substantive arts. Rather, they have much more fidelity in their ability to image Beauty and also a more "immortal" stability-of-form than architecture. Why then, the need for physical art? What more is there that can be? And yet there IS so much "more" that has been given to the "inferior" arts to re-present. Again, why? How? The greater serves the lesser, who as a finite flame reveals the one who is greatest in a "more" complete way. This larger paradox is God's point in angelic and then physical creation, and its littler version is mine in my attempted body of work.
As the mud and water of creation makes analogies and parables more vital than even the starry heights of theological splendor, so too architeture/art is called to make real and explicit spiritual things that music hints at and makes ethereally present in its emotive abilities. This is architecure and art's function, its reason for being (as though it needs a reason for being beyond it's innate goodness).
In my "syle" of building I want to approach this divine analogy. Inspired by music, creation, and salvation history I want to proceed- finding elemental seed motiffs that generate parts that add up to entities that mature into insight. Revelation shining light upon its own parts and the larger things that flow from them I want to find the largest- who, containing the complexity of all things within himself, has no parts.