quare id faciam?

Comment on architecture

Much as I've learned to admire thoughtful & versatile blogger & Comment editor Gideon Strauss (whose blog & its connections represent for me an ongoing intro to & a sort of paradigmatic example of what good may be pursued in this hall-of-mirrors realm of online published &/or quasi-published dialogue) and have generally found the material coming from the Work Research Foundation of interest, I have to confess my disappointment with the recent Comment article on the question of architecture's importance for Christians – a question in which I see a variety of my own special concerns reflected. Though I'm not altogether surprised, truthfully, to find myself disappointed. I think it's really a characteristic pattern for framing questions about culture and the role of Christian thought, a pattern fairly firmly established somewhere well below the surface activity of modern Protestant or Evangelical discourse having connection with Reformed or 'Reformational' tradition, that I'm disappointed with – or that I'm gradually discovering resistances to in my own thinking.

But I fear that I'm not up to discussing this disappointment usefully, as things stand with me at present. (Which is then its own cause for disappointment, in a way.) I'd like to find a good foothold for some sort of steady & creditable (which is to say suitable for real dialogue) critical engagement with what sometimes looks to me like a considerable range of the ideas represented in the Neocalvinist body of thought &/or that of various borrowers, imitators, or near relatives. It may be a long time before I see the kind of coherence in my own thinking that indicates such a foothold, though; and for now I am coming to some acceptance of this state of limitation – I think.

What for me it's interesting to draw out here is that the very form my efforts toward more coherent thinking has seemed to assume, circuitously but persistently, over a period of a little more than a decade, is a clear course toward & through some future formal study of architecture. So the problem of what architecture & its study may be is itself pretty thoroughly woven through all my reflections & meta-reflections [whoa!] about the shape & the durable value of that critical engagement with apparently confronting ideas & interestednesses to which I'm trying (ever more warily) to attain.

Well, anyway, there's a good deal in the Comment article (written by a Christian & experienced architect, David Greusel, who seems well versed in the big-picture issues prominent now for at least a couple of generations in the profession) that I'd like to examine – beginning with its implicit central premise, that architecture (or, more generally, 'design') is a category of human activity or experience whose importance needs to be explained (biblically or otherwise) to & urged for consideration on Christians, or anyone else. That might seem like an odd place to start objecting, since architectural conditions in the U.S. (at least) have for half a century been so widely, and in many respects so precipitously, in decline. Surely what's called for is improving of architectural sensitivities across the social spectrum, and to that end, among other programs, advancing a well-defined Christian understanding of the problem? I don't say that cultural critiques in this vein don't recognize real & serious failure present in American life, or that public attention to architecture is at a healthy state of development – hardly! But at the same time, the more I hear the problems lofted in puffy ethicalisms like this –

In the United States, especially – the richest country in the world – the standards of acceptable design in the public realm are astonishingly low. Unfortunately, the church is as much to blame for this fact as anyone. Where the church used to be explicitly a center of community life and a benchmark of architectural beauty, North American Christians, especially Protestants, have bought into the spirit of pragmatism that values utility over beauty and economy over excellence.

– the more I'm inclined to think there's some kind of intellectual tail-chasing, especially in the context of explicitly Christian dialogue, going on behind all this concern with culture & 'excellence'. 'Standards of design', 'utility vs. beauty', sepia-toned notions of community life, &c. – ideas like these are not nearly as graspable in substance, to my thinking, as their plugging-in in exhortative language of this kind suggests. In fact I suspect that glib & connectionless usages like this are more likely to confirm people, broadly speaking, in what come finally to architecturally insensitive & inattentive mindsets than they are to lead to meaningful revival in attitudes toward the potentials of significance & the particulars of form of buildings & places – even while, perhaps, repetition of the phrases encourages more spending on design services (& design academia & so on).

Of course, suspicions aren't arguments. But that's where I'll have to leave things for now.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:11 AM