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Starck & Stravinsky—M. Calvino - 1997Says Phillipe Starck in 1996: “Look, there are already millions of excellent chairs which are very comfortable, lamps which provide light, and so on. Is it necessary to create any more? The only reality of a profession such as mine is to act as the cleaning-lady for people’s subconscious and as the teacher who instructs them about the signs which are emitted by everything that surrounds them . . . In other words, to put it simply, I am not interested in design. The reason for this is that when we speak of design, we speak about objects. I am bored to hell of chairs. Even my own. One more chair, another lamp, what is the interest in that? The only thing of interest is what will it bring for the human being who is going to use it? It is very important to ask this question. We have moved from traditional design – Bauhaus, Loewy, people fascinated by the object itself, which gave fise to some very beautiful results – to the explosion, like the glow of a light bulb before it burns out, in the last 15 years of a narcissistic design, done by designers for other designers, a masturbatory exhibition of their know-how, of the panache.” Says Igor Stravinsky in 1942: “We are living at a time when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals. Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions. This failure to understand essential realities is extremely serious. It leads us infallibly to the violation of the fundamental laws of human equilibrium. In the domain of music, the consequences of this misunderstanding are these: on one hand there is a tendency to turn the mind away from what I shall call the higher mathematics of music in order to degrade music to servile employment, and to vulgarize it by adapting it to the requirements of an elementary utilitarianism – as we shall soon see on examining Soviet music. On the other hand, since the mind itself is ailing, the music of our time, and particularly the music that calls itself and believes itself pure, carries within it the symptoms of a pathologic blemish and spreads the germs of a new original sin. The old original sin was chiefly a sin of knowledge; the new original sin, if I may speak in these terms, is first and foremost a sin of non-acknowledgement – a refusal to acknowledge the truth and the laws that proceed therefrom, laws that we have called fundamental. What then is this truth in the domain of music? And what are its repercussions on creative activity?” -- Stravinsky, Igor, Igor Stravinsky Poetics of Music in the Form os Six Lessons., Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England. pp. 47-48. The reason that I bring up this text is that I think our experience of "delight" (it has also been referred to as monumentality, a sense of beauty . . . overwhelming sense) involves something that may be referred to as the "intangible" aspects of being. The issues that begin to build a bridge for us into the "intangible" are things like proportion, harmony, honesty, and truth, and of course truth in making. These are things that Igor Stravinsky touches on, that Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Mies Van der Rohe, and especially Le Corbusier spoke, wrote, and practiced. One such structure that imparted an overwhelming sense of "delight" is Le Courusier's Notre Dame du' haut in Ronchamp, France. I got a lump in my throat and was a little short of breath (and not from the walk up the long hill to get to it)when I rounded the hill and it came into view. That was monumental! And I believe the reason lies as much in the amount of energy that went into the design of it as it does in the incredibly strong belief by the architect in a system of "calculated" beauty . . . the existence of the golden proportion. Because he believed in and so rigorously developed the "thing" according to this methodology, one can feel the energy with every sense that we have including those that we do not now that we posess. I think that this psychological delight that you speak of is the accumulation of the delight of every sense all at |
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once. And again, I stress the "intangible". I don't think that it is necessairily an intellectual, memory triggered response. This sort of extreme sense of beauty is brought on by the recognition of "fundamental laws of human equilibrium" as Stravinsky states and the existence of beauty is aside from mankind . . . mankind did not create beauty, it is something like gravity that is a truth . . . it is not in the eye of the beholder. Some things are so beautiful that they move you. There are a few other edifices that I can think of that impart on the occupant a sense of overwhelming beauty . . . The Pantheon in Rome, from inside. The Mayan ruin site of Uxmal. And the German Pavillion for the World's fair by Mies Van der Rohe. This I believe is what Vitruvius meant by the delight aspect of "commodity, firmness, and delight. My questions lie in what role does mathematics . . . the golden ratio, the Fibonacci series, pi, and phi play in beauty? The most moving sites throughout the world . . . not coincidentally . . . have all been studied in these terms and are all found to involve these mathematical relations somehow.
These two paraphrases are entirely applicable to the state of architecture in the majority of the United States and most of the world. The excerpt from Poetics of Music was written nearly 60 years ago and is still quite accurate. One may substitute the word design for the word music and still have a meaningful and accurate statement. Our task is one of showing values and proportions, the essential realities and fundamental laws of human equilibrium through the design of our surroundings. --M. Calvino
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—Ronchamp, France, Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame Du’ Haut |
