Spaciousness and Crowding (part 1)

Crowdedness. From http://enchantingchallenge.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/crowdedness.jpg

The feeling of spaciousness is related to our vivéncies. It happened to me, that living many years in such a crowded city as Buenos Aires, I felt something was missing in Californian streets, I could feel the emptiness, my tall buildings were not protecting me from the streets….On the other hand, an Argentine friend told me her daughter, being born in California, and raised up in the mountains, felt dizziness when she was a ¨compressed¨ tourist in Buenos Aires city.

Below, it is the reference for chapter five, in the book ¨Space and Place¨ by Yi Fu Tuan. Let us do this exercise: a combination of Yi Fu Tuan´s words and Yes´ lyrics in the voice of Jon Anderson ¨Heart of the Sunrise¨. (One of my favorite songs).

¨Space and spaciousness are closely related terms, as are population density and crowding; but ample space is not always experienced as spaciousness, and high density does not necessarily mean crowding. Spaciousness and crowding are antithetical feelings. The point as which one feeling turns into another depends on conditions that are hard to generalize. To understand how space and human number, spaciousness and crowding are related….¨. ¨Spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act. Being free has several levels of meaning. Fundamental is the ability to transcend the present condition, and this transcendence is most simply manifest as the elementary power to move. In the act of moving, space and its attributes are directly experienced. An immobile person will have difficulty mastering even primitive ideas of abstract space, for such ideas develop into movement –out of the direct experiencing of space through movement.¨

Crowded city. http://trendsupdates.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/crowded-city.jpg

Let us see what Yes' lyrics say:

Love comes to you and you follow
Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with its arms
All around me
Lost on a wave and then after
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
Lost in the city
Lost in their eyes as you hurry by
Counting the broken ties they decide
Love comes to you and then after
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
Lost on a wave that you're dreaming
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with its arms all around Me
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
I feel lost in the city
Lost in their eyes as you hurry by
Counting the broken ties they decided
Straight light moving and removing
SHARPNESS of the colour sun shine
Straight light searching all the meanings
Of the song
Long last treatment of the telling that
Relates to all the words sung
Dreamer easy in the chair that really fits You
Love comes to you and then after
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the sun with its arms all around Me
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
I feel lost in the city

For those who'd love to listen to this song, here we have the links: Yes playing with Rick Wakeman! Part 1 and 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_l4-TMq4yI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBPzHvI-YTE&NR=1
Then, an unplugged great version with Spanish guitars (Guitarras criollas) at a Cafe in California, singing Jon Anderson, of course, who else?....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig6WOlsAYuk

Rochester subway. http://www.rochestersubway.com/images/photos/rochester_01.jpg

Worship Buildings: Discussion on their Mysticism

The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Picture by Myriam Mahiques

I have visited the Crystal Cathedral designed by architect Philip Johnson twice. It is located in the city of Garden Grove, California, just two miles from Disneyland. Though it bears the name of cathedral, the building itself is not imbued with a mystic spirit. Anyway, it is beautiful and impressive, it is all light in the glorification of the metallic structures. My husband, an architect too, said he does not like it very much, because it could represent any public building. I reminded him that, Philip Johnson explored the idea of ethereal walls through a complete permeability to light, but the functional program for this building, was not to create a place for prayers, but a huge TV studio.

In 1955, the Protestant broadcasting evangelist Robert H. Schuller (born September 16, 1926) preached outdoors to a flock gathered in their cars at a rented drive-in movie theater; ¨Most such churches begin by taking over a drive-in theater on Sunday morning. Minister, choir and organ perch atop the projection booth or a makeshift stage, and the sermon is piped into cars through window speakers. Among the most impressive of several new churches specially built for drive-in congregations are Schuller's Garden Grove Community Church (designed by Richard Neutra)¨ From Time. Churches: Drive in Devotion. November 3, 1967. Retrieved 2009-10-06.
 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837478,00.html

By 1970, he was preaching to a congregation of millions gathered around of TV sets on his weekly Sunday program The Hour of Prayer. Pastor Schuller thought he could design himself a suitable spectacular TV studio, but lately he realized he needed an architect. He chose arch. Philip Johnson when he read in “Time” that Johnson was a leading famous architect. The story is not clear for me, but it seems to be the main reason for Johnson’s contract.

Inside the Crystal Cathedral. Picture by Myriam Mahiques

A great organ in the second floor of the Crystal Cathedral. See the low ceiling with the entrances, there is no transition for the change of scale, what makes it much more impressive. Picture by Myriam Mahiques

The "campanile". Picture by Janine Hannois.

Anyway, church or not, I admire this building. I felt the emotion to enter under a low ceiling, and suddenly, the discovery of the change of scale inside the great structure through which the sky is seen. It is curious for me that Christians do not include religious imaginary inside their worship buildings, but, there are allegories of Jesuschrist’s birth in statues all around in the landscape. And in spite of the lack of pictures, every year there is a great event of Christmas where real animals with actors and dancers perform “The Glory of Christmas”. The event gives us much more than images, you can even smell the animals in their absence……

“The Glory of Christmas” event at the Crystal Cathedral. From http://www.crystalcathedral.org

A family picture outside the Crystal Cathedral, picture by Luis Makianich.

“The Glory of Christmas” event at the Crystal Cathedral. From http://www.crystalcathedral.org

Remember the effectiveness of theatre in religious teaching. Priests in the Conquest of America used to take the advantage of theatralizations;  Indians were the performers.

Scenography for "The Glory of Christmas". Picture by Myriam Mahiques

Pastor Schuller’s methods reminded me some similar methods in the Catholic Church, institution that has always held a primary place for ornament and sacred imaginary that evoke the historical events. I’m not an expert in the subject so I will add excerpts from “A Soul for the Liturgical Space” (Un Alma para el Espacio Litúrgico) by my Italian colleague and virtual friend Architect Ciro Lomonte, who is an expert church designer, who lives and works in Palermo, Sicily. He has edited in Italian L’Architettura del Corpo Mistico. Progettare chiese secondo il Concilio Vaticano II by Steven J. Schloeder (L’Epos, Palermo 2005).

So, questions arise, are all architects qualified to design sacred places? Or, do they focus on their own personal propaganda without taking into account what the parishioners feel? Which are the consequences of modern proceedings? Let us see what arch. Lomonte writes:

¨Modern churches are not convincing. Visiting them you can perceive the difficulty contemporaries have in expressing transcendentality in works of sacred art. The faithful are forced to attend churches that are often similar to gymnasiums, garages, supermarkets, schools, or even swimming pools. Perhaps those who designed them meant to reproduce daily life situations in the places reserved for an encounter with the Trinity. However in alienating atmospheres such as these one can neither establish a relationship with God nor with men. At times only solitude is perceived here, even more here than anywhere else. And to think that the church, by now, is no longer a place where one prays, but where assemblies are held, just as in halls of Protestant worship¨………

¨So where shall we begin again? On the one hand it is necessary that buildings for worship be beautiful, on the other that they adequately perform the function for which they were designed. The two requirements are connected closely.

Let us consider in the first place the aesthetic difficulties. Decorum has been excluded on principle from the syntax of modern architecture, though it is an indispensable component in the design of Catholic churches. This is essential reason for which modern churches are unadorned, as if they had undergone a preventive iconoclastic fury. The architect’s concept of God, usually abstract, is expressed with an unjustified grandiloquence of volumes. Seemingly out-of-place images of the Holy Three, of the Madonna and of the saints are hung on the bare walls, all of which could be removed or moved without modifying their combined effect. One enters anodyne realms, without knowing where to head, since there is no particular reason why the crucifix or the tabernacle are in one place rather than in another¨……….

¨To design a church requires an understanding of the places for celebration, in particular the tribune for the proclamation of the Word of God and the ara on which the sacrifice of the Calvary is renewed. The design should begin with the altar, not its container.

From this point of view the chief responsibility for the inadequacy of modern churches lies with those who commission them¨………………..

Arch. Lomonte published some astonishing pictures of weird icons at the Church of Saint Luca in Graz, Austria, that I reproduce here with his permission:

Altar. What if the artist meant that Christ’s sacrifice can be celebrated everywhere, in open nature, for example?

Tabernacle

Lights at the tabernacle. Does it mean Christ is everywhere in cities? Or is it a warning sign for us to decide if our soul is ”clean” enough for communion?

¨Some say that the Church has ceased to dialogue with artists for at least two centuries. This affirmation, on closer examination, is not convincing because the Liturgical Movement immediately brought about a search for new artistic forms. The trouble is that it did so in the name of an exaggerated egalitarianism, elaborating a conception of “universal space”, where all the participants and areas of ritual action have the same weight,…¨

¨One of the essential materials for architectonic composition is luminous energy. In the case of churches it possesses a precise symbolic charge. Not long ago the Pope explained it lyrically.

«It is the radiance of his transcendent mystery that is communicated to humanity. In fact, the light is outside us, we can neither grasp it nor hold on to it; yet it envelops, enlightens and warms us. God is like this, both distant and yet close, someone beyond us yet beside us, in fact willing to be with us and in us. The earth responds with a chorus of praise to the revelation of his majesty: it is a cosmic response, a prayer to which man gives voice¨…...

Light through the chapel's window. Mission of San Juan Capistrano, California.

Picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

Light through the chapel's window. Mission of San Juan Capistrano, California.

Picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

Then arch. Lomonte discusses about the advantages and disadvantages of different layout of elements that make ceremonies develop in many ways. And he also shows an interesting picture of a dancing priest. Events are also being performed inside Catholic churches.

The subject introduced here, is continued in the manifesto for

http://www.appelloalpapa.blogspot.com

Any architect, designer, artist has the right to express him/herself. I think the real problem resides in what people perceive and comprehend, which is a delicate issue considering it’s all about religion. I am not sure if the Graz community is prepared to understand the artist’s intentions, setting aside the liturgical problem briefly exposed here. In my particular case, I have my favorite church in Buenos Aires downtown, St. Michael Archangel. And it is a dark building with sad statues inside. That is my personal selection, and I leave it to phenomenology, to what I feel when I get in contact with the building. There is a Satan church in Santa Barbara, I cannot remember the name and sorry I did not have my camera and could not find it in the web, it is a brick building with vitreaux (stained glass) mostly in red color, with dubious images, a few glasses were broken and there was a little vandal graffiti. The building is so sinister, that even before I realized it was for Satan worship, I felt the rejection in the hidden memories associated with such a construction or such a practice. So strong feelings worship places trigger in us, rejection, admiration, extasis, happiness, respect…..

REFERENCES

Lomonte, Ciro. Un alma para el espacio litúrgico. Revista Humanitas, Santiago del Cile, n° 36, octubre-diciembre 2004

Great Buildings of the World by editors of Time. Page 68. New York, 2004

Space and Mirrors

Narcissus in love with his image, 1728. Painting by François Lemoyne, 1688-1728. Hamburger Kunsthalle. http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Narcissus.html

Narcissus’ story is the myth of the origin of the flower bearing his name and I would say the myth of the mirror. Narcissus is counted among the most handsome young men; per the Roman poet Ovid's retelling of the myth, he was the son of the river god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope.

When Narcissus was born, Tiresias was asked whether the child would live a long life, and the seer, aware of the difficulties of the enigmatic maxim "Know thyself", replied: "If he never knows himself." (Tiresias. Ovid, Metamorphoses).

He was destined to love himself –to his own image on the water- and not gain the thing he loved. He fell in love with his own reflection. And since he could not obtain the immaterial object of his love, he died of sorrow by the quiet spring. His body was never found, but in its place, there was a flower, purple within and surrounded with white leaves.

As an additional data, the spring where Narcissus saw himself is said to be in the territory of the Thespians, in a place called Donacon. Some reject the story of Narcissus being unable to distinguish a man from a man's reflection. Instead they assert that Narcissus had a twin sister, and that both were exactly alike in appearance. Supposedly, he fell in love with his sister, and when she died he used to visit the spring, knowing well that he saw his reflection, but finding some relief for his love because it reminded him of his sister. (From Greek Mythology Link, a web site created by Carlos Parada).

Rococo architecture, Amalienburg. Internet download.

The mirror is a fascinating object that changes or disguises the relationship of objects with their spatial environments. The artificial effects used by Rococo decorators is well known: large mirrors were place opposite one another on the walls of rooms.

Painting by Aguilar. Internet download

The event Smoke and Mirrors in New York, a production of non architectural space. “Through sensatory distortions a supernatural environment was created. The notoriously sour New York architecture scene found temporary solace in this wondrous atmosphere of dynamic projections and reflections set within a dense haze. One room was filled with a dense fog, reducing visibility at this networking party to the bare minimum. Poisonous yellow light created a fake ceiling through which one could descend into the haze.” By Solid Objectives. http://so-il.org/artifact/26

Painting by Aguilar. Internet download

In Henri Lefevre’s words “ The mirror discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and t he consciousness of my body –not because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subjet,…..but because it transforms what I am into the sign of what I am. This ice-smooth barrier, itself merely an inert sheen, reproduces and displays what I am –in a word, signifies what I am- within an imaginary sphere which is yet quite real. A process of abstraction then –but fascinating abstraction. In order to know myself, I “separate myself out from myself”. The effect is dizzying. Should the “Ego” fail to reassert hegemony over itself by defying its own image, it must become Narcissus –or Alice. It will then be in danger of never rediscovering itself, space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and the glacial surface of the mirror will hold it forever captive in its emptiness, in an absence devoid of all conceivable presence or bodily warmth. The mirror thus presents or offers the most unifying but also the most disjunctive relationship between form and content: forms therein have a powerful reality yet remain unreal; they readily expel or contain their contents, yet these contents retain an irreducible force, an irreducible opacity, and this is as true for my boddy (the content of “my consciousness”) as for other bodies, for bodies in general. So many objects have this dual character: they are transitional inasmuch as they tend towards something else, yet they are also aims or “objectives” in their own right…..There is in fact little justification for any systematic generalization from the effects of this particular object, whose role is properly confined to a sphere within the immediate vicinity of the body…..The mirror introduces a truly dual spatiality: a space which is imaginary with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to coexistence and differentiation”. (H. Lefevre, p. 185-186, 1999).

Psyche's Mirror in the Funhouse, at the Burning Man event, 2005. 'Anamorphic art' uses a curved mirror to straighten out a distorted image. Ray Allen installed this and Michael Heatherton is keeping it relatively clean. Painting is of Two Ambassadors by the Dutch artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). Picture by Tom Pendergast.

The mirror conceptualization also offers us the opportunity to enjoy bilateral symmetries in architecture. In the words of Kim Williams “Identifying a type of symmetry in a two-dimensional composition is relatively straightforward; the identification of symmetry types in a three-dimensional object such as a sculpture is somewhat more complicated because our perception of the object changes as we move around it. In the case of architecture, we not only move around it, but we move through it as well. This means that architecture provides us with a special opportunity to experience symmetry as well as to see it”. (Cited in landscapedesignweb.com)

REFERENCES

http://www.loggia.com/myth/echo2.html

http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Narcissus.html
http://landscapedesignweb.com/2008/02/24/inspiration-for-landscape-space-symmetry-in-architecture/
Le Fevre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Massachusetts, USA. 1999

No Internet Conexion for a few Days (?)

Dear Readers,
I wish you all a Happy New Year!
I've just moved the computers, and I'm still with no Internet conexion, if I'm lucky I'll be able to post again next week. Thank you!

The Collage Environments: The Happenings

Pop Artist Yayoi Kusama’s Spaced Out. See the multiplication of the space and the idea of infinite in the location of mirrors and lights. Internet download.

Happening was an event that combined elements of painting, poetry, music, dance, and theatre and staged them as a live action. The term Happening was coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in the 1950s. The nature of Happenings was influenced by Italian Futurist performance, where the convention of “proscenium architecture” was assaulted, where the “actors” could consist of moving lights, machinery, and the audience, and simultaneity noise-music were developed. (Britannica.com)

Probably, it can be seen as the negation of the Architecture, of the static building, the space is shaped by weird acts and consequent behaviors.

With the rise of Pop Art, both the environment and the Happening took on a new and special importance. …One was that Pop specialized in the “given”; this led artists to experiment with the literal reproduction of reality…There was too, the consuming interest taken by Pop artists in the Phenomena of popular culture, among them such enfolding experiences as amusement arcades and side-shows in circuses”. (Lucie-Smith, 1995)

Pop Artist Yayoi Kusama. Endless Love Room. 1965-6.

From http://www.bombsite.com/images/attachments/0001/0107/kusama2_body.jpg

The Happenings were designed for a brief life, they are dead every time they happen. It is an ephemeral game, the game of obsolescence felt in a certain state of mind; the objective is to stimulate as much fantasy as possible.

The situations can be commented by the stories told through the years, they can be printed in photographs, but you need to participate to feel the real nature of a “Happening”.

Jim Dine, The Car Crash, 1960.

http://www.comm.unt.edu/histofperf/BeckyWalker/crash1.jpg

Stuart Brisley. And For Today. 1972. From

http://a6.idata.over-blog.com/1/96/04/42/S-rie-A-10/Brisley-and-for-today-nothing-72.jpg

Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Action. From

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2131/2244749982_b4928ff238.jpg

The Happenings were designed for a brief life, they are dead every time they happen. It is an ephemeral game, the game of obsolescence felt in a certain state of mind; the objective is to stimulate as much fantasy as possible.

The situations can be commented by the stories told through the years, they can be printed in photographs, but you need to participate to feel the real nature of a “Happening”.

These are the rules of the game as explained by Allan Kaprow (edited by Jeff Kelly):

1) The line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible. For example, two cars collide in a freeway; violet liquid pours out of the broken radiator of one of them, and in the back seat of the other there is a huge load of dead chickens. The cops check into the incident, plausible answers are given and this is a normal situation of an accident.

2) Themes, materials, actions, and the associations they evoke are to be gotten from anywhere except from the arts, their derivatives and their milieu. Eliminate the arts and whatever is familiar to them, as art galleries, cultural buildings, nightclubs, etc. Then, a separate art can be developed. This is the goal, because “Happening” is not a total art, it is a source of energy in a “quasi art” with an uncertain identity.

3) The Happening should be dispersed over several widely spaced, sometimes moving and changing locales. A single performance space tends to be static and limiting (like painting only the center of the canvas). The stage theater is static and prevents the use of a thousand possibilities; movies can be watched, but not physically experienced. So, Happening can be developed in several points in a trafficked avenue, or different floors and rooms in an apartment house, or in different streets or cities or anywhere around the globe. This will increase the tension and will provide independence to each act with no interconnections.

4) Time, closely bound up with things and spaces should be variable and independent of the convention of continuity. Whatever is to happen should do so in its natural time, without respecting a structured scheme.

5) The composition of all materials, actions, images and their times and spaces should be undertaken in an artless and again, practical a way as possible. It means the avoidance of form theory associated with the arts, such as a serial technique, dynamic symmetry, etc.

6) Happenings should be unrehearsed and performed by non professionals, only once. Ex. a house is burned down; love letters are left on a field until the rain ruins them.

So Happenings were social manifestations materialized in a collage environment sensibility, a situation composed of sounds, time-durations, gestures, sensations, smells. The spectator was bombarded with sensations which he had to order on his own responsibility. Sometimes, the artists who took part in them seemed to engage in a desperate search for the unacceptable, for behavior which would restore them to a position as rebels an enemies of society (Lucie-Smith, 1995). For instance, the English artist Stuart Brisley who spent many hours almost motionless in a bath full of water and animal entrails. And there were also expressions of sado-masochistic fantasy. With an opposite funny tone, the Englishmen Gilbert and George performed a piece called Singing Sculptures, in which the two of them, with gilded faces, stood on a plinth and mimed to the music-hall song “Underneath the Arches”. The idea was to focus on style-stylishness, and the question of the division, or the lack of it, between the creator and what he creates.

Gilbert and George. Singing Sculpture, 1970. From

www.arte10.com/blogs/rss/artblog/2009/07/26/

REFERENCES

Kaprow, Allan; Kelley, Jeff. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. University of California Press. 2003

Lucie-Smith., Edward. Movements in Art since 1945. P. 155 –158. New York, 1995

Notes on Poe's "The Landscape Garden"

Aerial picture of flower fields. Carlsbad, California. By Alex Mac Lean.

From http://www.photographersgallery.com/i/full/cut_flower_fields.jpg

The most popular E. Allan Poe’s tales are those psychologically thrilling, related to murder, maladies, anguish. But I came across with this story and found it wonderful in the main character’s point of view about landscape. As always, he dies young, but this time, what is important is the emphasis in the pursue of happiness under certain unusual immaterial conditions (the landscape interventions), and the discussion of how man can affect the landscape design throughout scales, even with a minimalist contribution.

Trees landscape. From

http://images-1.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/1993771-4-revisiting-an-old-friend-in-november.jpg

Romantic landscape, 1826

http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Cole_Romantic_Landscape_c1826.jpg

Poe tells us that his friend Ellison was a very handsome man, heir of a fortune, with a beautiful bride and ample possessions.

“He admitted but four unvarying laws, or rather elementary principles:”

Health: free exercise, specifically in the open air.

The love of woman.

The contempt of ambition.

“An object of unceasing pursuit; and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of happiness was proportioned to the spirituality of this object.”

Ancient Chinese landscape painting. From

http://www.squidoo.com/landscape-paintings-origin

“When it had become definitely known that such was the enormous wealth inherited, there were, of course, many speculations as to the mode of its disposal.”

Instead of engaging in extravagant expenses or involving in politics, or build great buildings, or bestowing his name in institutions of charity, he decided that none possibility was adequate for him.

“I was not surprised, however, to perceive that he had long made up his mind upon a topic which had occasioned so much of discussion to his friends. Nor was I greatly astonished at the nature of his decision. In the widest and noblest sense, he was a poet.”

It means, he was not a poet indeed, but he understood the poetic sentiment:

“The proper gratification of the sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of Beauty”.

This concept of beauty was supported by physical loveliness. Nevertheless, Ellison did not become a musician, or a poet, or painter, or sculptor.

“But Mr. Ellison imagined that the richest, and altogether the most natural and most suitable province, had been blindly neglected. No definition had spoken of the Landscape-Gardener, as of the poet; yet my friend could not fail to perceive that the creation of the Landscape-Garden offered to the true muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here was, indeed, the fairest field for the display of invention, or imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel Beauty….In the multiform of the tree, and in the multicolor of the flower, he recognized the most direct and the most energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness.”

British landscape with a train. My (filtered) screen shot from the movie The Awakening

Esteros del Ibera, Argentina. From Panoramio.com

Being a landscape gardener would fulfill his destiny as Poet; Poe argues that no Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed upon canvasses; in real landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess; the artist, can arrange the parts that will always be susceptible of improvement. Regarding landscape, Ellison takes it as the supreme art, and at this point Poe agrees it has to be true, because the artist (Ellison)

“not only believes, but positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter, or form, constitute, and alone constitute, the true Beauty.”

So, this particular inclination triggered between the friends a kind of discussion about how to proceed with nature: with its exaltation or its improvement.

“It was Mr. Ellison who first suggested the idea…….that each alteration or disturbance of the primitive scenery might possibly effect a blemish in the picture, if we could suppose this picture viewed at large from some remote point in the heavens. "It is easily understood," says Mr. Ellison, "that what might improve a closely scrutinized detail, might, at the same time, injure a general and more distantly- observed effect."

It is interesting to see that a kind of “butterfly effect” is discussed here, together with the idea of change of scale and location for the observer’s point of view -one of the premises of design-, which in turn is involving collateral conclusions at the spatial scale where, supposedly, any former quasi-angels humans must exist:

“There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth”.

Patagonia Argentina. From planetware.com

Central Park in Huntington Beach, CA. Photo by Myriam Mahiques

Ellison then quoted a writer who had been supposed to have well treated this theme:

"There are, properly," he writes, "but two styles of landscape-gardening, the natural and the artificial. One seeks to recall the original beauty of the country, by adapting its means to the surrounding scenery; cultivating trees in harmony with the hills or plain of the neighboring land; detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color which, hid from the common observer, are revealed everywhere to the experienced student of nature. The result of the natural style of gardening, is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities- in the prevalence of a beautiful harmony and order, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles. The artificial style has as many varieties as there are different tastes to gratify. It has a certain general relation to the various styles of building……Whatever may be said against the abuses of the artificial landscape-gardening, a mixture of pure art in a garden scene, adds to it a great beauty. This is partly pleasing to the eye, by the show of order and design, and partly moral. A terrace, with an old moss-covered balustrade, calls up at once to the eye, the fair forms that have passed there in other days. The slightest exhibition of art is an evidence of care and human interest."

"From what I have already observed," said Mr. Ellison, "you will understand that I reject the idea, here expressed, of 'recalling the original beauty of the country.' The original beauty is never so great as that which may be introduced. Of course, much depends upon the selection of a spot with capabilities. What is said in respect to the 'detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color,' is a mere vagueness of speech, which may mean much, or little, or nothing, and which guides in no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd, than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius.

….The true poet possessed of very unusual pecuniary resources, might possibly, while retaining the necessary idea of art or interest or culture, so imbue his designs at once with extent and novelty of Beauty, as to convey the sentiment of spiritual interference. It will be seen that, in bringing about such result, he secures all the advantages of interest or design, while relieving his work of all the harshness and technicality of Art.”

Ellison’s garden is a middle state between human art and Almighty design. Its beauty is an effect in human perception, something ethereal that cannot be expressed as in landscape paintings. It is clear that technique, in itself, is not art. Art, in Ellison’s opinion, has to be imbued of spirituality to correct the imperfections of what has been given to us.

Patagonia Argentina. From Pixdau.com

REFERENCE

The Landscape Garden. In "The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe". Barnes and Noble, New York. 1999

The Nativity Façade of the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia

Sagrada Familia, detail. From wikiwak.org

I´ve found it nice to offer a tribute to the work of architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852-1926) for the Nativity façade of the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia. (Expiatory Church of the Holy Family).

Antonio Gaudí was an architect whose buildings made Barcelona world famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He invented a radical new language for architecture, fusing traditional and seemingly avant-garde ideas into a hybrid natural form. He can also be said to have invented a new, popular form of ecclesiastical architecture, explicitly designed to bring the ordinary person to God. His desire to understand spiritualism is clear in this anecdote: being a young student at the School of Architecture of Barcelona, he had to design a cemetery gate; he said to the astonished professors that he had to draw the road to the cemetery and the mourners before attempting the gate. Professors flunked him.

Gaudí´s private life remains a mystery, it is possible that he dedicated his life to work and religiosity. He worked on the Sagrada Familia until three days before his death in 1926. His work was continued by assistants and, later, outside architects commissioned by the private foundation that oversees the Temple.

Templo expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia. Picture from http://www.costaricanuestra.com/foro/userpix/259_SagradaFamilia_1.jpg

The Tree of Life, Templo de la Sagrada Familia. From http://themanyfacesofspaces.com/Cathedral_Sagrada_Familia_15.jpg

Nativity façade. From travelinginspain.com

Gaudí designed the Nativity façade as a landlocked ark, including most if not all of the creatures on God´s Earth. He concentrated on birds, of land and water, the former to the right and the latter to the left of the façade. As with the flora also featured here, he intended the façade to display a range of fauna that would have been present both in the Holy Land at the time of Christ and in SXX Spain. Most prominent is the pelican, but not even the lowly turkey is omitted.

Some familiar lizards and mammals, including the snake and the salamander, also appear, and there is a touch of probably unintentional ecumenism in the Buddhist turtles and tortoises supporting one of the columns. Also distributed among these images are oddly placed secular zodiacal symbols.

Most curious, however, is the effect that seems to start above the Nativity scene, in what some see as a Christmas ice cave and others as penitential tears. This appear to be a melting process, seeming to be an allusion to the impermanence of the physical, the inevitable death of the flesh. Equally they could represent the tears of God on seeing His finest creation, Man, has fared since giving His Son to them. (Adapted from Gaudí, by John Gill. P. 230, Parragon Publishing, United Kingdom, 2001).

Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus at the manger, encircled by a mule and Ox.  From travelinginspain.com

The natural materials are also fascinating. The structure is reinforced concrete faced with natural stone - the Montjuic, together with basalts and granites. ¨The Montjuic sandstone is joined for some of the interior elements by Scottish sandstone from the Clashach quarries on the Moray Firth. A "New Red" sandstone from the desert dunes of the Permian Period, some 250 million years ago, it is famous for its preservation of the tracks of ancient (and doomed) reptiles, all very geologically different from the Montjuic. But the two are similar in important ways. The Clashach sandstone had been used during refurbishment of Barcelona's old cathedral, and came to the attention of the Sagrada architects because of its similar appearance to the Montjuic, the warmth of its colour, its texture, and its durability¨. (Michael Welland, geologist. throughthesandglass.typepad.com)

Portrait of Gaudí. From http://www.gaudiclub.com/

The Legend of the Vegetable Lamb Plant

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, 1887, by Henry Lee. Image downloaded from elvezio-sciallis.blogspot.com

Polypodium barometz or Cibotium barometz, (golden chicken fern, woolly fern) is a species of arborescent fern. The general consensus is that the myth refers to the root of a Chinese fern, or maybe the legend was an explanation for the cotton plant. It is very interesting to know how a simple plant that resembled an animal was searched by curious travelers and ceremonies might have been developed around it in China.

Cibotium Barometz from kunst-en-cultuur.infonu.nl/geschiedenis

Cotton plant. Internet download.

As early as 445 BC Herodotus had written that “certain trees bear for their fruit fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom” (Lesley Gordon, Green Magic, p. 56. 1977, Viking Press, New York). This tree was known as wool-bearing tree. During the reign of Edward III, Sir John Mandeville described it and named it as Vegetable Lamb Plant. In the XVI and XVII centuries, this particular plant was made a subject of investigation and discussions by some famous writers. In his “Notes on Russia”, Baron Von Herberstein wrote that “a certain seed that of a melon, but rather rounder and longer, from which, when it was set in the earth, grew a plant resembling a lamb….which was called in the language of the country, Borametz or Little Lamb…It was rooted by the navel in the middle of the belly, and devoured the surrounding herbage and grass, and lived as long as that lasted; but when there was no more within its reach the stem withered and the lamb died”. (Lesley Gordon, 1977)

Tartarian sheep. Drawing by Thomas Bewick, 1790.

The specific lamb is the Tartarian sheep, that “is merely a variety of the common sheep, resulting from domestication. They are rather larger than those of the English breed. The color of the male is roan, or light brown mixed with white; the female is a mixture of black and white; their ears are rather long and pendulous; and instead of a tail, they have a large protuberance of fat behind”. (Thomas Brown, Biographical Sketches and Authentic Anecdotes of Quadrupeds. p. 571, London, 1831).

Barometz, from elvezio-sciallis.blogspot.com

Old drawing of the Lamb tree. From photobucket.com (By Panotea)

In his book “Medieval researches from Eastern Asiatic sources” (Vol 1, p. 154-155.1888. Great Britain), E. Bretschneider cites the legend “The lung chung yang (literally “sheep planted on hillocks”) are also produced in the western countries. The people take the navel of a sheep, plant it in the ground and water it. When it hears thunder it grows, the navel retaining a connection with the ground. After the beast has become full grown they take a stick and frighten it. Then the navel breaks off and the sheep begins to walk and eats grass. In autumn it can be eaten. The flesh of the navel (of the butchered sheep) can be planted again”. Then Bretschneider explains that “this miraculous story of a lamb that grows like a plant is nothing other than the reproduction of the medieval legend of the lamb-plant, Tartarian lamb, Agnus Acythicus. Friar Odoric, in the fourteenth century, was the first European traveler who referred to this story…., but it must have been current much earlier in Western countries, for the Chinese authors mention it in the ninth century. In the Tang Shu….(Byzantine Empire) I find the following account: There are in the country of Fu lin sheep which grow from the ground. The people wait till they shoot out, and then surround (the plant or beast) with a wall, to protect it against wild beasts. If the umbilical cord connecting the ground with the lamb is cut off, it will die….According to Odoric’s report, these lambs are found in large melons….The seed is like that of a melon, but the plant which is called barometz or “the lamb” (baran=sheep in Russian), grows to the height of about three feet in the form of that animal, with feet, hoofs, ears, etc, complete, only having in lieu of horns two curly locks of hair. If wounded, it bleeds…. In 1725 Dr Brein of Dantzig first declared that the pretended Agnus scythicus was nothing more than the root of a large fern covered with its natural yellow down, and accompanied by some of the stems, etc, in order when placed in an inverted position, the better to represent the appearance of the legs and horns of a quadruped. Linneus in 1752 received a fern from Southern China … and did not hesitate in declaring it to be the Agnus sovthicus, and to name it Polypodium Barometz…Modern botanists called the plant Cibotium Barometz. It is a tropical plant, found in South China, Assam, and on the Sandwich Islands… Medieval travelers as well as the Chinese annals agree in assigning to this marvelous plant-animal the countries of Western Asia or Eastern Europe”. (E. Bretschneider. p. 154-155.1888. Great Britain).

Polypodium Barometz. From cocanha.blogspot.com

In 1557, Girolamo Cardano of Pavia exposed the absurdity of these beliefs. If it had blood, it must have a heart, and that the soil in which a plant grows is not fitted to supply a heart with movement and vital heat. In 1641, professor of Mathematics at Avignon, Athanasius Kircher, declared it was a plant; but confusion aroused when this woolly plant became entangled with the Astrakhan lamb skins which were a valuable article of commerce. The fleeces of these lambs were obtained before their birth to ensure a softer, whiter and curlier pelt. Most people thought it had a vegetable origin.

In 1716, John Bell walked many miles in Tartary to find this weird plant. But he could only find some dry bushes, which grew on a single stalk. It was true that no grass or leaves grew below the circle of its shade. And what was more important, the Tartarians themselves were laughing at the fable.

Sixty years later, the eminent botanical writer Dr Erasmus Darwin wrote an incredible poem dedicated to this quiet lamb located in the Arctic (!):

E’en round the Pole the flames of love
aspire,
And icy bosoms feel the secret of fire,
Cradled in snow, and fanned by Arctic air,
Shines, gentle Borametz, thy golden hair;
Rooted in earth, each cloven foot descends,
And round and round her flexile neck she
bends,
Crops they grey coral moss, and hoary thyme,
Or laps with rosy tongue the melting
rime;
Eyes with mute tenderness her distant
dam,
And seems to bleat –a “vegetable lamb”.
(Poem cited by Lesley Gordon, 1977)

Scynthian lamb from www.thefreedictionary.com/Scythian+lamb

NOTE. September 10, 2013

Though the fern I'm showing below was labeled as " Australian tree fern fuzz" it reminded me this vegetable lamb, at first sight it looked like lamb's ribs. It was pretty impressive on the touch.

I took this photograph on September 8th, 2013 at the Sherman Gardens and Library in Newport Beach, California.