Geoffrey Bawa

I've read in several places that modernism looks better in the tropics than under Europe's so-often-gray skies, so I suppose it is a widespread sentiment. So let's look at one of the most famous exponents of Tropical Modernism, Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003).

Bawa was Eurasian, English and Indian Muslim on one side, German, Scottish, and Sinhalese on the other. His father was a successful lawyer under the British colonial regime, and he sent his son to Cambridge and then to the Middle Temple to study law. Bawa was admitted to the English bar in 1944, which makes me wonder; why were British law schools still graduating students in 1944? Were barristers needed for the war effort? Anyway Bawa practiced law in England and then after the war traveled on the continent and thought about settling in Italy before returning to Colombo in 1948.

In Sri Lanka Bawa practiced law for a while and bought an abandoned rubber estate that he named Lunuganga or Salt River. He lived there part time for the rest of his life, always tinkering with the buildings and the gardens. This gate house is his design.

By 1950 Bawa had grown dissatisfied with the law and decided he wanted to be an architect instead. So he apprenticed himself to one of Sri Lanka's leading architects, H. H. Reid. Reid promptly died, and Bawa went back to Britain in search of training. After spending a year at Cambridge, he enrolled as a student at the Architectural Association in London, graduating in 1956. In 1957, at the age of 38 he returned to Sri Lanka and took over what was left of Reid's practice. He was joined in the practice by Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, and the two designed many buildings together. This hotel shows one trick Bawa employed several times in his career, designing a fairly simple modernist structure and then allowing Sri Lanka's luxurious vegetation to cover the whole thing in greenery.

What strikes me is the fusion of modernism with what I think of as British or Dutch colonial architecture with modernism and a Buddhist aesthetic. Here are two views of Sri Lanka's parliament building.

Entrance to a cafe in Colombo.

 Two very different hotel lobbies.

Bawa had a thing for staircases; in fact I discovered him from a feature on ten of his best staircases at Dezeen.

A pavilion.

An observation tower. Below, views of the estate at Lunuganga.

Ghost Apple

These form when the temperature is just right for the slushy apple to thaw and drain away but the pure ice shell to remain. Via This is Colossal.

Tyler Cowen Interviews Jordan Peterson

The conversation starts with Jordan Peterson's collection of Soviet propaganda, mostly bought off eBay.

COWEN: What’s the main thing you learned over the years, living with those works, viewing the propaganda, thinking about it every day, every night?

PETERSON: Art wins.

COWEN: Art wins over propaganda. Why?

PETERSON: All the time, yeah. Nothing wins over art. Nothing is powerful enough to stand in the way of art. Whatever artistic merit the canvases have stays as a permanent part of them, and the propagandistic aspect disappears as the context — the political context — disappears. All that’s left, in some sense, is the pure art and the craftsmanship. At some point, some of the paintings I have are just very realistic renditions of working-class people. All the propaganda is disappearing, so it’s very interesting to have those artifacts around.

And this:

COWEN: What should we learn from Tolkien?

PETERSON: Go out and confront your dragons.

COWEN: What should we learn from Harry Potter?

PETERSON: Voluntary death and rebirth redeems.

The Runaway Nun

William de Melton [Archbishop of York] to the Dean of Beverly greetings. A scandalous rumor has reached us saying that Joan of Leeds, a nun at the Cloister of St. Clements in York, has impudently cast aside the propriety of religion and the modesty of her sex out of a malicious mind. . . Simulating a bodily illness, she pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul, and with the help of numerous of her accomplices, evildoers, with malice aforethought, crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body in order to mislead the devoted faithful and she had no shame in procuring its burial in a sacred space amongst the religious of that place and, in a cunning, nefarious manner … having turned her back on decency and the good of religion, seduced by indecency, she involved herself irreverently and perverted her path of life arrogantly to the way of carnal lust and away from poverty and obedience, and, having broken her vows and discarded the religious habit, she now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul and to the scandal of all of her order. Therefore let her and her known accomplices be excommunicated etc.

--18 August 1318

From the Registers of the Archbishop of York, via The History Blog

David Brooks on life in your 20s

Question from interviewer Tyler Cowen:

Why have so many young men stopped even looking for work? What has happened to aspiration in our culture?

After floundering around for a bit, David Brooks starts on this:

After I missed the Trump thing so badly, I traveled around the country for 18 months, and I’m still doing it and always talking to Trump voters and other voters. The amount of wounding and amount of sense of betrayal, high levels of distrust, high levels of feeling “Everyone else is getting ahead and I’m falling behind,” I found especially for young people in their 20s, even people with sterling educations.

The 20s have become for many a brutal time, that they don’t quite know what their purpose is in life. They don’t quite have the skills to get out of the wide-open options. They’re afraid of closing off options because they’re not really quite sure who they are. We’ve produced a society that’s made being 25 phenomenally difficult, in part because you’re in the most supervised childhood at human history until 21, and after that, you’re released into the complete void.

You’re not going to get married for another 12 years. You’re not going to settle into your career. I’ve come to notice it in my students. I’ve come to call it the Telos Crisis, the loss of sense of purpose. When you get the setback in your mid-20s, you don’t quite know where your life is, you haven’t discovered it, you haven’t found some calling that just seizes you, and it can be pretty rough.

Nietzsche has a phrase: “He who has a why to live for can endure any how.” That if you know what your long term is, then you can endure the setbacks, but if that hasn’t become clear to you, then the setbacks are super hard. And I noticed it in the rising depression rates, the rising mental health problems, the rising suicide problems. We’ve sort of left people in a very unstructured experience after age 21.

I just gave this commencement talk at Butler University, couple days ago. And commencements are happy, and I was like, “Your life is going to suck in three years.” . . .

I’m not sure that was the right spirit for that occasion.

Strawberry Hill

Strawberry Hill House near London  was built by Horace Walpole starting in 1747, one of the first works of Neogothic architecture. Walpole was the third son of Robert Walpole, who is generally considered Britain's first Prime Minister. The father arranged a couple of cozy sinecures for his son that allowed him to spend his life on artistic pursuits.

Most notably Horace wrote The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.

He designed this summer house with the help of two friends, John Chute and Richard Bentley; collectively they called themselves the Committee of Taste. The Committee clearly looked into every detail of the structure, including these chimneys.

I love the interiors because they are so restrained; this is domestic Gothic, appropriate for a house rather than a cathedral.

My elder daughter and I are thinking of organizing our own Committee of Taste, but sadly I think little produced in our own time would meet our standards. Since no relative thought to arrange any cozy sinecures for us, we lack the resources to build our own mansions that would. But at least we can enjoy Walpole's creation.

Edmund Dulac, The Buried Moon

Illustration for a book of Fairy Stories, 1916. For sale at The Curator's Eye

Nothing

Not far from my office in Washington is a condominium building of about ten stories that surrounds a small courtyard. You can access this courtyard through a gate of iron bars that opens onto a side street, with of course key card access and an intercom.

It has been a very nasty week around here, grim days of rain, sleet, and ice.

Monday as I walked down the street through a cold drizzle I came across a homeless woman standing at the gate to the condominium courtyard. She had a crazy look about her and was wearing a government-issue gray wool blanket as a shawl. She was delivering an impassioned speech to the intercom. She was not pressing the button, so nobody inside was hearing her even though as she swayed back and forth she sometimes brought her mouth right up to the microphone. What she said was hardly coherent and considered largely of expletives, a lot about effing rich white people. The one thing that came through clearly was, "You think you got everything, but you got nothing."

A Gray Day in Williamsport

I have an interesting project now, helping the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park build a new headquarters in Williamsport, Maryland. I'm heading back there tonight for the first public meeting; these are some photographs from the last time I was there.

Williamsport is historically interesting because it retains something of the industrial character of the canal landscape. Most of the canal has become in effect a natural park; in some places you can walk for miles without seeing any human-built structures but the canal and the towpath. But in the nineteenth century it was lined with mills, quarries, and farms, not forests. Above is part of the railroad lift bridge with its concrete control shack.

The old PEPCO power plant that shut down in 2012.

Lock 44. Once this project is complete you will be able to take a boat ride along the canal, through this working lock and over the aqueduct that carried the canal across Conococheague Creek.

Lockhouse 44.

Grave markers silhouetted against the sky.

Train tracks along the canal.

Jingler that let train men know if they had piled the coal too high on their cars to go under the bridge.

And now two photographs taken from the same place facing different directions. This is the old Miller Lumber Company building, which is where the NPS plans to put their headquarters. The stone building on the corner was built around 1790. The Miller Brothers were operating a lumber mill on the canal in 1890 when they began leasing the stone structure for their office. In 1918 Williamsport was electrified. The Miller Brothers then abandoned the mill and moved their whole operation to this spot, expanding onto several lots. It remained open until a few years ago.

And in the other direction, the Cushwa Basin with the 19th-century warehouse, Potomac River in the background. The crane is working on the aqueduct, which needs a major restoration before it can be rewatered. The idea is to put the new headquarters and visitor center across the street from this interpetive nexus with boat rides and all. This is all supposed to be done by the end of 2020, and it ought then to be an even better place to visit.

Social Media, Freedom, and Worlds Colliding

Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic has put up two interesting blog posts about the issue he calls "worlds colliding," that is, how the ubiquity of social media has made it much harder to be one kind of person at work and a different kind on the weekends. He starts from a claim made by University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson:

People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains? That is what it is to be free.

Friedersdorf thinks this is overstated and prefers this formulation:

The ability to slip into a domain and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining identities in other domains is something most Americans value, both to live in peace amid difference and for personal reasons.

He then tosses off a bunch of stories about people who get in trouble at work for something they said on Facebook or Twitter to a group of acquaintances that does not include anyone they work with, the sort of stories we are all familiar with.

Obviously there are limits to the sort of private life you can maintain on the side; nobody thinks that serial killers have a right to day jobs. But what if you are a serial killer fanboy and maintain a web site full of creepy trivia about serial killers and like to chat with other people about your favorite serial killers? Do you have the right to keep that private? Or do your colleagues and employer have a right to know this about you? Does your employer have a right to fire you for it? What if you post something really offensive and people start demonstrating outside the restaurant where you work and scaring away customers?

What if you're a middle school teacher and your students find out you've written racy fan fiction under a pseudonym? Can you be fired for that?

What if you have controversial political views? I have personally been told by several professors that they could simply never write online about a wide range of topics because their beliefs would get them in big trouble at work. There are things which I would never write about here.

I suppose this is related to the old internet argument about concealing your identity online. On the one hand this frees you to say controversial things, but on the other it enables horrific bullying and other forms of nastiness. Some people still do maintain separate online identities, but the software is getting better and better at tying all your online stuff together. Plus, many people in the tech world do not agree that you have any right to such privacy; Mark Zuckerberg once expressed what looked like real outrage at the thought that people would maintain different Facebook accounts for different interests and different groups of friends.

When Friedersdorf asked his readers to share their experiences in this line he heard from many for whom separating their worlds is vital, for example one who spends a lot of time in forms for victims of abuse he suffered but that his family and friends know nothing about. But he also heard from people who say that we need to shame people who behave badly because we are just way too nasty to each other in general and maybe the threat of a viral video of your worst moment is just what you need to straighten you out.

I'm curious what my readers think, and do.

Henri Rousseau

The first artist I loved as a child was Henri Rousseau (1844 – 1910). I remember encountering him in one of the many children's books illustrated in imitation of his style and wanting to paint my room like one of his jungles. (The Equatorial Jungle, 1909)

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French customs officer who took up painting in middle age. When he started showing his works they were roundly mocked, but soon they started to grow on people and within a decade of picking up a brush he was successful enough to quit his job and paint full time. However, most of the art world still despised him.

Until I started working on this post I knew only his jungle scenes, but they are actually only a small part of his output. (A Vase of Flowers)

Around 1905 Rousseau was discovered by some of the younger artists in Paris, notably Pablo Picasso. Picasso bought one of Rousseau's paintings for 5 francs and kept it for the rest of his life. He introduced Rousseau to his avant garde friends at a wild banquet in 1908 that became a legendary event in the Parisian art world. (The Sleeping Gypsy, 1907)

This of course made Rousseau famous and for the next sixty years or so he was one of the most valuable and sought after of the "post-Impressionist" French painters. The Met, the Tate and MOMA each have several of his works. His paintings appear in poems by Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath and in a song by Joni Mitchell; hippies loved him. (A Carnival Evening, 1886)

And then he went into an eclipse; I hardly remember seeing anything of his or reading about him since my childhood infatuation. The childlike quality that endeared him to hippies went out of fashion in an art world that valued rebellious cool. (Tiger in a Tropical Storm)

His most famous painting, The Dream, 1910.

I still like those, although I don't think I would consider painting my bedroom in this style any more.

Some Small Revenge

Ahem:

Looking to get yourself a present this Valentine's Day? The El Paso Zoo has you covered. It will name a cockroach after your ex and then feed it to a meerkat live on camera.

You can message the zoo on Facebook with your ex's name, then wait patiently for February 14 to watch the roach get devoured during the "Quit Bugging Me" meerkat event, which will live-stream on Facebook and the zoo's website. The names of those exes will also be displayed around the meerkat exhibit and on social media starting February 11. The zoo calls it "the perfect Valentine's Day gift."

Girault de Prangey's Grand Tour

Pioneering photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) took a grand tour from Europe into the Middle East in 1842-1844, creating many glass plate negatives of famous monuments. Some of these are now in a show at the Met. Above, the view from the gate of Antioch, 1844. To see these correctly you'll have to click on them. They don't wow me as art but they are among the earliest photographs of some of these places.

The Roman Forum in 1842.

Philae, 1843.

Istanbul, 1843.