Wonderful, wonderful

El coro de las Musas

Kalón: lo bello, lo que suscita admiración y atrae la mirada. Las cosas son bellas en virtud de su forma, que satisface los sentidos (especialmente la vista y el oído). Una persona es bella también según las cualidades de su alma y su carácter.

Belleza asociada a otras cualidades (lo amado, lo justo, la medida, la conveniencia). Para Platón, la belleza no es la verdad.

La belleza no es algo unitario. En los himnos es la armonía del cosmos, en poesía es el encanto, en escultura la medida proporcionada y la simetría, en retórica es el ritmo adecuado.

La belleza de los artistas

Con Pericles, se desarrollan las artes para reconstruir los templos destruidos por los persas.

Importancia de la visión subjetiva. Escorzo, belleza viva del cuerpo, equilibrio.

Adopción de un kanon específico, por analogía con la regla (nómos) de las composiciones musicales.

Kalokagathía: belleza ideal mediante la síntesis de los cuerpos vivos, armonizando alma y cuerpo.

La belleza de los filósofos

Sócrates: belleza ideal (representa la naturaleza a partir de composición de partes), belleza espiritual (expresa el alma a través de la mirada), belleza útil (o funcional)

(...) the conceptions of “total architecture” and “total design” are present, of necessity, in all utopian projections. P 87.

Taste is, of course, no longer - and was, perhaps, never - a serious or substantial matter; (...) the uninhibited aesthetic preference of the present (...) is fir structural discontinuities and the multiplicity of syncopated excitements which Tivoli presents. P 93.

(...) we return to rhe activist utopian myth as it was received between the twi world wars. (...) a condition of violent and rapid change, unprecedented in the history of mankind, has produced a state of disorientation, of suffering, of exploitation so profound, a moral and political crisis of such dimension that catastrophe is surely imminent, perhaps inevitable; and therefore, in order to ensure the orderly progression of human affairs, (...) the enterprises of mankind must be brought together into a closer alignment with the, equally inevitable, forces of blissful destiny. (...) society must rid itself of outmoded sentiment, though, technique (...). P 94.

But, if the ideally neutral observer is surely a critical fiction, (...) any literal usage of a “neutral” grid labours under approximate problems. The grid is either all-encompassing - a practical impossibility, or it is to be delimited - and hence not neutral; (...) in the one case, the process elevated to the level of the icon and, in the other, the covert statement of a tendentious idea. P 96.

The architectural components of populism are all for democracy and all for freedom (...). P 97.

(...) if one assumena that all ideas are implicit from the beginning of time (....) and if onw, simultaneously, assumes that all knowledge is accessible (....), then the irritant and the problem of future odeas will logically vanish away. P 99.

“Growth” assumed to be uninterrupted by politics; total design and total non-design, both equally “total” the grid of freedom, assumed to be neutral andd natural; the unchecked spontaneity of “the people”, suppones to be equally healthy and independent; the strange collusions between “science” and “destiny”, between fantasies of authority and fantasies of independence (...). P 100.

(...) architecture is a social institution related to building in much the same way that literature is to speech. Its technical medium is public property abd, if the notion that all speech should be aproximate to literature is, ipso facto, absurd and would, in practice, be intolerable, much the same may be said about building and architecture. P 101.

(...) if democracy (...) is, inherently, a collision of points of view and acceptable as such, then why not allow a theory of contending powers (...). P 106.

(...) in spite of the abstract universal goals demanded by teoretical liberalism, there still remains the problem of identity, with its related problems of absorption and extinction of specific type (...). For the true empirical order was never liberty, equality, fraternity; but it was rather the reverse: a question of fraternal order, a grouping of the equal and like-minded, which, collectively, assumes the power to negociate its freedoms. P 116.

In intention the modern city was to be a fitting home for the noble savage. P 50.

(...) modern architecture’s object fixation (the object which is not an object) is our present concern only in sonfar as it involves the city, the city which has to become evaporated. P 58.

Let us (...) consider the theoretical desideratum that the rational building is obliged to be an object and (...) that buildings, as man-made artefacts, enjoy a meretricious status, in some way, detrimental to an ultimate spiritual release. Let us (...) demand for the rational materialization of the object and this parallel need for disintegration alongside the very obvious feeling that space is, in some way, more sublime than matter (...). If space is more ublime, then limitless naturalistic space must be far more so than any abstracted and structured space (...): space is far less important than time. P 58

(...) there are certain cherished fantasies (...) which the architect must be called upon to imagine as modified and redirected. The notion of himself as messiah is one of these; and, while the notion of himself as prepotent if avant gardeism is another, even more important is the strangely desperate idea of architecture as oppressive and coercive. (...) The preposition that all outdoor space must be in public ownership and accesible to everybody. (...) a willingness to reconsider the object which allegedly nobody wants and to evaluate it not so much as figure but as ground. P 66.

(...) if functionalism proposed an end to typologies in favour of a logical induction from concrete factss, it is precisely because it was unwilling to consider iconic significance as a concrete fact in itself (...).

Modern architecture had not, ipso facto, resulted in a better world (...). P 33.

(...) townscape could readily be interpreted as a derivative of the late eighteenth century Picteresque: and, as it implicated all the love for disorder, cultivation of the individual, distate for the rational, passion for the various, pleasure in the idiosyncratic and suspicion of the generalized, (...) it was enabled to thrive. P 34.

Science fiction identifies itself with mega-buildings, lightweight throwaways, plug-in variability, over-city grids (...), linear citis, integration of buildings with transport, movement systems and tubes. It displays a preference for process and hyper-rationalization, for crude facts as found, and obsession with the spirit of the times. Its vocabulary displays a conversance with computer technology (...). P 37

(...) the results of science fiction (...) usually suffer from the same conditions which plague the ville radieuse - disregard for context, distrust of the social continuum, the use of symbolic utopian models for literal purposes, the assumption that the existing city will be made to go away (...). P 38.

Modern architecture is surely most cogently to be interpreted as a gospel - as, quite literally, a message of good news (...). P 11.

(...) we wish only to call attention to the one-time elevation of the architect’s fantasy, to notice some of its causes and, later, to comment upon the subsequent devolution. P 13.

[The classical utopia] offered not so much a future ideal as an hypothetical one. The icon was to be adored and was - up to a point - to be used; but as image rather than prescription. P 14.

[In theactivist utopia,] if the properties and behaviour of the material world had at last become explicable without resort to dubious speculation, if they were now provable by observation and experiment, then, as the measurable could increasingly be equated with the real, so it became to possible to conceive the ideal city of the mind as presently to be cleansed of all metaphysical and superstitious cloudiness. P 15.

(...) just as exponents of what amounted to scientific revolution had scrutinized simply nature, si the exponents of social renovation should scrutinize ‘natural’ society. P 15.

The city of modern architecture (it may also be calles the modern city) has not yet been built. P02.

So modern architecture, professing to be scientific, displayed a wholly naïve idealism. (...) Or, alternatively, modern architecture, professing to be humane, displayed a wholly unacceptable and sterile scientific rigour. P06.