The Hammock Papers: Necessity.

09 May 2023

Necessity.

Laubin, Paper Tiger (Leon Krier), n/d

Leon Krier argues that it is traditional urbanism − not dense Modernism − that offers the solutions to the planet’s ecological problems ...

We need a global environmental project to respond to global ecological problems. The proliferation of so-called "sustainable" green-suburbs, green-skyscrapers, green-transport, green-food, green-fuel and green-everything are distracting ploys that will postpone peak-oil by a mere few days. For the time being, the daily abuse of the terms erodes their social and political potential and postpones the advent of eventual solutions. What needs to be grasped is that building typology and building styles, urban densities and mixed uses are issues not of artistic, political or transcendental beliefs, but of ecology and technology.

For the time being, the daily abuse of the terms erodes their social and political potential and postpones the advent of eventual solutions. What needs to be grasped is that building typology and building styles, urban densities and mixed uses are issues not of artistic, political or transcendental beliefs, but of ecology and technology.

Traditional architectures are part and parcel of building technology. To condemn them as historical and dead languages amounts to an ideological brainwashing, to a technological dis-education, to the loss of millennial technical experience and knowledge. While the knowledge of handling synthetic building materials has progressed in the past century, the know-how and capacity to handle natural building materials has catastrophically regressed. Experience is by definition a matter of the past. The "fear of backwardness" holds control of a vast and worldwide fraternity, a global brotherhood, believing in the sanctity and exclusive legitimacy of Modernism, a theory that has been brain-dead for half a century, yet keeps dominating positions in academia and its dependent culture industry. This theory, at first fired by fossil fuel energies combined with an atavistic belief in infinite progress, is now held alive by fear of regression. The angst of backwardness is what blinds its victims to the technological treasure house of traditional architecture and urbanism. The resulting technological and artistic amnesia is responsible for the cataclysmic worldwide degradation of the built environment.

Traditional architecture and urbanism is a body of technical knowledge: it is definitely not a theology nor a transcendental theory, but the technology for settling the planet in ecological, aesthetic and ethical ways. The return to traditional architecture and settlement patterns will − contrary to what I have previously argued − not come about by democratic choice, but by fate and by overwhelming necessity. Geography, climate and ecology will eventually define again their forms and materials, their number, location, size and scale.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL