I have in the past worked and lived at mine camps. The accommodation and offices and facilities were always miserable, uncomfortable, ugly, temporary structures that seemed to be designed to impress upon the workers that they did not deserve to treated like humans who have the sort of sensual and aesthetic needs that are discussed in _A Pattern Language_. These workplaces are a world away from the bland, hygienic, styled interiors of inner city offices.
But then you have the sublimity of the underground. To be a kilometre underground in the steamy heat listening to the rocks cracking, seeing the ore minerals sparkling in the light of your head lamp, is something I miss profoundly. Seeing the crystals growing in cavities, the strange fungi, the lights in the distance from machines. The deep, still silence (when there aren't machines nearby!), the scent of the air, the way time moves differently, these are all akin to the experience of a cathedral. But for me there is also a sense of enclosure and security and I yearn to curl up and sleep in there forever. It is a comfortable place, for all its sublimity.
The comfort of home is "afflicting" in its own way. When we have an opportunity to step away from ugliness and constantly flashing screens into a place where money isn't exchanged and is an expression of a person and/or family, it's...different from our normal experience, and on some level we have to grapple with that, even if we don't realize we're doing so.
Also, part of why sublime beauty is sublime is because we are small/unworthy. Maybe in the next life we will have the capacity to experience sublimity and comfort simultaneously, whereas here we can only experience them separately (which is why we need both cathedrals and throw pillows, but not in the same place).
Here in the Twin Cities, we don't have mountains or grand oceanic vistas, but we do have some pretty great architecture. The St. Paul Cathedral and the Minnesota State Capitol both inspire that awesome experience of the sublime when looking up at their domes from below. I particularly love how the latter welcomes participation - middle schoolers give speeches in the rotunda, their voices echoing up the stone columns. Demonstrators will fill the mezzanines/balconies when a hot topic is on the docket. It's grand architecture that is uncomfortable in its beauty and grandness, but also says, 'participate anyway, this is yours'.
Our orchestra halls are a different type of sublime. They've taken my breath away when I've entered them - the O'Shaughnessy Auditorium, Orchestra Hall, the Ordway - but even more than their pure architectural wonder, their grandness helps to augment the sublime experience of the music that takes place in their spaces. Alone, the music and the architecture may not trigger sublime terror, but when the music starts, the architecture can aid in the elevation of both to that level.
Similarly, I think a home can also be arranged to ease the journey to the sublime. I have experienced the sublime at home - holding a newborn, looking at my sleeping kiddo - and I think it is possible to arrange the home in a way that makes it easier to experience that sublimity, and remind of the ever-available-ness of awe. My mom has a knack for this. She got very into feng shui when I was a kid, and has an eye for light and shadow and house plant placement. It's definitely not AirSpace, it's a peaceful space that is personal and welcoming and human and *balanced* in a way that feels *right*.
So, I don’t actually find the carefully styled ambiance of AirSpace beautiful at all. I find it… repellent. I do not want to be in this space, the space itself is rejecting me, making me unwelcome. It’s dead space. And I am reminded of Isaiah (45:18): “he is God, who shaped the earth and made it, who set it firm; he did not create it to be chaos, he formed it to be lived in.” A beautiful space is a living space - and life is complicated with lots of different kinds of living to do. Chartres (I’m assuming Chartres means the cathedral) is not like my living room or bedroom, and a living room or bedroom would be very unpleasant if it was like Chartres, - but it is still a living space in all it’s stillness because it’s pointing us at eternal life, which is what is wrong with AirSpace’s emptiness - it doesn’t point us outside ourselves.
One experience of the sublime that most of humanity got to experience for millennia, but which nowadays is increasingly rare, is the nightly appearance of the stars. Not a few random speckles across the horizon like we urban/suburban dwellers get to see, but vast and dense collections of constellations and galaxies, giving that confusing feeling of smallness and significance and eternity. Humankind used to share the experience of regularly grappling with that feeling, but now most of us can't. Fighting light pollution is a spiritual good! (Make sure your houselights don't direct light upwards! Close your blinds or curtains in the evening! If more homes made little changes, it can actually make a huge difference.)
First thing that comes to mind: Suburbia eats away at the sense of magnificence in the human experience. There's a stark lack of "sublime" in found in the spaces of housing developments (esp. hostile to the concept of a "shared common").
I'm a grad student heading into an Urban Planning program, and as I'm boning up on the literature in the field, everyone takes shots at the 'burbs, but I have yet to see a strong argument for exactly *why* they stink. I think suburbia feels like AirSpace writ large - Obviously, meticulously designed, but in a way that appeals to a marketable counterfeit sense of humanity, not a real, lived-in humanity. In a way, they're simultaneously appealing in a maddeningly overt way to humans' desire for comfort and privacy, but not providing any of lattice-work upon which to build communities that have deeper meaning for real, lasting homey-ness.
No sublime, no common spaces, just everybody left to their own devices until they realize their devices aren't enough to satisfy.
(Still waiting for some data on why suburbs stink, though.)
Totally ignoring most of the post and focusing on just the first image: I have been thinking more (because in my imagination, we are house-hunting) about the picture of groups of houses around a small common area. It seems to me very appealing, but probably an impossible dream in modern America, due to our individualistic mindset when it comes to ownership and money. "If I do not own it personally, then it's not my duty to tend it." To make a common space work, given this American mindset, you would need the locality to own and maintain the common spaces--which certainly has lots of precedent when it comes to fields, playgrounds, etc--but you would need to normalize the idea that instead of paying in your property price for yard acreage, you will have smaller home lots with higher local taxes to maintain lots of these little common spaces. But that's a difficult mindset shift to sell, in some ways: "Yes, you're getting less land AND paying higher taxes!" It comes with lots of benefits, but they can be vague and hard to measure, and therefore harder to advertise.
You know what are some remarkably sublime domestic spaces? the interiors of Gaudí’s multifamily residential buildings in Barcelona (the Casa Mila and Casa Batlló).
I have in the past worked and lived at mine camps. The accommodation and offices and facilities were always miserable, uncomfortable, ugly, temporary structures that seemed to be designed to impress upon the workers that they did not deserve to treated like humans who have the sort of sensual and aesthetic needs that are discussed in _A Pattern Language_. These workplaces are a world away from the bland, hygienic, styled interiors of inner city offices.
But then you have the sublimity of the underground. To be a kilometre underground in the steamy heat listening to the rocks cracking, seeing the ore minerals sparkling in the light of your head lamp, is something I miss profoundly. Seeing the crystals growing in cavities, the strange fungi, the lights in the distance from machines. The deep, still silence (when there aren't machines nearby!), the scent of the air, the way time moves differently, these are all akin to the experience of a cathedral. But for me there is also a sense of enclosure and security and I yearn to curl up and sleep in there forever. It is a comfortable place, for all its sublimity.
The comfort of home is "afflicting" in its own way. When we have an opportunity to step away from ugliness and constantly flashing screens into a place where money isn't exchanged and is an expression of a person and/or family, it's...different from our normal experience, and on some level we have to grapple with that, even if we don't realize we're doing so.
Also, part of why sublime beauty is sublime is because we are small/unworthy. Maybe in the next life we will have the capacity to experience sublimity and comfort simultaneously, whereas here we can only experience them separately (which is why we need both cathedrals and throw pillows, but not in the same place).
Here in the Twin Cities, we don't have mountains or grand oceanic vistas, but we do have some pretty great architecture. The St. Paul Cathedral and the Minnesota State Capitol both inspire that awesome experience of the sublime when looking up at their domes from below. I particularly love how the latter welcomes participation - middle schoolers give speeches in the rotunda, their voices echoing up the stone columns. Demonstrators will fill the mezzanines/balconies when a hot topic is on the docket. It's grand architecture that is uncomfortable in its beauty and grandness, but also says, 'participate anyway, this is yours'.
Our orchestra halls are a different type of sublime. They've taken my breath away when I've entered them - the O'Shaughnessy Auditorium, Orchestra Hall, the Ordway - but even more than their pure architectural wonder, their grandness helps to augment the sublime experience of the music that takes place in their spaces. Alone, the music and the architecture may not trigger sublime terror, but when the music starts, the architecture can aid in the elevation of both to that level.
Similarly, I think a home can also be arranged to ease the journey to the sublime. I have experienced the sublime at home - holding a newborn, looking at my sleeping kiddo - and I think it is possible to arrange the home in a way that makes it easier to experience that sublimity, and remind of the ever-available-ness of awe. My mom has a knack for this. She got very into feng shui when I was a kid, and has an eye for light and shadow and house plant placement. It's definitely not AirSpace, it's a peaceful space that is personal and welcoming and human and *balanced* in a way that feels *right*.
So, I don’t actually find the carefully styled ambiance of AirSpace beautiful at all. I find it… repellent. I do not want to be in this space, the space itself is rejecting me, making me unwelcome. It’s dead space. And I am reminded of Isaiah (45:18): “he is God, who shaped the earth and made it, who set it firm; he did not create it to be chaos, he formed it to be lived in.” A beautiful space is a living space - and life is complicated with lots of different kinds of living to do. Chartres (I’m assuming Chartres means the cathedral) is not like my living room or bedroom, and a living room or bedroom would be very unpleasant if it was like Chartres, - but it is still a living space in all it’s stillness because it’s pointing us at eternal life, which is what is wrong with AirSpace’s emptiness - it doesn’t point us outside ourselves.
One experience of the sublime that most of humanity got to experience for millennia, but which nowadays is increasingly rare, is the nightly appearance of the stars. Not a few random speckles across the horizon like we urban/suburban dwellers get to see, but vast and dense collections of constellations and galaxies, giving that confusing feeling of smallness and significance and eternity. Humankind used to share the experience of regularly grappling with that feeling, but now most of us can't. Fighting light pollution is a spiritual good! (Make sure your houselights don't direct light upwards! Close your blinds or curtains in the evening! If more homes made little changes, it can actually make a huge difference.)
First thing that comes to mind: Suburbia eats away at the sense of magnificence in the human experience. There's a stark lack of "sublime" in found in the spaces of housing developments (esp. hostile to the concept of a "shared common").
I'm a grad student heading into an Urban Planning program, and as I'm boning up on the literature in the field, everyone takes shots at the 'burbs, but I have yet to see a strong argument for exactly *why* they stink. I think suburbia feels like AirSpace writ large - Obviously, meticulously designed, but in a way that appeals to a marketable counterfeit sense of humanity, not a real, lived-in humanity. In a way, they're simultaneously appealing in a maddeningly overt way to humans' desire for comfort and privacy, but not providing any of lattice-work upon which to build communities that have deeper meaning for real, lasting homey-ness.
No sublime, no common spaces, just everybody left to their own devices until they realize their devices aren't enough to satisfy.
(Still waiting for some data on why suburbs stink, though.)
Totally ignoring most of the post and focusing on just the first image: I have been thinking more (because in my imagination, we are house-hunting) about the picture of groups of houses around a small common area. It seems to me very appealing, but probably an impossible dream in modern America, due to our individualistic mindset when it comes to ownership and money. "If I do not own it personally, then it's not my duty to tend it." To make a common space work, given this American mindset, you would need the locality to own and maintain the common spaces--which certainly has lots of precedent when it comes to fields, playgrounds, etc--but you would need to normalize the idea that instead of paying in your property price for yard acreage, you will have smaller home lots with higher local taxes to maintain lots of these little common spaces. But that's a difficult mindset shift to sell, in some ways: "Yes, you're getting less land AND paying higher taxes!" It comes with lots of benefits, but they can be vague and hard to measure, and therefore harder to advertise.
You know what are some remarkably sublime domestic spaces? the interiors of Gaudí’s multifamily residential buildings in Barcelona (the Casa Mila and Casa Batlló).