ALL IN ALL IT’S JUST BRICKS IN THE WALL

While reading and annotating Norberg-Schulz’s Intentions in Architecture, I wrote “all in all it’s just bricks in the wall” three times in the margins.  The book was all just words piled upon words.  Tortuous word assemblies which try dig to a deeper meaning about what buildings try to be. 

Back in 1965, if you were deemed to be bright and intelligent, you piled up words.  High brain power, in those days, was proven exactly by your ability to pile words upon words.  You didn’t have to do any drawings.  You didn’t have to advance a pathway forward.

If what you are going to do is pile up words, then it sure is a great example.  Here we have an architect, who combines Gestalt psychological principals, in an effort to dig deep to try to get at the fundamentals of what buildings are and how they come to be.  

I read every word of the book, and the margins are filled with my annotations.  I benefitted from my detailed read.  The book is a heroic attempt to get at truth.  Holistic truth.  Bottom line, it asks us to get beyond style so we can see the deep psychological interaction between a human and what they build.

And, time and again, Norberg-Schulz takes a swing at the fundamental beliefs of these pages, as these two quotes demonstrate.

“Generally we judge and act on the basis of a few representing phenomena, that is, we have an incomplete and superficial idea of the world of objects.”  Norberg-Schulz.  p29.

“It is often convenient to introduce elements which have the character of ‘total Gestalten’.  By this term we mean an element where space-form and space-boundary…are forming a pregnant whole.”  Norberg-Schulz.  p139.

Some of Norberg-Schulz’s precepts include:
-a theory is one of possibilities, not rules
-forget art for the sake of art
-universal dimensions are defined
-there is no absolute aesthetic ideals
-building can be ideated as a pure form
All of these, and more, are in total resonance with the Transparent Drawing project.  

Like I have said many times before, I’m no intellectual.  So in that guise, I guess that is why I rail against the pedantic word play, all of which is working strenuously toward a holistic and integrated theory of form.  Yet, at least to me, it never gets there.  There is no pathway forward.  In the back of the book, there are the requisite pictures of buildings.  Yet no drawings from Norberg-Schulz.  Not even a table or diagram which demonstrates how his theory is tied together: that would have been too visual.  

No, it’s always better to pile up more words.  That’s why its just bricks in the wall.  

1.  Norberg-Schulz, Christian.  Intentions in Architecture.  MIT Press, Cambridge.  1965.