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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
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Foreword
Let me begin with a lighthearted story that tells a lot. In 1950 the great photographer Robert Capa recalled:
Which leads to my point. What difference does it make to us what an artist believes? What an artist thinks is important because it conditions the forms and evolution of the art. But thinking is a lot different from believing. The thought process parallels the evolution of plastic images. For the best artists, thought runs on a track alongside art and does not touch it, does not converge, leaving for the art the nondiscursive, the ineffable part that cannot be treated adequately by thought, by ratiocination. But belief is a different matter. It is private. Like the founts of art -- also nondiscursive and ineffable -- belief is remotely personal, almost beyond confession. Confession, after all, though a passing fad in late Romantic art, which suggests authenticity (itself an aesthetic), also requires a form, language. So what difference does it make to us what an artist believes? To an artist, belief is as important as to anybody else. But no more so. Belief stipulates the structure of the universe and aligns as surely as the ropes of gravity the stars, placing everything in an order dictated by significance, or even by lack of belief. (The book of confession of a despairing person should be very short, but often they are the longest ramblings.) Viewing the world constellated by belief, provided with things that would not exist but for belief, challenges us to act in relation to what we behold, to add value to perception. Then we are challenged to perform on these assertions or stalk off, feeble, beaten, and paralyzed in inaction. The action that is meaningful for any man or woman, as a believer, as a world-maker, is our living choices. An artist is also a citizen. If Picasso was a Communist, in his time and place that may have made sense as an antifascist sentiment at the crest of an unusual age for Europe. Heady times of progress also came at the end of a degrading, generations-long depersonalization of workers and an alienation that created involuntary consumers. But, centuries before, Matthias Grunewald also grappled with balancing his fealty to rich patrons -- the Church and nobility -- with his sympathy for the struggling peasantry. Ultimately, an artist's allegiance must be to art, a vexing dilemma that limits to the implement of their art any participation as a citizen. (Would that Jacques-Louis David had understood or succumbed to this burden. Too late Beethoven and Goya learned this bitter lesson. The artist is mute but for his art.) If the field of action is limited to a canvas or a poem, the artist's beliefs are different. Architects are artists who dream the built world into being. We dwell in, walk among, wash our hands in, and stub our toes on the creations of architects in a way that no world of Herman Melville's contains us. Accordingly, we heed the beliefs of architects as the prerequisites of our world. The following pages hold the beliefs of Paolo Soleri. The writings of Paolo Soleri are not a sauce to flavor his buildings. His essays -- unlike those of most of the major practicing architects today -- do not substitute for competent or soul-stirring buildings. Few of the significant (or at least famous) late-twentieth-century commissions (for museums or office towers or private homes) could be examined without laughing were it not for a "theory" the architect has supplied to deflect and befuddle, first patrons, then the press. Soleri's writings are nothing of the sort; they are not excuses for buildings. His writings must be examined with the hope of actual construction. Like a few others (not Tatlin, that darling of the left whose imagined tower was long ago surpassed in height by the stacked pages written about it), Soleri is famous for what he has not built. He is not a "failed" architect either, not by the usual standards. He is not in the company of the dreamers or the disappointed. For example, a teacher at the royal academy of architecture, Etienne-Louis Boullee (1728-99), envisioned a vast megastructure for a cenotaph for Isaac Newton, ca. 1784; he also designed a huge metropolitan church for Paris, unbuildable because of its scale.The Russian architect Vasily Ivanovich Bazhenov (1738-99) designed a gigantic, sprawling Kremlin Palace, 1769-72, that fell prey to cost, changes of taste, and Catherine the Great's fickleness. Soleri is not in this company. The scarcity of his buildings is mainly his own doing, or undoing, or not doing. This makes him a special kind of architect. In China centuries before the common era, the so-called Lao-tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote: "With a wall all around / The clay bowl is molded; / But the use of the bowl / Will depend on the part / Of the bowl that is void." There are different kinds of voids: the useful part of the empty bowl, the vacancy of inaction waiting, the moral failure of the loser, the well-meaning dreamer, and so forth. Soleri's unbuilt buildings are interesting lacunae because they are a legacy leading toward the "obvious," as every great invention is "obvious" after some genius has opened a door to its possibility. As the elegance of the Wright brothers, or Columbus, is strikingly plain in its assertion, so too is Soleri's culmination of architecture-as-the-city, a merging of the individual and species, cityscape with (a) building, and the evaporation of that crime of industrialization, commuting, which robs the country of its park-like quality and injects uncivility into the city. Someday this will be obvious, thanks to Soleri. For now, we have more of his words than his buildings. His imaginings dot the landscape of our minds with promise while the actual landscape is presently almost devoid of his beliefs made manifest. Where belief as theory (stipulated values) meets belief as hope (wish and desire), this introductory statement must end and the master's own words begin. -- Harry Rand Smithsonian Institution
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