A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment

I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.

On Brutalism

Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.

Architecture

Architecture is the material actualization of a preferred system. It articulates how we feel the world ought to be. That it expresses a preference is a necessary consequence of its form: an architected form is a space transformed, a space replaced.

Orientation around Covent Garden and the West End

Another coursework motivated post. The task was to explore around the Covent Garden and West End areas of London, trying to visit as many key locations as possible, while producing written, photographic and drawn records. As well I was to find and collect things of interest from the environment. This exercise essentially familiarised me with a general research approach for exploring and documenting an area.

A lot of the places I was tasked with documenting were locations that would be relevant to illustration (art supply shops, galleries). Being plopped in the middle of Covent Garden I didn't exactly hit the ground running. When I first arrive in a place I find I'm not really ready to start seeking things out and constructing a mental model, rather first I aim to get a feel for things, to listen and let the place speak to me and then gradually build up a set of associations. This approach came crashing against my time constraint and instead I found myself rushing from spot to spot, hurriedly jotting down the most immediate of impressions like some twisted impersonation of a tourist. In any event, here follows what I managed to scrape together.

Chords of Canada

Another coursework-motivated post. The task is to find three examples each of Design, Illustration, and Art from my country of origin - Canada. These should be interesting and relevant to me and to Canada. Being not particularly well tuned in to art - especially that which might be considered culturally relevant - nor being in touch necessarily with Canadian culture, I found the task a bit of a challenge. In any event, here follows my attempt.

Pick 10: Images of Interest

The following post is rather simply motivated. It is part of my required pre-course work - a school assignment. The goal is simply to pick 10 images that I find interesting and to explain my picks. What follow are simply what happens to interest me at the moment of this posting.

A Geometric Offering: GEB-EGB Trip-let

Having come to the end (finally!) of the voluminous tome that is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I decided to try my hand at reproducing the GEB-EGB trip-let that forms the cover image (at least on the copy of the book that I was reading). This self-imposed exercise came as a welcome change of pace from the mathematical-typographical exercises that Hofstadter presents (punishes?) his readers with. Hofstadter describes the cover image thus:

Cover: A "GEB" and an "EGB" trip-let suspended in space, casting their symbolic shadows on three planes that meet at the corner of a room. ("Trip-let" is the name which I have given to blocks shaped in such a way that their shadows in three orthogonal directions are three different letters. The trip-let idea came to me in a flash one evening as I was trying to think how best to symbolize the unity of Gödel, Escher, and Bach by somehow fusing their names in a striking design. The two trip-lets shown on the cover were designed and made by me, using mainly a band saw, with an end mill for the holes; they are redwood, and are just under 4 inches on a side.)

GEB-EGB trip-let as depicted on the cover of my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach