2024. 10. 4 Fri
Stirring
M said my proposal reminded her of Valéry’s Eupalinos. I confessed that I hadn’t heard of it, to which she responded, a little taken aback, that it was on the reading list of everyone who wanted to learn architecture, at least in her time.
The book was kept in the librarian’s office in the rare books section, strictly for reference only. I handed in my student card, took it back to my seat by the window and read it to the end in one sitting. Two dead philosophers talk about architecture, but also about music, enclosures, geometry, language and the soul’s calling, in their realm of shades. The sense of nostalgia strangely echoes Eupalinos’ ‘delayed Ideas’ of that which is going to be, one day perhaps. How can one help being obscure? To this I recall Kahn’s imperturbable statement about unbuilt projects - the fact that an architect has conceived it, that alone legitimises its existence. Its will is now inevitably established. And thus makes V Phaedrus ask, “And do you conceive this?” to which the Architect replies, “Yes, as a dream. No, as a science.”
By science he is indicating the edification or its discipline, the action that P equates with the building itself. In a slightly different sense, I am reminded of Kojin’s metaphorisation, which necessarily invokes the agent of the action or event qua architecture. But is this not a tautology? All the time I draw and write, I am aware that it is I who draws and writes, therefore it is the universe that expresses itself through the peculiar event that is I. Such personalisation must be distinguished from individualisation because what we are dealing with here is singularity and not egoism. And so the Architect confesses, “By means of these successive degrees of my silence, I advance in my own edification. ... I truly believe that I have constructed myself.” I need not add another depiction of such a world or world-builder. Namely of a man who sets out to map the world, only to find in the end that the lines resemble the lineaments of his own face.
Although I find Anti-Socrates an excess of discourse, the fable of the Object is useful and somewhat personal to me since precisely this mysterious ‘white thing’ has been, as long as I can remember, the essence of my dream as an architect - the dream as in Eupalinos’ answer above. The contemplation of the object is in its making, to achieve its smoothness, solidity and indisputable wholeness. And for this is nature only in parts necessitated. For the philosopher, it is the thing that is necessitated in his pursuit of nature (or the world) par excellence. Through the inspection of its fruit, the mind disentangles the infinite lapse of time. So argues the stirring soul of an architect in Anti-Socrates, tracing its own death at the expense of the sovereignty of its mind. I wonder if it was this rather provocative dialectic that reminded M of this work when reading my ambitious plan. Matter and Mind, or even as scandalous as Men and Mind. And the choice mandated on us by the mysterious, beautiful object.
V seems to hint at a possible resolution with A-S’ grand rhetoric on the final pages. By severance, the Demiurge made the world out of chaos. The Constructor takes up where the god left off and brings in a new order - that of coalescence, be it wood and metal or marble and pigment. The ultimate goal of this order, of bringing together the separate, seems to me to be the coalescence between matter and that which commands it and at the same time is affected by it, the mind. Just as the philosopher finds in himself the architect, so the architect finds in himself the philosopher. Hence when he finally proclaims “I am the act,” this act is both practical and metaphysical, in itself the incessant tension between mind and matter.
It seems that where V left off in his dialogue is the starting point of my personal task. Personal because it can only continue in my own writing. Personal because I can only begin by imposing this order on the only subject I can command, my mind.
A useful reminder for my soul for the coming years of endeavour - I am the act.
