From: randolph@cognito.ebay.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: alt.architecture
Subject: Re: Mass Hallucination?
Date: 10 Nov 92 03:57:31 GMT
	<IezoaNi00WBKM7T440@andrew.cmu.edu>
Organization: St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed
NNTP-Posting-Host: cognito.ebay.sun.com
In-reply-to: pm3w+@andrew.cmu.edu's message of 10 Nov 92 05:33:13 GMT

[The following was originally posted in the virtual bar in
alt.callahans--hence some of the bar context references.  It is about
where architecture comes from & at the same time critical of cities.
I do hope you won't take it as anti-architecture--that's really not
the intent.  Still planning that bit from my ex-girlfriend the
mechanical contractor . . . soon, I promise.

__Randolph Fritz  sun!cognito.ebay!randolph || randolph@ebay.sun.com]


Randolph walks up to the line & shouts the odd toast, "To
wellsprings!"  *CRASH*

"Wellsprings are the places where wells come from; the water seeps
into the ground, comes up somewhere--and that's a wellspring.  You can
take water out of one as long as you don't take too much.  If you do,
why, the spring runs dry.  If you drain enough water, you may even
cause the land above the aquifer to drop.  *CRASH*

"But this isn't primarily about water.  It's about the places culture
comes from, instead--the 'wellsprings of civilization,' as it were.

"In our time of vast urbanization we have lost touch with the
wellsprings of culture.  City life can be exciting, bracing, and
creative.  Yet the roots of culture do not grow in the cities;
culture comes from intimate involvement in the physical or spiritual
world.  It comes, in other words, from the countryside, from working
with the physical universe, or from meditation.  City life, I believe,
can vastly expand on culture, but cannot, itself, create culture
because in the end, city life is people interacting with people; the
needed outside impetus is lacking.  And so there is a vast nostalgia
and a vast hunger.  Anything, anything with roots outside of our
cities becomes vastly important--folk arts have become so very
important, and we have a vast nostalgia for the tribal."  He pauses to
scan the bar; the many personae drawn from the memories of the
wellsprings.  "And at the same time, by forcibly involving the peoples
who live near the wellsprings with us, they become more like us, and
less what we need.  And so we drain the wells.

"There is a price for this profligacy.  Human history has a vast
cyclic pattern; nations emerge, focus in cities, then cities lead
nation-states, then fuse into empires, and at the end empires fall.
They drain the wells.  Physically and culturally.  That they do so
physically, I imagine that you all know--we are not the first
civilization to plunder its supporting ecosystems, though we have done
so on a vaster scale than before.  Less evidently, the empires *use up*
the cultural sources of creativity, until finally they have food for
neither body nor soul.

"But this is not intended as a counsel of despair.  Because I don't
think there is a need to drain the wells.  Instead: we could leave
something there; we could put something back.  Empire is not
necessary; we could strike a balance instead.  This is a path I
prefer: why ossify and fall, when we could instead stand and live?"

__Randolph Fritz  sun!cognito.ebay!randolph || randolph@ebay.sun.com