Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
31. The cocktail of hi-tech and Romantic mythology perdures in the high/low-
tech visions of
Star Wars,
where feudalism and chivalry abide next to tomorrow's
hardware.
32. Clement Greenberg,“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939, in
Art and Culture
(Bea-
con, 1961), 9. Later in the same essay Greenberg notes, importantly for the current
discussion, that “kitsch had not been confined to the cities in which it was born,
but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture.” Kitsch is the self-
consciousness of marketing (akin to the hyper-consciousness of modernism); it is
the “high art” of commerce, capable of obliterating the organic connection between
high and folk art, and thereby undermining the vital moral correlation between
apparently amoral science and liberality.
33. This intemperate abuse of the environment was noticed from the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution. William Blake, in his 1794 poem “London,” wrote “the
chartered Thames does flow,” by which he dourly observed lordly nature being
turned into a resource to be exploited.
34. “Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle.”
( Jonah 4: 11)
35. The implicit quality of such statements engaged the not-too-excessive time
required. We might say that a commuter should, ideally, spend no more than 45
minutes traveling to work, although in such a normative we do not assume the
mode of transportation or even the intermodal changes that may involve pedestrian
travel, bicycle, bus, elevator, escalator, street car, or heavy rail—in any order.
36. Admittedly, this construction of the argument skirts the question of vernacu-
lar or anonymous architecture wherein such questions may be moot for, as Bernard
Rudofsky has pointed out, “vernacular architecture does not go through fashion
cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to
perfection” (
Architecture without Architects,
Museum of Modern Art, 1965, fron-
tispiece caption).
