OPINION
30 · MONEY
ISSUE 55
Manuel is a political blogger who writes for The Sunday Times and manueldelia.com.
Political analyst Manuel Delia mulls on the consequences of overdevelopment we as a nation are yet to face as a result of letting things go over our head and our short-sighted mentality in this regard. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is a much maligned idiom. It does not democratise aesthetics. It does not give everyone the right to decide that what they like is beautiful. It resigns itself instead to the fact that the repulsive, the objectionable, the damaging and the rotten will still find enthusiastic buyers. And they will judge it beautiful. Democratisation is often confused with vulgarisation. And there’s hardly anything more vulgar than the jumbling of concepts. Consider for example the modernist notion of functionalism. The aesthetic choice is pragmatic, wary of excess, mindful of the use of space, waste-averse and keen to secure the vitality of the environment through its sustained, if not necessarily sustainable, use. No harm in any of that. But functionalism is then used as an excuse to rank functions themselves according to some utilitarian index which is restricted to variables that are short-sighted and soulless. The Middle Ages of Europe were functionalist too. The function of safety built castles and city walls. The function of administrationbuilt palaces and courts. The function of worship and securing a place in heaven — then believed to be the greatest function of all — built cathedrals, the greatest buildings
of our heritage. Cathedrals were built over generations, spanning centuries of ingenuity and a thousand days of labour delivered on credit to be cashed in the afterlife. The buildings outlived the faith that financed them. They stand tall bearing witness to a time gone by, when God was king. The graven images that told stories instantly recognisable to the contemporaries of the sculptors are now faded, obscure, understandable only to holders of arcane knowledge, vague flickers in a collective memory that wanes. And yet they are a thing of beauty not just because of their size or their age or because of the stories they tell and few do remember. But because they make a claim to immortality as those who laid their foundations had no hope of seeing them roofed over in their lifetime, and that did not matter to them. Because the present is a fickle moment of doubt but the future is certain. Standing in a human chain shuffling buckets of water picked out of a river far beyond sight to douse a fire that burns below the other horizon, those builders wanted to be a part of something greater than themselves. The transcendence of buildings is not limited to temples and churches that reach up to
the divine. From the sprawling estates to the family hovels of the poor, a property that is nurtured to carry a family name beyond the death of its builders is also a claim on immortality. Private property after all is the artificial notion that seeks to defy the finality of death. The cliché is you will not take anything with you when you die. But that is no excuse for sloth and despair. If you cannot build to take with you, you build to leave behind. In buildings, then, there is an investment in memory, the building of a legacy, the challenge against time. Timelessness in buildings is not necessarily hostile to private property. Nor is it inconsistent with function and prioritising use over isolated yearnings for appearance.
