Common Place Vol. 1 (No's. 1-3)

COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 1, 2 & 3 | 2008 & 2009

The first issue of Common Place was written at my daughter’s house in the Alpujarra region of Andalusia in Spain, south of Granada. When I showed it to my sister, Alice Parman, she said it reminded her of commonplace books.

This made me think of “ordinary,” the word the architect Joseph Esherick used to describe built work that sought to be part of something larger and more interesting or beautiful than itself. -- John Parman

JOSEPH ESHERICK: CARY HOUSE

COMMON PLACE No. 1 | August 2008

QUOTES & THOUGHTS Preamble Essays and criticism especially can trigger thoughts which extend from a particular passage, whether an observation by the writer or her quoting of another. These quotes take on a life of their own, I find, but I rarely take the time to set out what I’ve thought. Rather than wait for an occasion that will bring them back to mind, often when the quote itself is long gone, I’ve opted to record the quotes and document my responses—an open-ended process, in that the quotes are sometimes multilayered, and my responses to them aren’t necessarily final. The great advantage of a journal format is its incremental nature, to be extended or revised at leisure.

The ambush of desire In people, in families, in nations and in war, the unintended, the inexplicable, the groundless is for Tolstoy what instigates action and produces results; and we understand these results, if we understand them at all, only long after they are achieved and over. The unconscious rules Tolstoy’s world, but it is not Freud’s zone of repression: it is the realm of everything we don’t know about ourselves, about all the real, multifarious and inaccessible causes and effects we childishly simplify and pretend to understand, as if a plan could decide a battle, or a mere promise of virtue protect us from the ambush of desire – Michael Wood, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 12

Each person has her own destiny, fundamentally different from my own. We fall through time, but it seems to me that when we land, we’re among a cohort of time travelers, some of which are clearer than others about the tumbling dice nature of this process. Something accumulated arrives with us, like luggage that someone else has packed. We spend our lives unpacking it.

Our arrivals are plus or minus—it’s not an exact science, plunging through time, and it may take decades before we finally meet up. Yet there’s a kind of clustering of the cohort. Or perhaps the cluster that we encounter makes certain threads of time more important than the rest.

Each person having her own destiny, paths inevitably cross more often than they join. The woods are full of paths and, like Dante in the Inferno, we can find ourselves lost in them “in the middle of our lives”. What we find is that a path we took proved to be diverging. The decision to take one path and not another can be “gut wrenching”, to quote a friend who just wrote me about his decision to leave an untenable situation for one that’s full of promise.

He knows this, yet he’s torn apart by thoughts of the people he’s deserting. What he’s really experiencing is a path ending for them both, one they pursued together and believed in—until he didn’t.

Many people seem to arrive finally at a vantage point that makes it possible to glimpse how destiny unfolded, and how each fold, whatever its nature and apparent result, was vitally necessary. Yet this necessity could be dismissed as mere survivorship, our human tendency to find meaning, even when we’ve been wandering in circles. It could be a delusion, or not, but wisdom may lie in accepting meaning wherever we can find it. Perhaps we have to detach the meaning from the person who provided it, acknowledging that when a path diverges, the meanings that went with it go their separate ways. My meaning can never be yours, but finding meaning in the encounter—this may be possible to acknowledge later on, and even to appreciate.

The realm of everything we don’t know about ourselves Recently, I had the chance to view in their entirety the 16mm films my father made from 1949 until 1956. I’m two and then eventually I’m nine. I’m not the star of the show—my sister gets more footage—but there I am, a small person who is nonetheless myself at different ages.

My father filmed or photographed a great deal of what he experienced. I’m grateful to him for doing so, since it makes part of my life accessible to me. Of course, it’s really his life that I’m watching. He shows me what he wants me to see, but the characters have lives of their own.

Almost every day, I make an entry in the diary I carry with me. The current one extends from mid-2005 until now.

It has a few pages left, but it may take me two months more to finish it. There are other volumes. The one that

covers 1998, among other years, is missing. Its absence has made it live in memory more than the others.

I can see the terrible drawings I made on the terrace of the apartment in Rome where I stayed for a week, and can picture the patio at my friends’ house near Zurich where I wrote out my frustrations with that week and also recorded a memorable party on the lake, marking the wedding of two other friends there. I remember the quintet that played for them, and the relationship I intuited between the violinist, a 19thcentury figure, and the stunning cellist. All this is lost, diary-wise, but still with me.

In 1998, I weighed 190 pounds. In 1999, I lost weight and found a different self, one that had emerged previously, in 1996, and was then allowed to slip away. There’s a line I could draw from the small boy who appears on film in Singapore and Europe and this reclaimed self. I could draw another line from the heftier kid of nine, back in the states, and me at 190 pounds.

Several years ago, I tried to make a chronology of my life’s events. I found that whole parts of it could not be accurately placed. When exactly did I go to Orcas Island with the kids? I remembered the events themselves, but the years in which they took place escaped me. I didn’t try very hard, since the exercise struck me as pointless, even as I was doing it. I have an associative memory, which means that time lines up around specific people and I recall relevant things that pertain to them—not always, but often enough that this seems to be my memory’s main feature.

In the absence of anyone to line things up, so much that I’ve experienced seems to fall away, and then someone reappears and it all comes pouring back.

A mere promise of virtue protect us In France, a man was granted an annulment of his marriage based on his bride’s false claim of virginity. The ruling was roundly condemned as an intrusion of religion into civil life and an abrogation of the woman’s rights. The judge seems to have felt that a lie is a lie, and that the goods were not as advertised. Had it been me, I would have ruled that virginity is a state of mind. When women become pregnant, in my experience, they regain it. Most children are in some sense born of pure mothers, just like Jesus. This purity is not like the hypothetical one of virginity. If the bride had married with her virginity reconstructed, and this had emerged, say, four children later, what then? Does the bride get turned out of the house? The apple of carnal knowledge was handed to Eve by the serpent, not by Adam. Then she handed it to him, and they knew each other and knew mortality. We’re all damaged goods, and yet we lie daily on this topic, constantly reasserting our intact sense of own integrity against time’s depredations.

Effects we childishly simplify and pretend to understand In a letter written in the early spring of 2005, I explained to a Manichean correspondent that I see the world in color, not in black and white. You once saw it this way, too, I could have added.

To see the world in color means seeing it as it is, complex and contradictory, a mystery. It’s also to see that the boundaries that man puts up are arbitrary, although God’s revelation may be cited as their source. Perhaps the black and white view of life is a vow, like deciding not to drink. Its adherents are a bit fanatical in consequence. No backsliding, they tell themselves.

Fold the universe into a matchbox [Louis Zukofsky] would take the idea of economy to a radical extreme, and it is this, along with the scrambling of syntax and confusion of parts of speech, that makes for most of the difficulty in his work—this attempt to fold the universe into a matchbox, as [Hugh] Kenner somewhere puts it. – August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 26

Reading the Odes of Horace, in an edition that combined the Latin original with a freewheeling translation into English, I was struck by the condensed nature of Latin, which appeared to pack a huge amount into relatively few words. How is it, I wondered, that French, Italian, or Spanish takes up more space than English, typically, to convey the same thoughts? When Horace is unfolded, the meaning is intact, so the packing must have been done carefully, omitting nothing.

Take the idea of economy to a radical extreme Seeing in black and white is also too radical an economy, a matchbox with the heads left off.

These effects are almost cinematic As in a private journal (and his Sonnets do speak of journals, given and received as gifts), the poems allude to time lived through. Thus, from 104, comes this extraordinary writing: Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, Since I saw you fresh These effects are almost cinematic, the product of a modern awareness of the feeling of life, the way external change alters or fails to alter the internal mind. – Barbara Everett, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet,” London Review of Books, 8 May 2008, page 14

Actually, no film can so quickly summarize what Shakespeare depicts here. He’s only folded three years into this matchbox, but there’s so much heat that it could peel paint off a barn. “Time lived through” is time in specific, time that cuts a path through a larger landscape. The subject is the beloved, both present and absent. These are the seasons, their procession, but the sonnet’s force is from its unfolding present: snows build up and melt, fields flood and dry out, a torch is set to them—this is a procession, but it circles back on itself, often tail in mouth.

In process of the seasons have I seen The truism suggests that time passes faster as we grow older. Yet time still slows down when events pull us off to the side. The world outside flows at its usual pace and we fall behind. That falling behind is part of the pleasure of these events, to take a brief vacation from the march.

Mostly, we move distractedly through time, aware of the seasons but only briefly open to their particular beauty.

When we’re living in time, beauty is called forth from everything. (So, when someone next objects that beauty is ephemeral, I can point to this.)

The Pillow Book is the record of a woman who lived within and wrote about the “process of the seasons” and noted beauty whenever or wherever she saw it. When you read it, you live in it at her pace. The notes by the translator, Ivan Morris, fill in the blanks: how the empress she serves is supplanted by a younger favorite and then dies

tragically in childbirth, age 24. How the author admires the uncle of the empress, even as he betrays her, seeing something grand about him and understanding his motives in putting his own daughter forward. In the peculiar society of that era, when the power of the dominant family depended on marrying daughters to the emperors, his feelings for his sister were necessarily down the list. The author’s capacious mind accepts this, even as she deplores the effects on the empress she loves. All of this plays out against the seasons of the court, which are meant to be unchanging. Births and deaths are accidents of fate, while the beauty of the moment, regularly reenacted, is a talisman, like taking a lover for a night, experiencing the ritually delayed departure, and getting the poem. The ephemeral is also the cyclical. The real unfolds randomly, heightening the effect or crushing it.

Three hot Junes burned, since I saw you fresh The Odes include memorable lines about a half-drowned sailor hanging his soaked clothes up to dry in a temple, having once more risked that glittering sea. What sets the ode in motion is a love gone south, burning April’s perfumes with someone else. To be left high and dry is to be wrung out, left for dead. Shakespeare is writing from another angle, but both poems are as much about now as then. Despite the centuries passing, there’s no actual distance. The lover—present, absent, or gone—is still with us. So is the one who loves, waits, or is betrayed.

They only hurt you when they love you [My father] never mentions an even more horrible aspect of separation, that one can get used to it. His conclusion is ironical, considering their decline in the post-war years. “We’ve had the best, let us not put up with anything else. I would, I believe, sooner call it a day. I don’t think I could endure the agony and ignominy of a decaying passion. Maybe, as you told me the other day, your whole sex life is dormant. Maybe you’ve had a lover whom I must make you forget. These are questions I want answers to.” He must have been truly deranged by separation to have expected an answer to that. One thinks of the terrifying maxim “Jealousy wants proof”. It is now that he writes the words that my brother and I quote to one another in times of trouble: “I know very little about women, but I know they only hurt you when they love you. It’s when they’re kind that you know you’ve had it.” – Hugo Williams, Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 2008, page 16

In his book, The Point of Existence, A.H. Almaas makes the point that love approximates the experience of being and is for that reason a potential distraction from genuinely achieving it. Deranged is one response to separation, and dormancy, the walling off of feeling, is another. What we call hurting another could also be understood as both an expression of the pain of separation and an attempt to break through it, specifically to get back to a state of being in which there’s no sense of separation. Hurt is inflicted because the person inflicting it has no other means, from his perspective, to accomplish this. Yet in fact this is the strategy of ego, which is that part of us that feels the separation from being most acutely, and which uniquely lacks a suitable means for ending it. The ego can make us murderous in consequence. In its grip, we don’t hesitate to inflict pain or to contemplate putting an end to one life or another.

The critique Almaas makes of love is that it is being’s counterfeit, and thus a drug rather than enlightenment. Love so described is not the only form of love, but it’s the most common, the one we encounter early, usually, with its stages of infatuation and disillusionment. Sometimes there’s symmetry to this and both parties are happy to break it off; other times, someone gets the short end of the stick, is left hanging. That’s when the carapace of ego gets torn apart and one’s assumptions are exposed as illusions. Life as one has known it empties out. Almaas calls this a hole, and our awareness of it is devastating. He only hints about what to do, unwilling to reveal his methods, but it seems to involve allowing yourself to fall, trusting in life itself.

The image of a riptide comes to mind. “Don’t fight it!” is the received advice, although that must be extremely hard to follow in the moment, when you may end up 400 feet from where you started, may be underwater most of the time, wondering if you’ll still be breathing when you surface. In the throes of separation, in what I called “the

ravines” that followed it, I visited the Clark Institute of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and encountered Winslow Homer’s painting, “Undertow”, which I took to be an allegory. The image repeats in a different form a dream I had in which I came up spiraling stairs, like the inside of a stone tower, emerging on a pebble beach where I saw a wrecked wooden sailing ship from which emerged my naked self, and I flew over to rescue him: self rescues self. Is the ego this ruined ship, from which the self emerges, free of it, and rejoins his twin? (Buddhism makes an analogy to a raft that’s discarded once one reaches the other shore.)

Seeing one’s beloved as a twin is called mirroring, Almaas says, citing the literature of narcissism. The beloved is so like us it’s uncanny—then she isn’t. The corollary may be that real love involves seeing the other as other, even as you share a path. The beloved is not my self. More importantly, the beloved is not mine, she’s on the path voluntarily; hence the futility of the questions—ego’s questions—that Hugo Williams’ father poses.

The agony and ignominy of a decaying passion Penelope is the archetype of the woman who waits. When her lover finally returns, she allows her desire to pour out like a torrent. We’ve tracked Odysseus from one end of the world to the other, so we know he didn’t stint when it came to women. Yet he made his way back, slew her many suitors, and embraced her. We don’t hear any complaints from him along the way about decaying passion.

Hugo Williams’ mother wrote that her sex life was dormant in her husband’s absence, but Penelope cultivated her desire, not least from all the attention she received while waiting. Odysseus eliminated his rivals, but also benefited from them. Penelope subsumed all their fine words and good looks. All that was lacking to transform them was the spark, and she was content to wait for it. Odysseus was confident he possessed it. Williams’ father wasn’t.

Life is never apprehended with such fullness My problem was less making a novel than in doing what I thought I’d achieved in short stories, so my novel would have the virtues of a short story, just as a story should have the virtues of a poem. The density, the speed, and the sort of depth you can get in a short story, which I don’t believe you see in most novels. The short story is less obligated to tell a great big lie about life. I’m trying to get at something very particular. It’s the idea that life is never apprehended with such fullness, and such consistency of feeling over a long period of time, as you typically find in novels. Maybe that’s because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don’t generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren’t so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel. – “Leonard Michaels: The Lost Interview,” by David Reid and Ernest Machen, Paris Review 184, Spring 2008, page 159

The Leopard, which was written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa late and drawn empathetically from life, isn’t really a big novel. It’s more like The Catcher in the Rye in length. What makes it more true than false is a trajectory that’s accurately seen. By this, I don’t mean the parabola of a cannonball, but the vagaries of a life that still manage to add up to something expressible and even coherent about the protagonist’s character—how it held up as life threw things at it. In the telling, there’s density, speed, and depth, too. Lesser novels derail you somewhere, but with The Leopard, you’re prepared to stay with the protagonist to the end.

Lampedusa isn’t trying to tell us how to live. Rather, he’s drawing on a human type—his grandfather, Don Fabrizio—and a relevant slice of his life. The Leopard depicts a world that’s vanished. Lampedusa, among its traces, was about to disappear himself. “The dog is the key”—I believe that Wendy Lesser quotes Lampedusa to this effect in a recent essay. Don Fabrizio’s Great Dane mirrors his vitality and self-license; as the era ends, the dog’s stuffed, moth-eaten remains are thrown out. Our world is singular and ends with us, the Buddhists say. It belongs to us and no one else. The Leopard moves it to another medium and winnows it down to coherence.

Lampedusa’s novel isn’t true, as Michaels says, but it’s close enough. Without it, we’d lose this world completely.

It may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment Writing a short story presents its own specific challenges. One aspect I appreciate is the economy of the form; the story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly real characters, an exploration of life and its complexities, and all within the space of only a few pages. There’s something beautifully mathematical and precise about it, and what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. For that reason, your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete—the difficulty for the author is getting the balance perfectly right, creating something that will satisfy.

This is probably what makes short stories—when they’re written well—such an intellectually demanding form of literature. A great short story may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment from the reader. The very best short stories can haunt you long after you’ve read the concluding line, because so much of the experience is not just about the words on the page, but is individual to you and the way your own brain interprets and digests what you’ve read. – Interview with Clare Wigfall by Eric Forbes and Tan May Lee, Good Books Guide blog, 18 May 2008

An article written with the San Francisco architect Joseph Esherick in the early 1980s described his Cary House as being “intentionally anti-material and anti-focal.” It “exposes people to the passing of the day, using light rather than form as the main medium of the design, refusing to let form predominate,” and “gets away from form as something to see.”* Houses are the short stories of architecture, and the best ones are intellectually demanding— not by forcing dwellers to come to terms with an overlay of theory, but by acknowledging their participation in the house’s unfolding as settings within settings whose meaning shifts constantly as they are inhabited and experienced. With Cary House, the design is deliberately spare and open-ended, making what it looks out on (the setting) as important as what it is (the building) and what it contains (the rooms and furnishings). The house is about particular things, the larger setting most of all, yet that setting also changes. The design acknowledges that one moment gives way to the next, yet we stitch these moments together to make a world and live in it. We are still the measure of all things, still the ones who endow them with meaning—an ongoing process. [*: Joseph Esherick and John Parman, “The Pursuit of the Ordinary,” Space & Society, June 1983, page 52]

What you leave out is as important as what you leave in Somewhere in Stendhal’s Life of Henri Brulard, he says plainly that waiting for genius to strike is a waste of time for a writer. Stendhal spent his adult life writing a mix of novels, memoirs, and traveler’s journals, some for money and some for the drawer. Like The Leopard, his Charterhouse of Parma was written late in life. He wrote at a fast clip, drawing on experience. The novel pulls in the Napoleonic Wars, but its hero is an Italian who goes to France, the opposite of Stendhal himself. The clock was ticking, we can imagine, when he wrote it. Lampedusa similarly waited until the eleventh hour before writing his great novel. Did he wait for genius to strike, or for the kind of deadline that takes away your inhibitions?

Although they were both minor diplomats, Stendhal was a man of action who sought to make a mark in the world and came close enough to get in trouble, both with women and with the law. He lacked inhibition—that’s obvious when you read what he wrote for the drawer. While his memoirs address an eventual readership, they were written in order to work out what his life meant, by setting it down and looking at it. This happens in real time, with Stendhal noting in the margins how fast he’s writing, how his hand aches, how he can’t put his pen down.

With Lampedusa, there seem to have been many distractions. Eventually, though, he sets them aside and writes his manuscript. He dies before it’s even been accepted for publication. For all he knows, it won’t be—the novel is at odds with the prevailing sense of what a novel should be, and is rejected by one editor after another for this reason.

Finally, an editor reads it and sees what’s in front him—a masterpiece, whatever the contemporary conventions of the novel form say to the contrary. “Then the law is an ass” is how a judge might put it. The book is published.

Lampedusa’s article of faith is that the story he recounts, the world of The Leopard, is sufficiently interesting to find readers. Stendhal has the same faith about his memoirs—a sense of his life being of future interest, both because he writes about it compellingly and because his own character is proto-modern, anticipating a world in which he will finally feel at home. That world is not so much modern, though, as cosmopolitan. We recognize in Stendhal a type that makes his or her way through the decades, sometimes out in the open, but more often not.

Charterhouse of Parma is both a great novel and a reminder to his contemporaries that he, Stendhal, is someone who matters much more than his station in life would suggest. Left to languish in a peripheral Italian city by a French government that regards him as a has been, he takes immense license with the terms of his employment, absenting himself to better climes to write a life for the drawer and a valedictory novel for publication that draws renewed attention. Lampedusa, writing in the shadow of his ancestor, is more like Herodotus in his desire to convey to later generations the ephemeral texture of a man, family, and place, experienced at a distance so that he had to supplement to imagine and recreate. Stendhal writes from life. The texture is ephemeral, but he lived it. The remove is one of time, and Stendhal constantly retraces his steps to understand the past and what it says about him.

What to leave in or out is a problem for novels, too—Marguerite Yourcenar’s manuscript of Memoirs of Hadrian ran much longer than the book, and Lampedusa also worried about leaving in or taking out certain chapters, decisions that his editor had to make. We try to imagine The Leopard without the chapter focusing on the priest who attends the Prince. Given its large canvas, the omission would be less crucial than in a story. Lampedusa pares down, whereas Stendhal writes what he has to say (the manuscripts of his memoirs suggest). Thus, for Lampedusa, novels have to stop in time, avoiding the extraneous. For Stendhal, they have to give the story the room it needs to be told fully—no more, no less. And he’ll be the judge of that.

There’s something beautifully mathematical and precise about it Architects periodically turn to methods in an effort to increase the odds of beauty, commodity, and delight.

Vitruvius is credited with starting this, and subsequent generations of architects have regularly driven the idea into the ground. In the 1970s, Horst Rittel debunked the latest incarnation of this tendency by separating wicked from tame problems, noting that most of architecture falls in the former category, where “anything goes”—as his contemporary, Paul Feyerabend, put it. Feyerabend was discussing the scientific method, but the point is similar.

It’s not that methods go out the window, but, as Rittel used to say, the creative leaps on which architecture depends always happen offstage—in a way that methods can’t begin to describe.

Clare Wigfall looks at great short stories and sees their gorgeous balance. We can imagine that Palladio saw something equally beautiful and precise, “like mathematics”, and then sat down to write his treatise, like so many architects before and after. I don’t think Clare Wigfall would do so. The architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri told Richard Ingersoll* that architects should just build, and not write about their work. Then he made this analogy: when Reagan met with Gorbachev, he wasn’t carrying a copy of Machiavelli in his pocket. No safety net there, either. [*: “There is no Criticism, only History”, Design Book Review 9, Spring 1986, pages 8-11]

What remains tangible is a sensation of profound mutual sympathy When I recall this scene—myself in the throes of childbirth reading about Tolstoy’s little princess in the throes of childbirth— the memory has a play-within-a-play quality. What remains tangible is a sensation of profound mutual sympathy. I was, at that instant, enduring with this familiar yet imaginary woman the dance of torment and reprieve, torment and reprieve. We were, at each paroxysm, in the talons of death; at each release seized again by life. It was an accident and strange miracle to read it and suffer it simultaneously. – Dawn Potter, “Self-Portrait with War and Peace,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2008, page 21.

When my oldest son was in high school, he was assigned The Odyssey to read. Finding it lying around, I read it, too, and was stunned to find a completely different book than the one I remembered, with a long prologue that suddenly stood out for me, because it described the son’s search for his father, a totally forgotten part of the book, and also laid out, as a preface to the fantastic tales that Odysseus tells about his journey, the much more true-to-life reporting of the care with which he handles his first encounter with the princess Nausicaä—honoring her on every level, thus ensuring that he will live to tell those tales to her and her father, and also preserving himself as a potential lover by respecting her privacy and remaining hidden. The passage makes it clear that while Odysseus appreciates the striking beauty of the princess, there’s no voyeurism. He encounters her and intuits her nature.

What he intuits is told to us, and we also grasp the nuances of his response—his sensitivity to a woman who’s caught his interest without knowing it. In a way, his response is a savoring of what he senses. None of this meant anything to me when I read the book in high school. Twenty-four years later, they were the meaning. I recognized the territory, stripped of its mythic trappings.

We were, at each paroxysm, in the talons of death A woman should be honored forever for having children. She should receive medals and wear them proudly on a special day set aside solely to recognize her role in keeping the human species going. She should receive a soldier’s pension for the pain and suffering she endured.

I write this knowing that women often have children because they love the men who father them and want that love to be embodied, to take it in and transform it into another human being. They have children because they love children and love mothering them, because they believe in something beyond themselves and children are part of it. They have children because they forget the torment once it’s over, or they manage to put it aside and have another. For all of these reasons, or any one of them, women should be honored even more.

In the US workplace, there is a certain jealousy, impatience, or resentment of working mothers of young children.

There’s a tendency to point to rules or assumptions that were put in place by men for the immediate benefit of the enterprise. Today, they are less frontally stated, but still very much in place: have a child and watch your career suffer and possibly die. Yet the women, with children or without them, that accept the rules as given often don’t get the brass ring that’s promised them, or they get it and it’s snatched away.

The whole edifice needs to be rethought. Women should be able to have children if they want them, and to raise them well, with or without a father or family to support them. That support should be unplugged from marriage and redefined as responsibilities that people take on, but that are shared with society and geared to their individual circumstances and potentialities.

The survival of marriage is wrapped up in property and inheritance, issues that can be sorted out in many other ways. Father and mother are more durable traits than husband and wife. In this regard, men should be encouraged to become fathers by other means than fathering. The tradition of godparents could play into this—men and women who make parenting a vocation.

Work also needs to be rethought. Too much is wrapped up in it, and society—US society—gets off easily. As a result, there’s more money to spend waging pointless wars and building bridges to nowhere. The things that really matter, that are truly fundamental to society’s well being—like raising and educating children—are starved for funds. Women and children bear the burden of this disproportionately. Perhaps, as in Lysistrata, it’s time for the women to go on strike.

It is up to the reader’s imagination to supply the missing body parts For someone whose preoccupation in much of what he wrote was with the erotic, Cavafy is a strangely chaste poet. He was a sensualist who left unmentioned what he was most excited about. His descriptions of lovemaking never get specific. It is up to the reader’s imagination to supply the missing body parts. He used words in their primary meaning and was perfectly satisfied in calling a naked body young and beautiful and leaving it at that. In his view, this is not an issue. Art doesn’t represent reality, imitate life or copy nature. Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter. It imposes its own will on the subject, removing it from the contingencies of the natural and social worlds. – Charles Simic, London Review of Books, 20 March 2008, page 33

Before this, Simic quotes Cavafy’s poem, “Has Come to Rest” (as translated by Stratis Haviaras in The Canon). An excerpt goes, “No one could actually see us, But we’d / already provoked ourselves so thoroughly / that we were incapable of restraint. / Our clothing half-opened—not much to begin with, / that month of July being so divinely sultry.” This transcends gender, a measure of its cosmopolitanism. I’m not sure I agree with Simic that this poem is detached from reality or from the contingencies of the larger world. We know the month, the weather, how they might have dressed, and the state of their arousal. What the poet found is left to us.

I doubt that “experience is primarily an aesthetic matter.” It can be—sometimes we are entirely sensory, but more often we’re putting the world we move through into context. Lovemaking can shift our plane of relating, enabling a purely bodily connection that triggers our responses, an instinctual dance that unfolds partly of its own accord.

The body “imposes its own will,” but it does this to us in the interest of the dance, and because it also desires the one who strokes it.

Pure sensory experience is exceptional, a peak. Mostly, we’re on other, more contingent planes.

It’s possible that men are never really in the realm of pure experience anyway. A colleague once told me that male animals, men among them, are hardwired to be on the alert. Females, he said, can switch that off in lovemaking. Is it true? Cavafy’s poem indicates an awareness of context. When lovemaking is memorable, everything about where it happened also figures. Sometimes the dissipation of love causes the lover to recede from the scene, yet Eros’ traces linger in the setting itself. It retains its potency, long after. The lover who steams up the café needs that context, which Eros provides. From then on, cafés will always be among the god’s venues.

Simic’s statement about art is modern. Elsewhere in the review, he calls Cavafy a modern poet. He goes on, though, to point to Cavafy’s self-description: poet-historian. “If he hadn’t been a poet, Cavafy said, he would have been a historian. The historical periods that interested him were the Hellenic Age and the late Byzantine, with their cosmopolitan way of life, their high civilization and the political and religious turmoil that eventually did them in.” Cavafy writes about what resonates, whether it’s a fragment of vanished high civilization or examples in his own life of the pleasures that link him to those eras and their exemplars—are in that tradition.

What Simic observes about these poems—that the reader has to supply what Cavafy leaves out—relates to Clare Wigfall and Leonard Michaels’ comments about short stories. Michaels actually mentions poems, suggesting that short stories are closer to them than to novels. In leaving certain things to our imagination, it’s not clear to me that Cavafy is asking us to work. Rather, he’s asking us to draw from our own experience, if we have it, to find an equivalent to what he declines to name, not wishing to preclude our own erotic impulse by imposing his own.

When writing he could surprise himself being himself One of the catastrophes of alcoholism is that it arrests the growth of personality, and Lowry’s relationships with his wives, friends and family were often marked by childlike rages and startling abreactions. It is hard not to see his writing as an attempt to reintegrate himself. When writing he could surprise himself being himself, and it seems he could approach a sense of wholeness only by translating the experience into the written word. (The painter Julian Trevelyan once told Lowry that he didn’t need therapy; he needed to write.) – Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books, 1 November 2007, page 14

In his book, Dōgen on meditation and thinking: a reflection on his view of Zen, Hee-Jin Kim writes that Dōgen— the 13th-century founder of Soto Zen—“offers what I would call a ‘realizational’ view of language, in contrast to the ‘instrumental’ view that is epitomized in the Zen adage ‘the finger pointing to the moon.’ … Inasmuch as language is the core of discriminative thought, it has the power—perhaps the only power there is—to liberate it.” He goes on to say, “Enlightenment, from Dōgen’s perspective, consists of clarifying and penetrating one’s muddled, discriminative thought in and through our language to attain clarity, depth, and precision in the discriminative thought itself. This is enlightenment or vision.”* [*: The quotes are from chapter four, “The Reason of Words and Letters”, pages 62-63]

Only in Triestine could he tell the truth Svevo disparaged Triestine as a dialettaccio, a petty dialect, or a linguetta, a sub-language, but he was not being sincere. Much more from the heart is Zeno’s lament that outsiders ‘don’t know what it entails for those of us who speak dialect (il dialetto) to write in Italian. With every Tuscan word of ours, we lie!’ Here Svevo treats the step from the one dialect to the other, from the Triestine in which he thought to the Italian in which he wrote, as inherently treacherous (traditore taduttore). Only in Triestine could he tell the truth. The question for non-Italians as well as Italians to ponder is whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page. – J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, Inner Workings, pages 5-6

The preponderance of architecture today speaks in a kind of global patois or pidgin. The high moments, as proclaimed by design critics and the design press that follows their lead, play with form by riffing on new materials and the structural derring-do that computer analysis makes possible (or doesn’t, as the Charles de Gaulle Airport terminal’s partial collapse suggests). Very little that’s designed is recognizably speaking in a voice that’s idiosyncratically local, “Triestine”.

What truths could be spoken by an architecture that’s genuinely of this place or another? Are there instances, even now, of architects who could be said to work with this goal in mind? In the early 1980s, George Homsey told me that it was his ambition to move the architecture of the region forward, and his work, or some of it, seems rooted in local history and culture. His Garfield Elementary School in San Francisco’s North Beach is an example of a building that relates to its past on a psychological level, invoking the history of elementary schools in that city as a building type. It manages to combine this with a great sensitivity to a streetscape that is mainly residential in scale and nature. Because of these choices, the voice in which the new school speaks is idiomatic, of that place, and tied to a larger history that’s unique to the city.

Stanley Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Shalom at 14th Avenue and Clement in San Francisco riffs on synagogues as he experienced them as a boy growing up in South Africa. It also takes in the neighborhood—low and tightly packed Richmond district houses—in which it rises, imposing a slightly larger scale and a definitely different look, but one that’s accessible rather than defiant, a kind of Noah’s Ark that floats serenely above the ground, visually reassuring. Beth Sholom, its different parts arrayed around a street-like entry court, is a separate and yet semiporous world, with a gate-like but transparent entry to mediate open and closed. Up the road, Temple Emanuel

uses a more mosque-like strategy of surrounding walls and gardens, but Beth Sholom is modern and urban, part of its neighborhood, even when it’s not.

The rabbi who commissioned Saitowitz is a Zen Buddhist who returned to Judaism and became a rabbi without abandoning Zen. As a client, he encouraged his architect to investigate the history of synagogues and their meaning in Judaism, and to design the different parts in light of what he discovered. Not all of it has been carried out, but the big moves are there—compelling in their straightforward expression. To me, there’s something vernacular and local about it, a voice that’s appropriate for a congregation in the avenues that takes its Judaism straight up.

What is it that we desire to be cured of?

Like any good bourgeois of his time, Svevo fretted about his health: what constituted good health, how was it to be acquired, how maintained? In his writings health comes to take on a range of meanings, from the physical and psychic to the social and ethical. Where does the discontented feeling come from, unique to mankind, that we are not well, and what is it that we desire to be cured of? Is cure possible? If cure entails making our peace with the way things are, is it necessarily a good thing to be cured? – J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, Inner Workings, page 4

We’d like to be cured of death—isn’t this really what we want? We’d like to be the gods that we resemble, in our own minds, but are not. Instead, we’ve done a reasonable job of extending life, eliminating the short order deaths like heart attacks and strokes, so that now we can survive to succumb to the slower ones, with their greater agony and expense. It’s enough to make you start smoking cigars and buttering your steaks with lard.

If cure entails making our peace with the way things are In the summer of 2007, I ran into a neighbor who was suffering from a particularly virulent illness. Steadied by his wife, he was out walking on the main shopping street near my house. I greeted them—surprised actually to see him walking, as I’d heard he was wheelchair-bound. “I’m cured,” he announced. Last winter, I went to his memorial. At the get-together afterward, I heard that he was bitter in the last few months of his life. Yes, I thought, it’s that word “cure”. Better to have told him that the treatment had bought him a bit more time, “so use it well!” Part of the “waking up” that George Gurdjieff urged on his followers was awareness of death, “the terror of the situation”, which should be a constant prod to live fully, but often isn’t. In his memoirs, he quotes his grandmother’s admonition to live consciously—conscious of who and where he is. Life is a unique opportunity, and we squander it in neurosis, laziness, and timidity.

Despite our self-regard, we never actually take our lives seriously. We are mostly less then fully human in consequence, holding back, walling our selves off from life. This gets us nowhere in the end. Death takes us anyway, slipping all to easily through every single one of our defenses.

CAUCASIA

Some opening remarks I often picture my father in his two-door Jaguar, one hand draped outside the window, holding a cigarette. This would have been in the second half of the 1950s—he quit smoking in 1960, when he was 45. He still has the car, along with his tortoiseshell glasses. He’s quite elegant, even with the wrinkles. An early taste for bespoke suits continues. Despite his age, despite having made a ton of money, or perhaps because of it, he still drives himself to the station three days a week, down from five, rides into Penn Station, and makes his way to his desk.

That desk is the one he had made from the teak crates he shipped from Singapore in 1953. The walls, too, attest to his past—a childhood in Hanoi, student days in Paris and London, wartime service in Malaya, a trader’s life in Singapore, the decades in New York, and all the travel back-and-forth to Asia when China and Indochina opened up.

Despite that focus, my father is a Europhile—having spent his formative years on that continent and in its colonies.

At my age, I’m lucky that he’s still alive. When your father dies, turning that corner must bring the wall of your own life into view. That, at any rate, is what my father notes in his journal. He was just 37 when his own father died, age 76. “Borrowed time” is how he’s described every birthday he’s had since 1991. So far, he owes someone 17 years.

When he turned 90, my father invited me to lunch. “I’m not really immortal,” he said, adding that when he looked back at the totality of his life, it seemed like a story worth telling. “Yet, having lived most of it, it’s hard for me to know where to begin. And I would be tempted to leave things out. You know—you don’t want to hurt people, and yet there they were, smack bang in the middle of your life, or vice versa.” In short, he needed someone to get the broad outline from conversations and then read the letters and the journals, all of which he’d somehow managed to keep despite the war, the moves, and my mother. Apparently, that was me.

I should say a few things about my family. Although born in Hanoi, my father was of Chinese descent, the son of a wealthy merchant who traded with France and China. My mother was Vietnamese, but they first met in Paris.

According to the family legend, he knew immediately that they would marry. Despite provocations on both sides, they still are.

My mother is more or less the opposite of my father, who is happiest at his desk or in intimate company. My mother likes to socialize. She also enjoys sticking her nose in everyone’s business except my father’s. That’s their pact— each asks no questions of the other. Roughly once a day, they talk about topics of mutual interest. For every trip they take together, there are five or six they make alone. Yet they discuss every potential destination. “You should go,” he tells her.

He’s been saying that all their married life, beginning in 1940 when he presciently sent her to New York to spend the war out of the line of fire. Neither of them wasted much time being lonely, but my sister—born in 1942—was the more tangible evidence of this. My father loved her the instant he learned of her existence. Her father, a Japanese expatriate, is still with us, living in New York. Decades later, my mother still has herself driven to the city to be with him.

“We aren’t very alike,” my father commented at lunch. “For some reason, marriage throws you together with another whose differences become clearer as you grow older. Yet you have these ties—family, property, and the ease of long familiarity.” Then there was the war and their years of separation. “I was in the jungle, out of reach.

There was literally no way for her to know what would happen. In a situation like that, you have to be very tactful when you reenter the world you left. And besides, I had my own life to consider.”

Our lunch opened the door to my father’s private papers. There are letters, personal poems, and the diaries he’s kept since he was a student. The letters are voluminous. When motivated, he’ll write five or six times a day. The diaries are difficult to read, written in his tiny script. They sometimes overlap the letters, but mostly they comment on things that the letters address in the moment, creating a kind of double reflection.

When will you retire? When people ask this of my father, he always smiles. “When there’s no more reason to head into town” is what he thinks.

[To be continued, I wrote, but as of January 2020, it hasn’t been.]

COMMON PLACE Commentary and story © 2008 by John Parman Credits: Cover photo of Cary House, Mill Valley, by Roy Flamm; photo of 1955 Jaguar XK-140 from Phil Seed’s Virtual Car Museum (www.philseed.com). Website: http://complace.j2parman.com

The second issue of Common Place gathered three articles and a coda on the Slow Movement’s implications for the Bay Region’s future development. It also included a review of Pierluigi Serraino’s book, NorCalMod.

ROME VIEWED FROM A TERRACE ABOVE THE CAMPO DE' FIORI

COMMON PLACE No. 2 | March 2009

PREAMBLE What gives us pleasure is experience. Even with a beloved object, like a painting, we never see it the same way twice. The light changes, our eyes see the colors differently, or the room is warmer or colder.

For several years I’ve been writing about how to apply the lessons of the Slow Food movement to the development of Bay Regional towns and cities. This new issue of Common Place collects three essays on this topic—the second written with Richard Bender. They are revised somewhat from their published version to eliminate repetition and improve what I found when I revisited them. I’m grateful to the publications, noted at the end of each essay, where they first appeared. — John Parman

THE ROOFSCAPE OF ROME’S HISTORIC CENTER

THE PLEASURES OF THE DEMOTIC CITY By demotic I mean arising from the individual, everyday actions of ordinary people, motivated by their immediate needs and circumstances and responding intuitively and sometimes creatively to the traditions and patterns of the society in which they find themselves. The pleasures that a city offers reflect both the nature and administration of its underlying framework and the tastes and initiatives of its citizens. They also reflect the relative power and influence of these two realms.

Ideally, each is a check to the excesses of the other—and the cityscape is a useful indicator of where this balance stands. (By cityscape, I mean everything that pedestrians can reasonably expect to take in as they walk, including the parts of buildings in public view, the activities they house that are publicly accessible, the adjoining public and semi-public open spaces.) A recent review by the New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff1 discusses one aspect of this. In doing so, he shows how this demotic realm has become a tug-of-war between these two interests, polis and demos.

Atlantic Yards’ public settings In his critique of the proposed redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, Ouroussoff commented on the weaknesses of its public settings. He bemoaned the city’s abdication of its role as their steward and sponsor, and noted how the architect, Frank Gehry, turned public courtyards into private enclaves, embedded in the complex’s larger mass. This, Ouroussoff wrote, reflects Gehry’s professional “coming of age…during the planning debates of the 1970s, when architects were dismantling the planning formulas of late Modernism in favor of dense urban villages.” Since then, “a growing number of architects, mostly European, have challenged that approach. Rather than splitting sprawling developments into more intimate spaces, they deliberately focus on the collision between the two: between the heroic scale of urban infrastructure and the fine-grained texture of the home.” Ouroussoff speculated that architects of this stripe “might have chosen to create a dialogue between the public zones at ground level” and elements of the surrounding city. He lamented the decision by Bruce Ratner, Atlantic Yards’ developer, not to implement—on grounds of cost—a proposal to cap the roof of the project’s basketball arena with a public garden that “seemingly floating in the skyline, might have evolved into one of New York’s most original public spaces.” He added that “such decisions could well determine whether Atlantic Yards will feel like a privileged enclave or belong to the community as a whole. One imagines what might have been possible if the city had the resources or the will to support such a vision.”

To me, a shift in power from the developer to the city does not fundamentally change the duopoly they both enjoy over projects of this scale. And isn’t this scale itself really the inevitable result of that circumstance? To justify an investment that includes the built-in political diversions that are the developer’s price of entry and the politicians’ main motivation requires a large, intensively redeveloped site. Yet we know from bitter experience how often this formula disappoints. The devil’s bargain that these projects represent fatally compromises the larger community’s ability to shape and influence the cityscape over time. We experience this here, too, and our cities are less pleasurable in consequence.

Paved with good intentions In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek noted that socialist regimes always opt for the case-by-case regulation of development, rather than allowing it to be based on rule of law. He argued that the hegemony of political power that characterizes socialist regimes inevitably breeds corruption. The fact that the money doesn’t directly change hands here doesn’t make its effects any less corrosive. Thanks to case-by-case regulation, an apparatus of scrutiny is now in place in San Francisco that bottlenecks the flow of projects and shifts the owner’s focus primarily to securing entitlements.

This has proven to be destructive to the city’s urbanity. While the interest in better design quality shown recently by San Francisco’s Mayor and Planning Director is welcome, it is meaningless without a concomitant willingness to loosen the grip of political power. That means limiting case-by-case assessment and restoring rule of law and the reasonable use of precedent.

In his final book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek pointed to the traditions and patterns that are the real basis of society. A fallacy of socialism is its belief that laws and institutions are the result of conscious design. They are not, he argues; society is self-organizing, and traditions and patterns persist because they are robust in an evolutionary sense. This is not to say that “design” is absent, but rather that society in all its aspects is the unfolding outcome of different contributions, some from above, many more from below. This flow of ideas from every quarter is the source of the demotic city’s pleasures.

The duopoly of power that gives us an Atlantic Yards and its equivalents here produces behemoths, mostly, that even when phased lack the vitality that cities built by other means usually manage to achieve. Ironically, a single owner—Tokyo’s Minoru Mori comes to mind—has more incentive than a duopoly to loosen the frame initially and then work like hell to keep it interesting. In San Francisco, classic build-and-sell developers of large projects have tended toward bulkiness and mediocrity. The Port and Airport, both monopolies, have done better with projects of this scale. True public-private partnerships, like Mission Bay and Yerba Buena Center, have shown mixed results.

With culture in the mix, Yerba Buena Center has a better middle block than Mission Bay has a UCSF research

campus. Given the decades and millions of dollars expended on these different projects, the results are mixed.

There has to be a better way to approach the city’s development.

Restoring the virtuous circle In a recent article in the Financial Times, the food writer Philippa Davenport commented on the “virtuous circle of producers, chefs, and public” she found in San Francisco. She cited the Ferry Building—its shops, restaurants, and farmers’ markets—as exemplifying a region in which city and countryside have made a common cause of food. “The quality, the imagination, and the innovation are breathtaking,” she wrote.2 How is it that the food of northern California is so widely and generously celebrated, but contemporary placemaking here is not? Restaurants and markets, chefs, farmers, and the public have managed to join forces around this source of daily pleasure, raising it to a global standard, but our buildings and settings have not experienced a comparable transformation. There are instances when everyone rallies round and the results are good, but urbanity is mostly missing in action.

Anyone who has seen Ostia Antico outside of Rome knows that the press of in-migration to the capital region (as we would call it now) at the height of Roman power led to an urban density—five-story walkups—that looks familiar. That same pressure led to real efforts to achieve a level of public sanitation that is recognizably modern, and to the aqueducts and other monuments of infrastructure. Like the Spanish in reference to their American colonies, the Romans had a clear, almost archetypal sense of what a city should be. One function of the Roman state was to provide this frame, but Roman citizens had a corresponding obligation to defend and enliven it. The whole arc of Roman life was focused on this symbiotic relationship, which posited an active, socially mobile, and above all pleasure-loving existence, rooted in family, friends, the city, and the land. We have no comparably demotic impulse to create a framework that orders the city and yet encourages, even demands that its citizens fill it in—a constant flux of activity within that greater whole. This happens here and there, but it is not yet a guiding idea that would rebalance things.

So how can we begin to realize it in San Francisco? We cook and garden, watching things change from this to that to something else, seeing the rich variation that tradition affords and how chance and even error can prod a creative response. Part of the pleasure a city affords is its ability to allow for this. It’s what gives the city’s parts and pieces their authenticity, and it argues for a looser frame and for agreements on placemaking that make room for the demotic, establishing patterns that ordinary citizens can activate, both as their right and as a vitally necessary role.

We need a looser frame because there are limits to what that frame can do. So much of what is bad in recent development flows from the hubris of politicians and their planners about what can actually be achieved through regulation. However well-intentioned, what officials think about the design of an entry or of fenestration is really just their opinions, matters of individual taste. That’s not really their business. We expect the city to inspect the food and the kitchens of our restaurants, but not to choose the restaurant’s cuisine or dictate our choices from the menu. Placemaking is no different.

Allowing for a demotic impulse is a way of “cultivating” the cityscape through its buildings and other elements.

The roof terraces and substantial balconies of Rome’s historic core create a secondary order of variation that brings the public realm alive and reconnects people to nature, even in the heart of the city. This is an aspect of green design that has gone missing here in new development: the deliberate and fertile expression of human habitation. At Tokyo’s Ark Hills complex, tenants and neighbors pay for the privilege of tending the gardens that are this private development’s public realm. This is a reasonable transaction in a crowded city—one that gives Ark Hills such beauty as it has.

A city is like a river, but we’ve turned ours into a glacier. Too much is fixed that should really be the city’s demotic flux. In The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander suggests the presence of life as the way to gauge the rightness of things. That measure of vitality also speaks to the demotic nature of much of the pleasure that a city gives us. We need more of it here.

Notes 1. Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Skyline for Sale,” New York Times, June 4, 2006. He uses the term “late Modernism” here to describe the Modernism of the seventies, but this has also been used to describe Modernism’s revival in the late 1990s. So which is it? Perhaps we should rename the latter “neo-modernism” or even “modernist revival.”

2. Philippa Davenport, “America’s golden state enjoys its salad daze,” Financial Times, July 1/2, 2006.

Written in September and October 2006 and published in LINE’s “Pleasure” issue, fall 2006.

THE “VICTORY” GARDEN AT SF’s CITY HALL

NOT TOO SLOW, NOT TOO SMART Can we “slow” the growth of San Francisco’s metropolitan region without stopping it? By Slow, we refer to the Slow Food movement and its CittaSlow offshoot, especially in their emphasis on the value and pleasures of regional difference. “Without stopping it” is to acknowledge the region’s projected growth. Our title’s smart refers to smart growth—livable is another favored adjective, both endorsing density without always asking what it means in practice. Like the Buddha, we seek a middle way between Slow and smart that aims at enjoyment and conviviality. Like the Californians we’ve both become, we want to have our cake and eat it, too.

The Problem Space Between 2007 and 2030, the nine counties that make up the Bay Region will grow in population from 7.2 million to 8.7 million people, a net gain of about 1.5 million people.1 Will these newcomers be housed within the 700,000 acres of currently developed land, about 15.5% of the region’s total land area of 4.5 million acres? Or will they continue to erode the undeveloped balance, reducing still further the land available for farming, recreation, wildlife, and the maintenance of the region’s ecosystem? (No small matter, as it includes much of the river delta that supplies many California cities with water—an area for which substantial low-density residential development has been proposed.2) This is half of the problem; the other half has to do with the density of development required within the region’s already developed areas simply to maintain their current boundaries. (Ideally, it would be possible to pull them in, especially where low-density sprawl has penetrated mindlessly into farmland or the ecosystem.) Greenbelt Alliance and others have tried to determine what density would be required, but this analysis does not fully consider the qualitative side of the problem: what increases in density would actually mean for a neighborhood in human, experiential terms.3 So the “problem space” that the region poses is how to accommodate future growth in ways that preserve and even reclaim open space, yet do so in ways that are not just “sound” in terms of current planning dogma (e.g., “dense, compact, and transit-served”), but also create appropriate settings for a humane and enjoyable life as this is broadly understood by those who live and work in its towns and cities. In framing it in this way, we want to emphasize that the future of the region must be thought of holistically, seeing open space preservation and finegrained development as connected ideas, both of which point to the pleasure and prosperity that the region can offer its residents.

Greenbelt Alliance’s Prescription Focused on preserving open land, Greenbelt Alliance has formulated a program that is widely accepted by other policy-shaping organizations in the region. Here is the gist: Growth boundaries: cities, towns, and other communities in the region should agree to establish inviolable boundaries for development. Lands falling outside them (but within their jurisdiction) are to be left as open space, whether under private or public ownership.1 Walkable urbanism: to accommodate future growth, cities and towns should require a higher density of development, especially around transit (train and light rail stations) and transit corridors (arterials served by buses). Even when transit is not yet in place, patterns of development should anticipate it by favoring compactness and higher density.

Opposition to this program came initially (and predictably) from some owners of large land parcels that fell outside of the growth boundaries established on the urban edge. Elections in these communities often feature ballot measures aimed at creating exceptions for specific parcels. Opposition is also coming from some of the affected urban neighborhoods. The Association of Bay Area Governments sets goals for housing development in the region that, if disregarded, can theoretically impact a city’s ability to tap regional grants for affordable housing and other purposes. In Berkeley, for example, meeting the goal would require the construction of 14 16-story housing towers in its downtown core, according to the city’s planning staff. The state has also mandated development “bonuses” that increase multiunit housing density in a way that overrides local zoning.

Density and its Enemies So, density is emerging as a major point of contention in the region. In the urban core, it is focused on absolute density—height and bulk—and how it contributes to or detracts from the community around it. In urban neighborhoods, the question of impact is heightened. Style, use, ownership, and a desire to preserve the existing fabric figure in the debates about each and every project. In the newer suburbs, intensification of established areas to preserve greenspace vies with efforts to carve out new territory for office campuses and large single-family home developments.

Especially in the city and the older suburbs, the debate about density comes down to two positions: that it’s good because it provides affordable housing and prevents sprawl; or that it’s bad because it undermines a community’s existing character (and, by implication, its property values: Berkeley was extensively down-zoned in the 1970s by residential real estate interests, representing middle- and upper-middle-class owners). In recent years, these positions have hardened, with each side refusing to acknowledge the other. Density is “entirely good” and preservationists “almost always wrong” (about the historic merits of what they try to preserve) and vice versa.

This deadlocked situation has created a vacuum that developers and politicians have not failed to fill and exploit.

Fear of overdevelopment has led to constant skirmishes in Berkeley around the issues of growth and density.

Measure P, put on the ballot by petition, sought to limit the height of new construction in the city. A more recent measure sought to maintain the current, restrictive Landmarks ordinance. Both measures failed, but the second lost by a much smaller margin.

As in other US cities, San Francisco and Berkeley have politicized development so that almost every project of any size has to be reviewed in a way that stretches out the entitlements process inordinately and makes the owner or developer liable to a variety of political pressures. The time and money involved favor politically-connected developers with the “deep pockets” needed to get through it. This creates a “duopoly” that links their interests with their political gatekeepers. It produces projects of a scale and nature at odds with their surroundings and even with the city itself as a place with a unique character—oversized and overly prepackaged. Prewar developers left room for demotic content in their projects, not just in the retail mix, but also in the ways that “communal” open space was provided and used. In the grip of the duopoly, we have lost this art. Our cities fail to encourage ordinary people to participate in their reshaping over time. There’s no flux, and no real life.

Slow in the Bay Region The Slow Movement has tremendous resonance in the Bay Area, where a love of good food and wine has led to a renaissance in local organic farms catering to food halls and farmers’ markets. The wineries started this, moving from purely domestic mass products to high-end “appellation” wines that compete globally for prizes and buyers.

Chefs like Alice Waters, now one of Slow Food’s international vice-presidents, extended this to a cuisine based on the availability of locally grown, “seasonal” ingredients. Even the Berkeley public schools have embraced it, with the chef Ann Cooper running its kitchens.

The Slow Movement can seem like something from The Theory of the Leisure Class, yet its manifesto has a commonsensical truth. Whether we are thinking of food or city life, the pleasures of living well are worth defending in the face of external forces, not least our own ignorance and negligence.

A metropolis like ours would benefit from Slow thinking—but not too slow. Efforts to apply the Slow Food perspective to urban life began in small towns in Tuscany, worried about the impact of tourism and development.

The CittaSlow (CitySlow) offshoot that resulted limits itself to “cities” of no more than 50,000 residents. This places it below the threshold even of Berkeley, which has about 110,000 residents. It also ignores the fact that cities like San Francisco are made up of districts and neighborhoods that are not so different in size or in the pressures they face from the Italian hill towns whose citizens first penned Cittaslow’s manifesto 18 years ago.

Resisting the forces of Fast Preserving the quality of urban life means accommodating growth in sustainable ways. This is the other side of Slow. In urging local producers to find global markets, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini acknowledged that growth can be positive, an indication of quality and urbanity. This is a crucial distinction. Folco Portinari’s Slow Food manifesto, written in 1989, attacked speed rather than growth as the enemy of “a better future.” The 20th century, he wrote, that “began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.” He asserted that “real culture is about developing taste rather than demeaning it,” arguing for “ a firm defense of material pleasure” as “the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life” that “in the name of productivity has changed our way of being and threatens our environment.”3 The forces arrayed against the quality of our urban life are also Fast, and “smart” development is too often part of it—as in our willingness to accept bad design if it hits a density target. And no-growth is smart growth’s inevitable twin, locked in a battle that produces mediocrity and sameness. Just as we oppose Fast in this sense, we oppose a Slow that clings without reflection to what exists. Slow is not the same as No. Growth is desirable if it enables a region to remain “alive,” and to “rediscover the flavors and savors” (quoting Portinari) that make it what it is. That this also requires pruning and paring has to be faced as part of this active cultivation.

There are signs of change. Politically-connected architects who regularly secured commissions in San Francisco based on their ability to push projects through the entitlements process are finding that they’ve lost their touch. Much better architects are showing that pleasure is affordable, and that not every new building has to cater to empty-nest baby boomers returning from the suburbs. If a proper balance can be restored between the city as a looser framework for development and its citizens as more active city makers, then life will be more pleasurable and the region will be better protected.

Notes 1. At Risk: The Bay Area Greenbelt, 2006 edition, Greenbelt Alliance, 2006, pp. 2-3.

2. See Jane Wolff, Delta Primer, William Stout, 2003.

3. Smart Infill, Greenbelt Alliance, 2008.

4. The quotes are from Fabio Parasecoli, “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds,” Gastronomica. Summer 2003. Cittaslow’s founding charter is in English on the Cittaslow UK website. Also see Paul L. Knox, “Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World,” Journal of Urban Design, February 2005.

OUR SLOWBAY MANIFESTO Here is our first draft of a manifesto for a Slow Bay Region that affords urbanity and pleasure while still accommodating the growth in population that experts are projecting.

Create boundaries for density, not just growth We need to cut through the current impasse by agreeing on what we mean by density in each and every area where development can still occur. Density is not just an abstraction; it has to serve communities and support their existing residents as well as new ones. There’s nothing wrong with establishing goals for density, but they have to contribute in clear and fundamental ways to the experiential qualities that make each place what it is(or what it could be).

Make urbanity count We need a robust vision of the region’s urbanity that takes lessons from its rich culture of food and wine, not shrinking from creativity, experimentation, and the demotic element that challenges and changes tastes, and is unafraid of outside influences—knowing that the region will absorb them and make them its own. Then we need to put this vision first.

Restore the demotic; end the duopoly The tendency of Bay Regional cities to politicize development at almost every scale, making owners and leaseholders jump through endless hoops, is depriving us of the spontaneous contributions of individuals, operating within rules that are broad enough to allow creative interpretation. It makes for a duopoly that favors large projects that are shaped by “global” assumptions about market preferences, and that attract only the biggest players. There are exceptions, but this is too much the norm.

See the region as a whole Understanding the region holistically, especially as an ecosystem, would immediately put a halt to insanities like the current pressure to develop the Delta, one of California’s main sources of fresh water, as single-family housing. It would encourage us to invest much more in transit and much less in freeways, and to value open land like our first-born.

Honor our real traditions The historic patterns of the region have favored a humane density in urban development coupled with the preservation of the natural landscape. They have always acted as a brake to heedless sprawl, and making them the law of the land would solve a lot of problems.

Put our money where our mouth is Americans tend to wait until the future they dreaded arrives before dealing with it. We have to break this habit. The best way to do so is to fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, savored its delicious food and wine, and walked its captivating streets. Something this beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. It’s time to change.

Written with Richard Bender for the Forms in the City/Spaces in the Metropolis Conference, Rome, 2-3 April 2007, and published in Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica no. 126, September–December 2007, pgs. 50–55.

CONGREGATION BETH SHOLOM

URBAN TERROIR Terroir refers to the conditions of terrain and microclimate in wine-growing regions and, more specifically, within a given vineyard. It takes in those attributes of place that influence the grapes and thus the wine. Terroir is an evolving context, subject to human intervention and to the vicissitudes of nature in a larger sense. It evolves, but the pace of evolution of its different elements can vary radically. As a mix of the found and the cultivated, terroir can be improved, revived, diminished, and even destroyed.

We use words like structure, scale, density, and fabric to describe the urban context, but these are all elements of something larger. By calling this “something larger” terroir, we raise the possibility of cultivation, but against a deeper background—the regional ecosystem in which a city is situated. Terroir could also be said to be that part of nature we can influence. Thus its boundaries are potentially vast. Exurbia, the embodiment of our economically and culturally divided society, is also a byproduct of a cultivation strategy that treats social displacement in its different forms as an externality. The question of who cultivates, and why, is as legitimate for city making as it is for farming, fishing, or forestry.

Reclaiming terroir In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi writes of scale that “it is conceivable that a change in scale modified an urban artifact in some way; but it does not change its quality.” Citing the urban geographer Richard Ratcliff, he adds, “To reduce metropolitan problems to problems of scale means to ignore…the actual structure of the city and its conditions of evolution.”1 Rossi then quotes the critic Giuseppe Samonà, writing in the mid-1960s: It is absolutely out of the question, in my opinion, to nurture any idea of gigantic spatial parameters. In truth, we find ourselves, as at all times, in a situation that, from a general point of view, presents man and his space in wellbalanced proportion, and in a relationship analogous to that of the ancients, except that in today’s relationship all the spatial measures are greater than were the more fixed ones of fifty years ago.2 The key words here are quality, well-balanced proportion, and relationship. What is to be avoided are “gigantic spatial parameters” which ignore or traduce the relationship between “man and his space.” Terroir posits human cultivation, and cultivation in an urban sense is how a city becomes “our space.” In cultivating our urban terroir, we address and value the relationship itself. Whatever furthers it—scale, for example—becomes part of the terroir, cultivated both for its own sake and for what it can contribute to the outcomes we desire to achieve and also to sustain. Sustainability is intrinsic to terroir, one reason why we cultivate it. Structure and scale (for example) lack this connotation. They can be dead, to use Christopher Alexander’s apt word for it; terroir is organic, alive.3 What gives terroir efficacy compared to words like density or fabric is that it explicitly takes in humanity and nature, so we cannot treat it as a thing unmoored from both.

Resisting gigantism Samonà cautions us that scale is necessarily a human scale, or gigantism may result. In a different context, Wallace Stegner described his talkative aunt. Finally noticing the huge rock formation rising dead ahead of them—they were in a car—she was rendered speechless, unable to wrap her mind around it. “You have to get used to an inhuman scale,” Stegner wrote.4 Cities can also have a scale that diminishes the possibility of a human relationship.

If we build canyons that become wind tunnels, we have to cultivate the affected streets and plazas to bring them back to life. If every act of building has the potential to further the human relationship, then gigantism is really an egotism that disregards that possibility. As this suggests, gigantism flows from a willful or mindless ignorance with respect to terroir. Preservationists that reflexively resist higher-density development, privileging their own neighborhoods over the region’s remaining open space, show a similar egotism, yet their fears of gigantism seem justified by experience. 5 Why is it that we get gigantism much more often than we get urbanity? One could say, borrowing from JeanFrançois Lyotard, that the “grand narrative” of regional open space preservation, so well accepted by Bay Area opinion makers, has become a pretext for the “soft terrorism” of Smart Growth. The results fall right in line with Lyotard’s now 30-year-old critique: “On the one hand, the system can only function by reducing complexity, and on the other, it must induce the adaptation of individual aspirations to its own ends. The reduction in complexity is required to maintain the system’s power capability.”6 This power capability is very much in place. Reforming it doesn’t mean streamlining the process—we tried that under former Mayor Willie Brown—but taking it out of the hands of politicians, restoring consensus and rule of law, yet doing so as postmodernists, accepting nuance and difference.

Rethinking tradition Entire swathes of San Francisco—neighborhoods we know and love—were built based on a shared understanding of the city’s terroir. The introduction of taller, more massive buildings, first in the financial district and then in lowerdensity industrial areas to the north and south, ended that consensus. Especially south of Market, the results are mixed. Yet there are a growing number of examples of higher-density projects that achieve the kind of urbanity that we associate with the best of the city’s established districts. Certain architects stand out in their ability to do this across a range of building types and scales, and their work in the city is worth studying as potential precedents.7 The best new tall buildings around the city’s Mission Street corridor make room for the people on the ground. These aren’t lifeless plazas, either. They’re run just as well as they’re designed, and their owners clearly get that a civic gesture not only buys them constant goodwill, but makes their properties stand out from the competition. The best mid-sized developments create open space and through-block porosity, add balconies that people really use, and vary the height and shape of the buildings and their elements to avoid a monolithic look that substitutes groundscraper for blocky highrise.

Rethinking cultivation Pattern books were part of a consensus about city form at different levels that made the rule of law in development possible. Although pattern books posited specific designs, they were liberally interpreted by individual builders.

More importantly, they reflected a shared understanding of how neighborhoods took shape, with the underlying house pattern reflecting the way the individual blocks were divided up In A Pattern Language,8 Alexander and his collaborators documented the elements that make everyday life worth living. It may be timely to take their work further—to update the patterns that supported the quality of everyday life in our cities through the early postwar period, but then fell into disuse as the desire for a higher density took hold.

We have never really replaced these older patterns, which could be tailored to each and every block. Without them, we are cast adrift in the politicized world of case by case, and cultivation becomes a shouting match. With them, city making can shift back to what it was for eons: a widely-shared human activity.9 The cultivation of urban terroir requires this kind of “working” consensus. Despite a planning apparatus and an elaborate playbook, the recent development of cities like San Francisco and Berkeley has mainly reflected the developer-influenced whims of politicians, with each new project serving as a vehicle for securing contributions and bragging rights. Only GSA and the genuinely civic groups responsible for the new public museums have used

this license intelligently. Since those philosopher-kings (and queens) are not always available, putting cultivation back in the hands of the community is safer.

The city’s leadership still has a role to play in guiding cultivation. They are the stewards, to use a word that often arises in university campus planning. Part of their responsibility, part of what they steward, is the urban terroir. They have to balance the claims of the region—the necessary preservation of open land, for example—with the claims of the community to live well within necessarily higher densities. They have to connect the dots, do the math, and help the community understand and explore its options—not in abstract, but literally neighborhood by neighborhood. Most of all, they have to avoid the “grand narratives” that paper over false solutions, and acknowledge that consensus can only really be achieved at the local level, as an evolving, constantly negotiated resolution.

The community, too, has responsibilities. Neighborhoods are alive because the people who live there care about them and participate in their cultivation. One way to make this happen is to devolve power to them, but to hand that power over with stipulations. How a higher density is to be achieved is ideally a neighborhood decision.

Friedrich Engel’s idea that the housing crisis could be solved by rethinking how existing housing is used is relevant to a number of San Francisco and Berkeley districts.

Density does not always mean bigger—it can also mean used more intensively. Many neighborhoods are working to address urban crime and postearthquake recovery—topics that force them to interact with adjoining blocks to pursue shared interests and initiatives. They could also come to grips with how to meet their communal obligations to the region—to absorb expected population growth, reduce congestion and pollution, use water and energy more efficiently, and preserve the larger ecosystem while maintaining, reviving, and creating urbanity where it counts.

Rethinking participation At a time when, in virtually every other walk of life, people go online to find information and plug into specific communities to understand their options and track and cultivate their personal interests, the mechanisms of “community” are inefficient and out of touch. The remarkable Obama campaign exemplified what can happen when the means and methods of the rest of life are applied to neighborhood-scale organizing and initiatives: a dialogue becomes possible across “interested” communities, which the official city can support, participate in, and sometimes help frame or augment.10 Our cities need to face reality and begin to leverage the tools that everyone else is using now on an individual basis, and put urban cultivation on a new footing, so that this shared civic responsibility can be carried out in a more open and balanced way—with the terroir in mind. Politics will continue—this is not an argument for “good government.” That said, bringing the city and the community back on the same page is a necessity, both to define a new consensus about the city’s cultivation, one neighborhood at a time, and to recognize that the relationship between them has to change. The city’s broad powers will be curtailed, while the community will have more to do.

Every neighborhood will need to tend its own vineyard, with a better understanding of how this contributes to the urban terroir.

Notes 1. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1982, pages 160–161.

2. Rossi is quoting (on page 161) from an essay by Giuseppe Samonà, published in 1964.

3. Alexander’s insistence, in The Nature of Order, that we measure the built realm by its vitality, radically asserts its connection to the rest of life. Alexander, the Tolstoy of architectural theory, is much criticized for his discursive and messianic writings, but on the fundamentals, he has always been on to something.

4. Wallace Stegner, “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Modern Library, 2002, pages 52–54. The quote reads, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

5. It is not just regional open space that is treated as an externality by gigantism of this sort; the homeless are another “urban externality” that mysteriously drops out of the frame of neighborhood preservation on the one hand and high-density rede-

velopment on the other. One could mention the exclusionary nature of public employment here, too: no sign of the poor sweeping up the parks, for example, and their rifling of recycling bins is considered a crime in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Berkeley.

6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, page 61. The book was first published in 1979. It’s interesting to me that Rossi, Alexander, Lyotard, and others—like Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, and Paul Feyerabend—whose works also have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on the theme of terroir, were all writing around the same time.

That period was characterized by left/right debates on issues that are back on the table today, from oil shortages to urban terrorism. It ended with the US and the UK shifting rightward toward unfettered global capitalism. As the US now shifts the other way, let’s hope we learned something in the interim.

7. For example: SOM’s 101 Second Street, St. Regis, and UCSF Mission Bay Housing; Pelli Clarke Pelli on Mission Street; Studios on Howard Street; Stanley Saitowitz on Folsom Street and on 14th Avenue; Leddy Maytum Stacey on Sixth Street; Thom Mayne/Morphosis on Seventh Street; and David Baker on Eighth Street and elsewhere. There are others, but collectively they are the exception and banality is the rule—in a city that is remarkably and even courageously cosmopolitan in many other respects.

8. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977. Alexander is best at recording specific attributes of towns and cities—their settings at different scales—that make them truly livable and enjoyable. His willingness to say that we know if a place or a building is alive or dead restores ordinary people to their rightful place as measurers of all they survey. When we start to consider new patterns of city making that are in tune with humanity and nature, we often find that Alexander has been there before us. We may not agree with his account of the terrain, but we can appreciate what he knows and what he’s seen.

9. Ivan Illich comments on modernity’s “loss of proportionality” or “common sense” (in The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Anansi, 2005, pages 136–137): This loss of proportionality points to the historical uniqueness of modernity, its incomparability. The poetic, performative quality of existence was erased and forgotten in field after field… And in this transition from a world based on experience of fit, of appropriateness, to a world which I can’t even name, a world in which words have lost their contours, what was once called common sense has been washed out. Common sense, as this term was used of old, meant the sense of what fits, what belongs, what is appropriate. It was by common sense, for example, that the physician understood the limits of what he could and should do.

Illich and Alexander share a sense that modernity is fatal to humane patterns of living/being. I think they would argue, in contrast to Samonà’s statement about scale in a modern context, that gigantism is inherent—that is, a constant danger—in the modern loss of proportionality and common sense (as Illich puts it). In an earlier introduction to Illich and his work (Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi, 1992, page 15), David Cayley writes that Illich, drawing on the work of Leopold Kohr, who pioneered a philosophy of social size, claimed that: To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. … In each of these dimensions, tools that require time periods or space or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional.

In Rivers North, Illich describes the introduction of tempered scales in music (pages 134–136)—a passage that suggests to me that modernity requires us to find “tempered” forms that can be harmoniously combined. We have to “learn not to hear disharmony,” he says. Perhaps we have to learn not see it, either, in order both to feel at home in the modern city and begin to reclaim it for ourselves. It is in this spirit that I point to Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Sholom and Mayne’s Federal Office Building, each of which has been accused (by John King and Dean Macris, respectively) of disharmony—buildings that are tempered as the latter building’s neighbor, the SoMA Grand, is not. Seeing them, I felt that each fits harmoniously with its context, but in a new way. By studying this new way, we may be able to find new patterns of city making that are suited to the city we’ve become. (By pattern I mean precedents that suggest ideas about how to work—plan, design, and build—in a given context.)

10. In Berkeley, Kitchen Democracy provides an online forum to discuss and weigh in on issues of public debate. There are signs that the city’s leaders are paying attention. Some question if this is really participation, but it may be where it needs to go to be effective.

Written in November and December 2008 and published in LINE’s “Slow” issue, January 2009.

POSTSCRIPT: LOOKING BEYOND SLOW I went to see my friend and writing partner Richard Bender earlier today, and we talked about where to take this.

We both feel that, with these three essays, we’ve exhausted Slow as a topic. Yet it’s a potent metaphor, as is terroir.

Where do they point?

Ivan Illich surfaced while I was writing the third essay. His willingness to make fundamental critiques of received wisdom on education, healthcare, transit, water, gender, and, behind them, of modern life itself, and to pose radical alternatives, makes him the man of the hour. When I read David Cacey’s interviews with Illich, I got a better sense of his ideas and positions. I was struck by his assertion that modernity erodes human-centered proportionality. Gigantism or inhuman scale is one result, but this can also take the form of grandiosity—our modern belief that we run the world. The current unwinding of the world economy reflects, once again, the exposure of this fallacy.

Capitalism may be under attack, but modernity is the actual elephant in the room. The current crisis is like the loss of faith that swept through the intellectual and professional classes of mid-Victorian England and Scotland in the 19th century. Abandoning their belief, they put their energy with a vengeance into creating modern life.

Maynard Keynes wrote that their work ethic made it possible for him and cohort to be modern without being dissolute. Those of his generation notably valued the pleasures of everyday life. They were Slow before the word gained this connotation.

Modernism sought to bend humanity to pared-down notions of a healthy life. Blaming the ills of society, like tuberculosis, on defects in city form, it proposed to sweep it away and substitute new patterns that leveraged speed, but also sought through rational planning to guarantee everyone a place in the sun and access to supportive public infrastructure. Its legacy is bits and parts that worked, and a powerful aesthetic, risible in certain ways, enduring in others. Or we could say that its legacy is one disaster after another, from fascist embrace to postwar redevelopment. The question, similar to the one that Hayek raised about socialism, is whether or not modernism leads invariably to disaster.

Modernity is not quite modernism. It’s where we’ve ended up or, more accurately, how life has been led all along as people lived their lives in and around the modern program. The famous relook at the Domino project that Corbu designed in Pessac, like the infamous Wall in Kowloon, suggests that people will assert themselves if they can. Abandoned public housing blocks, a late-20th-century phenomenon in Europe and the US, make the point that they’ll destroy them or desert them if they can’t.

Dwell captures the seductive part of modernism. Retrospectives on the modernists at the VA and of Corbu at the Mori Art Center reinforced the humane character of the modern aesthetic up to a certain scale. Late modernism is valuable in part for its willingness to experiment with the limits of scale, but this does not yet add up to real patterns or a sense of how cities can densify and still retain urbanity.

Modernity is not really an aesthetic, but—as Illich points out—the abandonment of common sense. The current crisis may shock us sufficiently to wake us to this fact, restoring proportionality to modern life and giving us a clearer sense of the proper limits of human intervention. Put an end to grandiosity and much else may find a human scale and a renewed demotic spirit. It will take time, because cities in an official sense, institutions, and corporations are conditioned to their hubris. It’s clear, though, that we can’t afford it. This used to be argued in human terms, but now it’s financial, too. What’s in front of us is a massive adjustment—not going back, but going forward from a deeper past.

— John Parman, Berkeley, 1 March 2009

BOOK REVIEW: WHAT REMAINS In his Modern Architecture, Kenneth Frampton distinguishes critical regionalism from regionalism as “a spontaneously produced” vernacular. Critical regionalism is intended “to identify those recent regional ‘schools’ whose primary aim has been to reflect and serve the limited constituencies in which they are grounded.” It depends on “a certain prosperity,” he writes, as well as “some kind of anti-centrist consensus, an aspiration at least to some form of cultural, economic and political independence.” Like Lewis Mumford before him, Frampton counts San Francisco as such a school. A new book by the architect and critic Pierluigi Serraino, NorCalMod, challenges this view.

Interested in California’s mid-20th century modernism and prompted by a suggestion from Elaine Jones to look at the Bay Area, “considered a hotbed of modern architecture in the fifties,” Serraino has written a revisionist history of its postwar period. Along the way, he also discusses the importance of architectural photographers and the role of the east coast-centered design press in drawing attention to architects at the periphery of their editorial vision.

Rethinking Bay Regionalism Serraino argues that the official history of postwar Bay Regionalism distorts the facts by consciously excluding modernism and its Bay Area exponents. In his view, The evidence reveals an incohesive chorus of voices, if not an atomized design aesthetic, among Northern California architects during this time. When all these dots are connected, the picture that emerges is rather different, indeed more comprehensive and richer in design vocabulary than one might expect: Northern California was an unrestrained laboratory for Modern architecture, propelled by the explosion of the national economy.

Regionalists and Modernists alike promoted economy of design, but through profoundly different architectural expressions.

In the early 1980s, I worked with San Francisco architect Joseph Esherick on an article in Space & Society on the evolution of his work. In one of our conversations, he said to me that he felt that the steady stream of national and international design magazines made it impossible for architects here to avoid the contamination of larger movements, whatever they might be. Is this the anti-centrism that Frampton believes is characteristic of regional schools?

In fact, the “regional” architect who said it shared the status of an outsider with Bernard Maybeck, Chuck Bassett, and Stanley Saitowitz—to name three other of the Bay Region’s leading lights. All four arrived here trained in a larger tradition, and then absorbed what they found—its history and most of all its sense of place. Esherick was the most directly influenced by older Bay Regional architects, but the work he and his EHDD collaborators produced was as eclectic as Serraino posits. Among the influences: Corbu and Kahn (through Esherick), and MLTW and Rossi (through his gifted partner George Homsey). Homsey, a kind of fifth Beatle to MLTW, influenced them in turn.

In a recent interview in Line, Bill Stout noted that Allan Temko, Bay Regional modernism’s main polemicist, paid no attention to houses. That omission left William Wurster free to frame the official history of region’s architecture in his own image. San Francisco modernism was the province of SOM—something imported. (It’s interesting that Wurster looked back to Timothy Pflueger’s 1930s moderne style for inspiration when he paired up with SOM on San Francisco’s Bank of America Tower in the late 1960s.) Not every modernist here fell off the East Coast’s radar, but the story definitely got around.

Architecture and the Media A practicing architect and independent scholar, Serraino wrote an earlier book with Julius Shulman, the iconic photographer of midcentury modernism in Southern California. It’s not surprising, then, that his beautifully illustrated new book is also an excellent primer for architects on how to document their work so historians can find it. This reflects Serraino’s view that only “that which is photographed, reported, and generations later still retrievable can continue to exist in architectural history.”

In a maxim worthy of Goethe, Serraino takes this thought a measure further: Architecture without photographs is like a traveler without a passport: it has no identity as far as the media is concerned.

Photography makes architecture noticeable. Also, photography is the oxygen of architecture. It keeps its sister field alive in the present and in the future.

His maxim refers to architects as well as architecture. Indeed, his best example is the architect David Thorne. After designing a widely published modernist house in the Oakland hills for Dave Brubeck, he felt pressured by the resulting media coverage and deliberately slipped under the radar, changing his first name and assiduously keeping himself and his work out of the press. As a result, both “disappeared” until Serraino rediscovered them.

So is it “publish or perish,” even for architects? Serraino is right that it’s important to document one’s work and that the choice of photographer matters in terms of securing coverage. That coverage has its limits, though.

The design press is a distorting mirror, both in how it values and reports on contemporary work and the way it credits who did what. It’s also ephemeral, in terms of public consciousness. Houses aren’t the Acropolis, but they have owners. There’s a natural curiosity about their provenance, and in the Bay Region’s often inflated housing market, provenance has value. Roger Lee may have been invisible nationally, but he’s still a known commodity in the East Bay. Seeing the Work with New Eyes The rise of Dwell and the importance now given to midcentury modernist houses make a book like Serraino’s, that reassesses the work of earlier decades in light of current tastes, seem almost inevitable. The passage of time makes it easier to understand how the work of the Bay Regional modernists differs from their contemporaries and builds imaginatively on modernist antecedents. At the time, east coast editors may have seen their work as derivative of trends more fully developed elsewhere. LA, hyped by photographers like Shulman who made the work there seem so sexy, got the attention.

What sets the modernism of the Bay Region apart from everywhere else is the place itself—its dramatic sites, especially for houses, and its remarkable light and climate. It’s not the only place with these qualities, but they give our version of midcentury modernism its DNA. One of the best things about NorCalMod is its inclusiveness.

Serraino understands how this sense of place links pure exemplars of the International Style, like Donald Olsen, to architects like Roger Lee who are much closer to the ranch house style that is as close as we really get to midcentury vernacular.

NorCalMod displays this vividly, drawing on our region’s best postwar architectural photographers—a tribute to Serraino’s tenacity in getting their remarkable photographs into print, thus documenting one of the high water marks of the region’s architecture. In this sense, the book is a kind of love letter from the past to a new generation of architects here—with this talented Italian as its messenger.

Pierluigi Serraino: NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism, Chronicle Books, 2006, published in ArcCA 06.4.

COMMON PLACE © 2009 by John Parman; essay 2 and coda © 2009 by Richard Bender and John Parman Credits: Rome’s Campo de' Fiori, Mary Lebeck; Roman roofscape: Patricia Sonnino; Civic Center Victory Garden: James Monday; Stanley Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Sholom: Rien van Rijthoven. Website: http://complace.j2parman.com

The third issue of Common Place recapitulated my diary entries from the trip I made to Granada and the Alpujarra region of Andalusia, Spain. It also included an interview that Richard Ingersoll conducted with Manfredo Tafuri that had appeared in Design Book Review, the journal I founded with Laurie Snowden. At the time, Design Book Review had almost no online presence and I was afraid it would disappear from sight. There’s now an archive.

THE VALLEY OF THE ETERNAL FATHER, ÓRGIVA, ALPUJARRA, SPAIN

COMMON PLACE No. 3 | April 2009

A VISIT TO GRANADA AND ALPUJARRA

A WATER CHANNEL, PART OF THE VALLEY’S IRRIGATION SYSTEM

PREAMBLE In April 2008, I met my daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, in Granada, Spain, where we stayed for several days and then drove to the valley, not far from Órgiva in Alpujarra—a region that extends along the south slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains—where she had been living since the fall of 2007. She ended up living there until November 2008, nearly two years. Although my stay was brief, I came away with an impression that has deepened over time as Lizy and I corresponded and then conversed. Like equivalent places in California, the valley is a kind of litmus test of civilization’s ability to leave well enough alone and, equally, of the constant, seductive, even crazy-making pull that civilization exercises nonetheless—no matter how far off the grid you think you’ve gone. Yet Alpujarra has a real history, both a place of refuge after the fall of Granada and a region originally terraced for agriculture by the Hispano-Latin citizens of the Roman Empire who also put in place its elaborate fresh water channels. What follows are excerpts from the notes I made at the time, along with a brief postscript.

DIARY ENTRIES

VIEW OF THE OLD TOWN FROM OUR WINDOW

(Saturday, 26 April 2008) Granada is a bigger city than I imagined. The new part flows out of the old, which is well preserved. The topography is dramatic—the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the south, the Alhambra and the summer palace on the a tree-covered hillside, south of the old town, and a second hillside that’s filled with houses off of narrow, winding streets. We climbed both these hills today in reverse order, finding a plaza at the summit with a commanding view. The hills form a river valley, but there’s a drought, Lizy said, so the river’s low. The streets are cobblestone, but they’re made of smaller river stones, not the large, square stones you find in France, and so are easier to walk on.

(Tuesday, 29 April 2008) Yesterday, we drove to the valley where Lizy lives, meeting up with her friend Ananda, who was working in Órgiva, the nearest market town. He’s an earnest young man of 19, good at anything of a technical nature, Lizy tells me. He and his family live below her. Her house, which she shares with Julia, a woman from Madrid, consists of a kitchen and a main room, plus a separate room where Lizy sleeps. It has a west-facing window that frames a view of the valley. The house is made of dark brown stones and mortar. It sits on one of the terraces that the Moors made, and gets a terrific amount of sunlight, Lizy said, although there’s some shade from a pine tree and other, smaller trees in front. It would be easy to put a garden in. She used to live on the other hillside, much lower down, and she would look up enviously at the house, picturing all that sun.

The other occupant of the house beside Julia is Ruth, who came down from Madrid a week before, after breaking off with her boyfriend. She was writing an allegorical story about him, drawn as an elf that, because of a spell, is condemned to wear armor. It comes off magically for one night when the moon is full. The story continues, as the spell is complicated. Each part is illustrated with drawings in pastel crayons. Her depiction of the elf made Julia and I laugh as she told us the story.

(Wednesday, 30 April 2008) Back in Granada, we went to the cathedral in all its baroque splendor, whitewashed stone and painted-on gold. The plan of the building is a cross with an imposed X. It includes a sculpture-and-

painting of King Ferdinand conquering the Moors (in this case, one Moor) and a weird, dark gold side chapel dedicated, I think, to the Holy Ghost. The gold looked almost spray-painted on. You can see the origin of lots of things that were emulated and/or parodied later. A detail from a painting by Bellini, “Presentation of the Virgin” hung on one side of the main altar.

Tomorrow is “Las Cruces,” a holiday specific to Granada. It’s also the first of May, workers’ day everywhere else (and here, too). According to the man at the café, the local event includes “alcohol and processions of the Virgin.” The town will be crowded, and the event goes on through the weekend.

Walking back here, I realized that the church at the head of the alley that leads to our building must have been a mosque and that its location across from the “Arab baths” implies that it was once in the very center of the town, downhill from the Alhambra. The area is called the Albaycin, and it’s where the Moors briefly lived after the Alhambra fell. According to Lizy, the valley she lives in was their last stop before they were expelled. The whole of southern Spain reflects or is steeped in the Moorish heritage: the names, the cuisine, the music and dancing, the general appearance of the people.

“The Moors” is a misnomer—they came from different places, ruled in different cities as their emirate was diminished by re-conquest. The original capital was in Cordoba, and it shifted to Granada after Cordoba fell, existing for 300 years as a vassal state of the Spanish king. The Moors were expelled, I read, because of edicts, after the fall of Granada, eliminating their language and culture—very similar to the benighted policies of Franco in reference to the Basques and the Catalan (and also of the northern French kings toward the kingdoms of Provence).

At seven p.m., we went back to the Church of St. John of God, a local saint born in 1495, to hear the rosary (although we didn’t know this is what we’d hear). The church is amazing, a basilica with an entirely gold interior, an altar that climbs three or four stories, and a dome at the center. After the service, they lit up the whole church.

The saint himself is represented in three life-size sculptures, and the Virgin presides over the altar, holding the baby Jesus in her arms, with a crescent moon before her. The service, recited in Spanish, was familiar enough that I could follow parts of it, including the Lord’s Prayer. Numerous older women appeared, but there was an audience of tourists behind them (and us). It’s hard to describe just how encrusted with ornament this church is, and yet it has more integrity than the cathedral in terms of self-consistency. The last time I heard the rosary recited was at Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, also a basilica, now that I think of it—perhaps this is the form that churches dedicated to the Virgin take? That church was built after a plague, my Venetian friend Marta Moretti told me. They pledged to build it if God would end it. Or perhaps they made this pledge to the Virgin.

Walking over there, I began to see what how cars plague a town like this. They’re everywhere, and they demand to share the tiniest streets with pedestrians. Scooters invade even the alleys that, because of stairs and other obstacles, are really only wide enough for people to walk. There are public buses that are inexpensive to use, yet everyone drives. The car we rented is sitting in a public parking garage, chewing up 18 Euros every 24 hours. It seems like a waste to have it, but it was cheaper to take it for six days than to rent it twice.

Owing to accidents of time and geography, the sun is just going down at nine p.m. I think it’s because we’re an hour ahead of GMT, but not very far to the east of the demarcation line. And despite being in the “south,” I guess we’re actually fairly far north.

The Lebanese restaurant that we’ve gone to every night was closed, so we went to a Moroccan restaurant a little higher up, run by an impresario, fluent in all the different tourist languages. Several families from California were at the next table—I heard Napa Valley mentioned, and Lizy said later that the snippets of conversation she overheard were typical of someone’s friend being grilled about her experiences here and answering with a recitation of her classes.

The restaurant itself, together with the food, was the polar opposite of the other one, as overdone in décor as one of the cathedral’s side chapels, and with ingredients that came from a can, whereas the Lebanese restaurant has the wife as cook and everything is made fresh. The soups are especially good because of this, with very subtle flavors.

The last building on our alley, which ends at the garden gate of a former convent, houses a woman who goes around Granada yelling things like, “You’re really ugly” (in Spanish) at students. Late at night, she emerges from her building and calls her dogs in a loud, manly voice—I thought it was a man, but Lizy said, “No, it’s a woman. I

know her.” I guess you never forget a voice like that. I haven’t lain eyes her, but ears—yes. I heard her while I was washing up, but in that interval, she went inside. Sleep well.

(Thursday, 1 May 2008) Back in the valley, Lizy and I walked down to Ananda’s house and met his father, Nuriel, who speaks Spanish slowly and clearly enough that I could understand. Their house, which he built on the ruins of an older one, is well made—he laid and mortared all the rocks himself. You can see how it’s progressed over the 26 years he’s lived there, adding a room for his wife and a sleeping alcove for both of them. The boys have a “studio” downstairs with a computer and various music-related electronics. The brother is into hip-hop and the Internet. I met him on Monday and again this evening—he showed up wearing earphones and carrying an mpeg player.

Modern life, I said to Nuriel. As a parting gift, Nuriel gave us avocados and squash from their root cellar.

Then we came back and Lizy made a salad, soup, and quinoa, which was all very good. We ate on two orangecrate-like tables, seated on the floor—this seems to be the norm here, as Alma and Nuriel also sit on the floor, Turkish style. (However, Nuriel produced a chair for me and I noticed another. The boys also have chairs in their studio.)

Before we went down to Nuriel’s house, I started rereading Lizy’s copy of the book on Dōgen that I have at home. There was much that I’d forgotten. Later, we were briefly visited by Julio Donat, the author of the book on the plants of Alpujarra. He speaks English, although he said that he had difficulty understanding my American accent. I asked if I could buy two copies of the book—one for Lizy, one for me. Like every other man in the valley, he has a beard. I would probably have one, too, if I lived here for long, since shaving takes a certain effort (and you either have to heat the water on the stove or wait for the sun to heat it up the water in the hose on the roof.

THE MAIN CHANNEL WITH THE SUBSIDIARY CHANNEL TO ITS RIGHT

The valley’s irrigation system is amazing—channels of water that wind down the hill, with a smaller system to divert it to the plots. Nuriel’s plot has a sprinkler system that Ananda installed.

(Friday, 2 May 2008) Julia, the housemate of Lizy, arrived this afternoon. At least, I think she arrived—it might have been someone else passing through. There’s a path that comes down from the road—I could have parked the car there and walked down, avoiding the narrow drive, but I felt it would be harder to carry things down from there, since the incline is steeper. I met Julio, for example, while he was walking down from the road after the bus dropped him off. Yesterday, a woman tourist walked by and apologized for intruding.

THE DAGGERBOARD THAT LETS WATER INTO THE SIDE CHANNEL

(Later) Lizy has just left in the near-darkness, assuring me that she can find her way to Ananda’s house, where we had dinner this evening—a salad with avocado that she whipped into a kind of yogurt (as Nuriel described its consistency before she started). I learned that he’s from Seville originally and was an artist who sold his wares in different places until he settled here 27 years ago. His wife Alma, who’s from Barcelona, came here 20 years ago.

He is a master of reike, a healing method that he learned from “una maestra de Canada” who lived in the valley. He gave me a booklet in Spanish, printed in Idaho, which described it. The patriarch, a Japanese Christian who studied at the University of Chicago, returned to Japan and studied Zen, and after much searching worked out a method that he believed was shared by Buddha and Jesus, “the laying on of hands”. He offered me a session (and offered a second after he walked me back here). Most of it was cradling my head in different ways, and at one point I felt like my head was in his hands and body was floating. Whether it has healing powers remains to be seen, although there’s at least one positive sign—my digestive system is working again.

VIEW OF THE VALLEY SHOWING THE TERRACED HILLSIDE

Reading the Dōgen book, I was struck by the phrase “topsy-turvy world” and its Japanese original. The valley, despite its beauty and slowness, is very much a part of this. The larger area is just as damaged by tourism as Granada, although this same tourism makes certain good things possible. Could it be done in a different way that

would keep those things alive, allow tourists their access, but—for example—ban private cars, which are the principal menace, in favor of the bus system, which works well and is used by all the locals? (It costs a Euro to ride it.) I could have come here directly from Granada by bus. Instead, I spent hundreds of Euros on a car that has presented a parking challenge in every village.

Lizy assures me that only animal life that’s the least untoward are the coyotes that roam the hills. She sometimes hears them howling when the moon’s full. There are bullfrogs that sound like raccoons attacking squirrels, and endless clicks and scratches and thumps. Walking up here with Nuriel, he discovered a small snake that wrapped up into a tight circle when he prodded it, after first lunging at him. Let snakes lie is my motto.

(Saturday, 3 May 2008) Slowing down is a way of recharging, and perhaps the real meaning of Slow is in taking the time—taking enough time—to gain rather than lose energy along the way. Lizy and Julia are talking with a friend of theirs in the kitchen. I had a real cup of coffee, made on the stovetop, and brushed my teeth, but I still have to shave. It’s a little after noon. The sun is out and it’s warming up—there’s warm water from the spigot, for example.

Last Saturday, I was in Granada recovering from the flight. Lizy and I walked up to the Alhambra. She was fighting the city, and that resistance took a lot out of her. Over the ensuing week, we’ve been talking about that.

I’ve quoted Dōgen, who said that light and dark can’t be distinguished, that enlightenment emerges from everyday existence, the topsy-turvy world, as he calls it, as part of the giddiness of karmic life (another phrase of his). Trying to separate yourself from the world is as pointless as trying to make a mirror by polishing a tile. We arise in life and are eventually subsumed by it, organic and transient creatures that we are, unfolding from the spark that set us into being, a journey in which we are enlightened and deluded in turn, being in the midst of life, not apart from it.

Buddhism is “very yang,” Lizy said a few days ago. Yesterday, I asked her to explain, and she answered that she finds Buddhism more of a man’s than a woman’s philosophy of life. After we heard the rosary at the Church of St. John of God, I said that it was really like chanting. It’s also a repetitive act, saying the rosary, a daily ritual of a cyclic nature, focused on the mother, on women, as the channel of God, “mother of God.” In this view, the importance of Jesus is that he “was made flesh,” that God immersed Himself in the world and used a woman as his vehicle, a woman being the only way He could do it. This is true of the old gods, too. Like men, they hungered for women and begot various semi-divinities with them. Jesus is one, “half-man, half-God”—and when he shed his body, God entirely, they say.

I agree with Swedenborg that everything in the world has its corresponding thing in heaven or hell. That Swedish gentleman took in it all in dispassionately. He was good at reading malice and falsity, and ignoring both when he encountered them. The world didn’t slow him down because he didn’t waste his time resisting it, but instead gave his time to things that resonated—studies, public service, people whose goodness deserved his notice and kindness. Other things he sidestepped.

This valley is as rich in correspondence as any city. It has its hell as well as its heaven.

Thanks (or no thanks) to having access to wireless, I’ve kept up with events at home. Nothing seems to have changed much in these days, although small “urgencies” (as the Spanish call them) have arisen. I like that Spanish word, urgencia, which feels better than emergency as a descriptor. The latter puts its emphasis on “things developing,” emerging in a particularly bad way, but the former just lets it go at that: whatever it is, however it developed, it is urgent now.

(Later) Nuriel appeared and asked me if I wanted a second session of reike. I agreed, and walked with him down to his house, this time to have a full front-and-back treatment, which involves, he explained, a subtle transfer of negative and positive energy. At the outset, he produced crystals, pink quartz, and an egg of onyx. I liked the egg, I said, and he commented that onyx is the stone of Capricorn. (He’s one, too.) The different minerals represent air, fire, water, and earth. Alternatively, he may have meant that they channel forces from the heavens. I’m not sure which it was. My Spanish is getting better, listening to him. Sometimes I could follow him, but not consistently.

Lizy said that she and Alma are studying chiropractic with a German adept who’s told them to obtain the original book on the subject, by a man named Zimmer. Alma has a copy of the German edition, but no one can read it except the teacher, so Lizy’s been trying to track down a copy via the Internet. She said that the difference in

methods has to do with their subtlety, and that modern chiropractic is something like shiatsu, while the old school is very gentle because their knowledge of the spinal cord is more detailed and their methods more sensitive.

The reike session lasted maybe 90 minutes—this is a guess. Lizy arrived meanwhile, and she and Nuriel made an elaborate salad. I watched Nuriel add oil and lemon juice and then mix it in. He sliced everything up so the salad bowl was heaping when he was finished. I realized that I could make it, too, having watched him, and said to Lizy later that this is rare for me, to learn something by observation.

I asked Nuriel (with Lizy translating) if he knew how to garden when he came here. “No,” he said. “I learned mostly by myself, but when I got into some difficulty, I went to see a more experienced older man named Antonio.”

Lizy feels that you just plunge in, and maybe she’s right, but I said that I like to know someone who can help me when I get into difficulties, as I inevitably do. While in the midst of the reike, I thought about the garden of my house and about my room. I’ve had “remake the room” on my list since the turn of the year, but now I have a clearer image of what to do: empty it out.

When I came here before, the terrace in front of Lizy’s room was filled with people, friends from the valley plus one who’s not. They said hello nicely, but were caught up in their own talk, and I came and went, getting my camera so that I could document the way the water system works. It’s quite something how intricate it is and with what exactitude it delivers water where you need it. That makes sense, of course, in a climate that’s basically a step away from being a desert. There’s been a drought for four years, Julio said two days ago. We’re supposed to visit him—the Henry Thoreau of Alpujarra—this evening. Right now, though, Lizy is still with Nuriel and Ananda.

(Later) Close to dusk, we walked over to the house of Julio Donat. He was out, and we met Pedro, his tenant, who lives in Granada, but comes down here for the weekend, and Pedro’s girlfriend Julia, who’s originally from Munich, Polish-German, and an artist, studying at the University of Granada. What kind of artist, I asked? Etching, she said, but at Granada you have to study every sort of art—you can only specialize as a doctoral student. She works in copper, after finding working with zinc too toxic.

This was later, though. Pedro was the first to greet us, and then Julio appeared. He’d been up organizing the flow of water, as his area will get some next from the channel system. He said that it begins at the highest village—I don’t remember the name—and is fed from a source that comes directly from the mountain. The water depends on the snow pack, and this past winter was dry and warm, so there isn’t much. The spring rains didn’t really help.

Julio took us to his attic, which is a herbarium—shelf after shelf of herbs and plants, which he makes up into herbal or plant mixtures for various conditions. “Hawthorne is good for the heart and circulation,” he explained.

“You drink an infusion, and you can drink it as often as you like without ill effect.” This in response to my comment about foxglove (digitalis): “You never know what the result will be, so you can only take it in a hospital, not at home.” Lizy explained later, when I wondered aloud why he didn’t sell his mixtures on the Internet, that a larger market would strip the region of its plants. “He sells them in local markets,” she said, “and earns enough money for what he needs here.”

I bought two copies of his book—at 20 Euros a piece. It’s a wonderful book, and I urged Lizy to translate at least a chapter so we can show it to publishers. Julio speaks English, although he had trouble understanding my Californian, and Lizy says that he teaches classes locally to small groups. He’d be an interesting visitor to our region. His book, too, would find an audience. It’s a model that other regions could profitably emulate.1

THE WALK DOWN TO ALMA AND NURIEL’S HOUSE

I brought over a bottle of red wine, so he invited Julia and Pedro to come over and we had a supper that was the exact opposite of our two meals with Nuriel—cosmopolitan in spirit, talking about New York (which Julia intends to visit), Berlin (a city she likes), US and Spanish politics, the films of Peter Greenaway, books like Ecotopia (a copy of which Julio produced, and which led me to mention that I’d met the author, Ernest Callenbach), and the music of Jobim (playing in the background). Lizy drank some wine and enjoyed the conversation. It was a fitting way to end my last full day here. Julia loaned us a headlamp and we walked home in the dark. I followed Lizy, who knows the path better than I do.

Something else about the channels that Julio said: they predate the Moors, as do the villages—they were probably put there by the Romans, which makes complete sense to me, thinking of their skill with aqueducts and other waterways. This was the land of the Hispano-Latin population that fell on hard times in the fifth century A.D., as I learned during my visit to the Archaeology Museum in Madrid. They did well, and it stuck.

(Sunday, 4 May 2008) I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and washed up. It’s surprising how easy this proved to be, after all my qualms before getting to the valley. From the experience of the morning before, I left the room closed up so its warmth didn’t dissipate. A few days before, with all the windows open, I got so cold that I had to get back under the covers. Worried that Lizy wasn’t coming, I went down to find her, encountering her and Ananda just at the beginning of the path down to Nuriel’s house. I continued down and said goodbye to Nuriel, thanking him for helping Lizy, and then walked up again, running into Ananda, who was coming back down, and said goodbye to him. I left the house before Lizy, and met up with Julio Donat at the top of the path where the car was parked. We spent 10 minutes talking. Then Lizy arrived and we headed off, talking the whole way until we reached the bus station in Granada, where we left him, on his way to Madrid to visit his mother.

ANOTHER RESIDENT OF THE VALLEY

Julio said that the largest of the towns in the Alpujarra, Lanjaron, is a spa whose waters are said to help rheumatism. It’s also a source for bottled water, and as a result, the bottling enterprise is taking water from the irrigation system, to the detriment of the local community. His sister lives in Vancouver, he said—she’s married to a Canadian Chinese who’s a diplomat. I hope he’ll come to California. He knew about Yosemite and other parks.

His other interest is trees, Lizy told me yesterday. In the car, he told us that he studied psychology at the university in Madrid, but then came to the valley a bit before Nuriel—which means that he’s been there for about 30 years.

“My father came to visit a few months before he died,” he said. “That visit was important for me, because he said, after seeing the valley, that he understood why I’d done what I did—choosing to make a life there instead of pursuing work as a psychologist.” He’s acquired all his knowledge of plants since then.

Note: Julio Donat and Anabel Sandoval: A tus plantas, Alpujarra, Asoc. de Mujeres Órgiva, 2006

POSTSCRIPT: CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS

THE DOOR TO LIZY’S ROOM IN THE VALLEY

A J.M. Coetzee review of the work of Italo Svevo (in Coetzee’s Inner Workings1) describes how Svevo, a native of Trieste, benefited from the cosmopolitan nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That rich culture of difference fell apart after World War I, but Illich absorbed it nonetheless, becoming in effect a citizen of the cosmos. Reading Coetzee on Svevo gave me a new appreciation for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is usually dismissed as impotent in the face of everything that confronted it. Yes, probably so, but then that “everything” has proven diabolic. Life was manifestly better for citizens of the cosmos. It being dead, we’ll have to reinvent it—not as an Empire so much as a state of mind.

The valley where Lizy lived is in the orbit of the market and tourist towns that surround it, and connected to the wider world by wireless as well as by mail (delivered to Órgiva). A naturalist like Julio Donat is able to write and publish his book on the medicinal plants of the region locally, and to lead tours that draw people from England and elsewhere. He subsists on the infusions he sells in local markets, and on the income he derives from the spare room attached to his small house. Everyone in the valley who doesn’t have an outside income raises their own vegetables.

It’s a way of life that was lived by Lizy’s grandfather on the outskirts of Miami in the 1930s, when he and his brothers made what cash the family had delivering newspapers, everything else being raised, hunted, or fished.

At a conference on future metropolitan regions held at U.C. Berkeley in 2005, the landscape architect Randy Hester said in passing that “government should limit itself to regions and neighborhoods—focus on them, and everything else will take care of itself.” While recognizing the utopian and also flippant nature of the comment, I think it’s true: regions are typically defined by their ecosystems, while neighborhoods are defined by clusters of people who identity with them and with each other. A city is more arbitrarily defined and its interests are often at odds with its region and its neighborhoods. Cities will deliberately harm the ecosystem in the name of short-term interests. Regions, especially if environmental stewardship is their main responsibility, have a harder time doing so. Neighborhoods, like families, are conservative when it comes to disregarding their own traditions. And yet, like families, they can be remarkably, contradictorily cosmopolitan when they see an evolutionary reason to do so.

Just as, in a marriage that breaks with racial or cultural taboos, the appearance of children mends the generational rift, regionally-beneficent changes to the fabric of a neighborhood that the neighbors themselves

interpret as a favorable evolution will do much more to transform it in the long run than an intervention that bypasses the steps that make this possible. These changes attract favor, not exactly by fitting in, although that’s part of it, but by opening a door to the future that invites people in. Much of what is presented to us as the putative future has an “eat your spinach” quality. Cities nag and scold. Meanwhile, their own hypocrisies are too much in evidence for them to hold much moral authority.

Despite its primitive character, Alpujarra is a product of successive civilizations—the generations of people that terraced the land and then built the elaborate system of channels that brings fresh water to every valley from the melting snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Civilizations come and go, but what is valued regionally is preserved, maintained, and extended locally. Cities once had the knack. The church near where we stayed in Granada, a former mosque adapted to the new order, is an example.

When Lizy was in Berkeley last summer, we talked about the relative “simplicity” of life here. I put the word in quotes because it’s a byproduct of affluence, reflecting how the urban affluent organize their days. In the valley, much more time is spent “subsisting,” but there is still time for reflection. It is possible for a naturalist like Julio Donat to pursue the kind of program of local knowledge that Thoreau pursued in Concord, cataloguing what it in front of him and understanding and documenting its value. This happens here, too, of course, but the connection between nature and naturalist is more tenuous. To put it another way, we don’t think of someone consciously coming to a place in order to master its secrets and then put them to work in a pragmatic manner. There are people who do this, but how often do we encounter them? Thoreau is the great American example, steadily setting his sights on Concord, but without provincialism, the world being alive in Concord, and Concord in turn being alive to the world—at the epicenter, actually, of our nascent, transatlantic culture, its tendrils reaching out to Asia.

A while ago, I started reading Reflexions, a memoir by Richard Olney2, a chef and writer on food and wine who ended his days living on a hillside in the French countryside, “letting the world come to him.” In his case, the tendrils extended across the Atlantic, an admiring network of friends, colleagues, and readers. Planted in the country, Olney remains cosmopolitan. This is also true of Julio Donat, I believe. Born and educated in Madrid, he’s comfortable enough in both settings to move between them easily although he chooses to live in one place, not the other. Being a citizen of the cosmos demands this.

Notes: 1. J.M. Coetzee: “Italo Svevo,” in Inner Workings, Literary Essays 2000-2005, Penguin, 2007, pages 1–14 2. Richard Olney: Reflexions, Brick Tower Press, 2005

THE VALLEY FROM LIZY’S FRONT PORCH

THERE IS NO CRITICISM, ONLY HISTORY MANFREDO TAFURI INTERVIEWED BY RICHARD INGERSOLL Manfredo Tafuri is a prolific author on a wide variety of subjects ranging from 16th-century Venice (L’armonia e I conflitti, coauthored with Antonio Foscari) to more alien topics such as The American City (coauthored with Giorgio Ciucci and Francesco Dal Co). Each of his works serves as a platform for questioning the methods of architectural history, which, as he so emphatically states below, is not to be distinguished from criticism. In Theories and History of Architecture, he identified a major problem of “operative criticism,” endemic to architects who write about architecture. His suggestion to counteract this tendency to impose contemporary standards on the past was to shift the discourse away from the protagonists and individual monuments and consider architecture as an institution. His most widely read book in America, Architecture and Utopia, advanced this position, proposing an ideological analysis of architecture. His disconcerting message for those who had hopes of a “progressive” architecture was that there can be no class architecture which can revolutionize society, but only a class analysis of architecture. In his most recent theoretical work, La sfera e il labirinto, he has outlined a method of history called the progetto storico. This historical project, which is indebted to Michel Foucault’s “archaeologies of knowledge” and Carlo Ginzburg’s “micro-histories,” seeks to study the “totality” of a work, disassembling it in terms of iconology, political economy, philosophy, science, and folklore. His goal is to penetrate the language of architecture through non-linguistic means. At the core he still finds the problem of “the historic role of ideology.” The job of the Tafurian critic-historian is to “reconstruct lucidly the course followed by intellectual labor through modern history and in so doing to recognize the contingent tasks that call for a new organization of labor.” In November, 1985, we interviewed Professor Tafuri on the subject of criticism—Richard Ingersoll

Manfredo Tafuri: There is no such thing as criticism, there is only history. What usually is passed off as criticism, the things you find in architecture magazines, is produced by architects, who frankly are bad historians. As for your concern for what should be the subject of criticism, let me propose that history is not about objects, but instead is about men, about human civilization. What should interest the historian are the cycles of architectural activity and the problem of how a work of architecture fits in its own time. To do otherwise is to impose one’s own way of seeing on architectural history.

What is essential to understanding architecture is the mentality, the mental structure of any given period. The historian’s task is to recreate the cultural context of a work. Take for example a sanctuary dedicated to the cult of the Madonna, built sometimes in the Renaissance. What amazes us is how consistently these buildings have a central plan and an octagonal shape. The form cannot be explained without a knowledge of the religious attitudes of the period and a familiarity with the inheritance from antiquity—a reproposal of the temple form devoted to female divinities. Or take the case of Pope Alexander VII, whose interest in Gothic architecture at the cathedral of Siena [mid-17th century] compared to his patronage of Bernini in Rome can only be explained through a knowledge of the Sienese environment and traditions. The historian must evaluate all the elements that surround a work, all of its margins of involvement; only then can he start to discover the margins of freedom, or creativity, that were possible for either the architect or the sponsor.

The problem is the same for comprehending current work. You ask how the historian might gain the distance from a new work to apply historical methods. Distance is fundamental to history: the historian examining current work must create artificial distance. This cannot be done without a profound knowledge of the times—through the differences we can better understand the present. I’ll give you a simple example: you can tell me with precision the day and year of your birth, and probably the hour. A man of the 16th century would only be able to tell you that he was born about 53 years ago. There is a fundamental difference in the conception of time in our own era: we have the products of mass media that give us instantaneous access to all the information surrounding our lives. Four centuries ago it took a month to learn of the outcome of a battle. An artist in the 15th century had a completely different reference to space-time; every time he moved to a new city (which was very rarely) he would make out his will. In earlier centuries, time was not calculated but was considered to be a gift from God. Knowledge was also considered to be God-given and thus teachers in the Middle Ages could not be paid; only later was their payment justified as a compensation for time. These factors belong to the mental web of another era. The way for us to gain distance from our own times, and thus perspective, is to confront its differences from the past.

One of the greatest problems of our own times is dealing with the uncontrollable acceleration of time, a process that began with 19th-century industrializations; it keeps continually disposing of things in expectation of the future, of the next thing. All avant-garde movements were in fact based on the continual destruction of preceding works in order to go on to something new. Implicit in this is the murder of the future. The program of the “modern” artist was always to anticipate the next thing. It’s just like when you see a “coming attraction” ad for a film, essentially you have already consumed the film and the event of going to see the film is predictably disappointing and makes you anxious for something new.

This anxiety for the future represents a secularization of the Book of the Apocalypse—things only have meaning in relation to the eschatology of their final goal. This is the basic parameter. This continual destruction of the present contributes to the nihilism of our times.

What you would call an “architectural critic” serves as a truffle dog looking for the new to get rid of the old.

Scully is a good example, when he first discovers Louis Kahn and then dumps him to go on to Venturi. For this sort of critic, truly profound work, such as that of Mies, remains “unread” because it does not fit into the scheme of continual destruction.

As to how to select buildings that are worthy of history, it is the problem and not the object that concerns the historian. The works selected are irrelevant on their own and only have meaning in the way they relate to the problem. If you look back to the fifties, you’d see that two of the most published architects were Oscar Niemeyer and Kenzo Tange, architects who have not enjoyed continued prominence in successive histories. They were swept up in the news in an ephemeral notoriety, but this exposure did not assure them a place in history.

The historian has to abandon his prejudices about the quality of the work in order to deal with the problem behind it. The work of Eisenman and Hejduk was much more interesting 10 years ago than it is today because it showed a curious problem of Americans looking to Europe, and what they chose to look at was an “Americanized” Europe—Eisenman’s Terragni is an architecture without human history. Using the theoretical precepts of Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss (rather than the more characteristic American pragmatism), they succeeded in emptying their historic sources of the human subject.

As to the problems of architecture, it is more interesting to note cycles—series of things—rather than individual works of architects. The historic cycle tells us more than stylistic taxonomies. In the US, for instance, the attitudes toward public housing that emerged during the Progressive era under Theodore Roosevelt were regenerated during the New Deal and present a significant cycle for the historian to analyze.

The greatest confusion in the “criticism” of architecture is in fact due to the magazines attached to the profession: architects should do architecture and historians should do history. Can you imagine what would happen if I built a house? Or do you think that Reagan took a copy of Machiavelli (or even something contemporary like Schlesinger) to Geneva—impossible, he just acts, and this is also what the architect should do.

The study of history has indirect ways of influencing action. If an architect needs to read to understand where he is, he is without a doubt a bad architect! I frankly don’t see the importance of pushing theory into practice; instead, to me, it is the conflict of things that is important, that is productive. I don’t see it as being prophetic, but what I was saying 15 years ago in Architecture and Utopia has become a fairly standard analysis: there are no more utopias, the architecture of commitment, which tried to engage us politically and socially, is finished, and what is left to pursue is empty architecture. Thus an architect today is forced to either be great or be a nonentity. I really don’t see this as the “failure of Modern architecture”; we must look instead at what an architect could do when certain things were not possible, and what he could do when they were possible. This is why I insist on the late work of Le Corbusier, which had no longer any message to impose on humanity. And as I have been trying to make clear in talking about historical context: no one can determine the future.

Until recently history has been conceived of as Universal History, which had a finite sequence from beginning to end. There was always a goal to history, inherited from millenarian thought, and this remained with historians as they moved from hermeneutic history based on the interpretation of sacred texts to a history based on human action. The desire to understand life according to a final outcome necessarily led to a causal way of thinking, evident even in someone as modern as Benedetto Croce, who considered history as the history of freedom. If we

look at it, however, as the continual exposure to the unexpected instead of seeking causes, we get a different history, one that presents concatenations rather than causes. Instead of a linear history, we get a history with a hole in the middle.

To live in the world today is to live in a state of constant anxiety. Look at the minor architects, the unfamous ones who a decade ago would have been content putting up curtain-walled boxes. They now feel obliged to inject symbolism into their work: a pseudo-temple on top and an Italian piazza below—thanks to Jencks’s and Portoghesi’s “recovery of history.” All of this is being done from the point of view of publicity and exercised just like advertising. History has been reduced to fashion and understood in the way Walt Disney understands it— Venturi, who thinks he is being ironic, actually ends up more like Mickey Mouse.

But let’s step outside these judgments on matters of taste to examine the problem underneath, the sense of insecurity so common in our world. Gone are the certitudes. Just as a child discovers the truth about Santa Claus, we find ourselves confronting the great “truths” about the world. Phillipe Ariès in his excellent history of death (The Hour of Our Death) shows the change in attitude toward death during the late Middle Ages after the invention of Purgatory. The certainty of leaving one life for a better one was suddenly thrown into crisis, and from that time on we can observe humanity’s hopeless struggle to eliminate death. Along with this uncertainty comes a nostalgic search for a center, thus in our times we see the return of the pope in Italy and the triumph of Reagan in America. In architecture, we might see Graves like Vignola in the 16th century, not having the talent or the courage to really design. But even the work of a good architect, such as Stirling, shows this problem of the search for the center.

The mass of architects shouldn’t worry, they should just do architecture. If we take two theorists who are currently enjoying a revival, Loos and Tessenow, the latter especially advised never to insist on invention but rather on production. One should refine a few elements to perfection as a good craftsman. In our times, Richard Meier does this, he is a good craftsman. The avant-garde oriented architects are infused with some sort of mysticism awaiting an ultimate epiphany, a final word—but the word already exists, they just are unable to hear it.

Contemporary architects are heirs to an enormous effort of liberation, yet is often appears that they would prefer that the liberation had not yet occurred so that they might repeat the process.

The time of connections (collegamenti) is over. Knowledge seen as analogy is no longer valid. The correspondences that were considered capable of linking microcosm to macrocosm (i.e., treating the headache as a storm in the head), this system of concordia-discors gave way because it could no longer alleviate man’s anxiety.

Even our great 19th-century minds—Nietzsche, Marx, Freud—retained some millennial thinking when they proposed the possibility of a better time by bringing us to the limits of our own existence. Building on their knowledge, we can only try to live more completely—if we really are resolved to eliminate anxiety, then we would realize that history serves to dispel nostalgia, not inspire it.

There is no criticism, only history, an interview with Manfredo Tafuri conducted in Italian by Richard Ingersoll and translated by him into English, appeared in Design Book Review, no. 9, spring 1986, pages 8–11.

COMMON PLACE Notes and commentary on Granada and Alpujarra Š 2009 by John Parman; interview with Mandredo Tafuri Š 1986 by Richard Ingersoll and Design Book Review Credits: Cover photo and others of Alpujarra and Granada by John Parman. Website: http://complace.j2parman.com Contact: j2parman@yahoo.com

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