Do Not Tip or Rock

Some of you may remember Lore Sjoberg's Book of Ratings.

Who am i kidding, none of you remember the Book of Ratings. But it's hilarious. In lieu of a normal post, i thought i'd run something similar, only not purposefully for the sake of humour.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

The Statue of Liberty

The Oracle informs me that the proper title for the Statue of Liberty is Liberty Enlightening the World, which is a much more unique name. I also appreciate how the symbol of American freedom was a gift from the French (which is fitting, really, considering the American Revolutionary War). It's a shame that the symbolism of it is so inaccessible, though. The seven-pointed crown is simple enough (the seven continents/seas), but the rest is lost to that monstrous large podium (she's apparently stepping forward, trampling shackles with her left foot). And the tour guides don't seem prone to explain that either. Maybe i just had a poor tour guide. Even so, there's something about gigantic port-city statues that just makes me feel proud to be an American. Or Dodecanese (also a World Heritage Site). It's hard to say. B-


Cathédrale Notre Dame de Chartres

Our Lady of Notre Dame in Chartres gains bonus points for having its own
groupie distinct from the religion for which the cathedral was built in the first place. Like a lot of Gothic cathedrals, the stained glass and haut-reliefs depict parables from the Bible, which is super boring if you don't know what the story is, and incredibly cool if you do. Luckily, Chartres has a groupie, er...historian to tell you what each one is about. This particular Notre Dame has a rich history (as any building taking 400 years to build ought to); normally i'd link you for more information here, since i just hinted at it, but the internet is failing to produce any legitimate information on this one. The best part about Notre Dame de Chartres is that it introduced and popularized the flying buttress. I have a fond spot in my heart for flying buttresses. Not only do most people love to say the phrase, not having any idea what they are, but if you tried to use them today your architecture prof from back in school would probably hunt you down and rip up your license. A-


Galápagos Islands

I apparently almost fell out of the boat on the way to the Galápagos Islands as an infant. Maybe it was some other island offshore South America, i can't remember -- all i have to go on are stories my parents told me. I've got nothing against the islands themselves, but because it's not an architectural site (and this is an architecture blog, remember?) and due to my near brush with becoming one of the many endemic species there, i have trouble giving this one high marks. D+

EDIT: Turns out i actually almost died on the way to Isla de los Lobos, not the Galápagos. Incidentally, there's also an Isla de los Lobos in the Beagle Channel near the Tierra del Fuego. The channel is named after the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin's ship -- the same voyage which took him to the Galápagos and about which the book of the same name was written. That's such a good Connection that i ought to send it to James Burke.

The Great Wall (of China)

The Great Wall of China, for all its awesome (in the true meaning of the word) size, is really sort of a disappointing story. Against all logical prediction, it actually worked a couple times, which i guess makes the millions of Chinese who died to build it worth the cost? Ok, probably not. Plus, you can't even see it from the moon, and not even well from low-earth orbit. But it's hard to be harsh on four thousand miles of wall. "Well, we can't cross here. Want to go around?" "Nah, i have to be back home sometime in the next five years or the missus will have my hide." The Great Wall took even LONGER to build than the above Notre Dame, and versions of it were used for over two thousand years. Big startup cost, but that's good, sustainable architecture right there (sort of). That Great Wall sure isn't contributing to rising gas prices, anyway. B


Chichen Itza

I don't know very much about
Chichen Itza aside from what i learned from Mayaquest, which taught me that it's much more difficult to bike on a computer than it is in real life. That's not entirely true, i actually do some research on these posts, i just don't have a whole lot to say about it right now. I do remember, however, that Chichen Itza was the home of the Great Ball Court. I hope this is how people hundreds of years from now will remember America's current great cities: Los Angeles, home to the American Gladiators arena! Plus, the game played on the Great Ball Court involves mythology of gods using each others' heads as balls. That's hardcore.
There's actually a lot of really neat stuff about Chichen Itza, but because it's in ruins its score drops a bit to an A-

That Damon's

I passed the Damon's i wrote about earlier the other day. It's not off exit 110, i realized. Does that make me a little bit like James Frey? I hope not, his fictions were somehow more dishonest, maybe because they changed the fundamental meaning of the anecdote (or so i'm told).

Anyway, it's a Hall of Fame Cafe, and the building has undergone dramatic renovations/additions (several years ago, actually). I hardly even recognized it when i made a point to look at it carefully. I guess it's true what they say about leaving home: once you've left, you can never come back.

It's funny how that works. Of course, even buildings that haven't changed more than their marquee don't quite seem the same as when we used to frequent them, years later. I visited one of the elementary schools i went to not too long ago. If you've done the same, you've heard these words sung before; the halls, once unspectacular, seemed claustrophobic and low. The teaching rooms are tiny and even the gym is hardly more than a glorified garage. It's hard to stomach, but we know the building hasn't changed, we have. As Dantès might say, kings to nostalgia, right?

But i bring this up to challenge the limits of architecture's power. An architect built the school, surely, and that architecture may have influenced my education. How, i'd be hard pressed to say, but i can say things about the layout of the school that might have been different in another plan. The halls formed an H with a double crossbar, with one leg The Office. There's no courtyard in the middle though, just the gym and the cafeteria. We were lucky to have them separate in elementary school -- when i went to middle school we had to make due with our Cafe-tor-nasium.

In front of The Office was The Bench. You sat on The Bench to await your judgment from the principal, who (along with calling your parents, i suppose) would often cast down your doom, in the ancient sense of the word: more sitting on The Bench. I rarely invoked such harsh punishment, but The Bench commanded a respect no mere furniture should ever have of a small child. The parking lot was just outside the door by the principal's seat of power, but even after school we would rather stand by the door than sit and wait on The Bench. People would think you'd gotten in trouble.

I never had cause to venture across to the far side of the H, that was for the younger children, but it was a mirror image of the near side. The hallways were single loaded in a manner of speaking, since the gym and the cafeteria took up the entire other side and were accessed by the "crossbars" as i called them above. A straight shot down the hallway from The Office would bring you to the playground doors. Facing that direction down the hallway was certainly exciting.

I reminisce all this because despite all the physical memories i have of the place, none of them are memorable for themselves. They simply remind of a time past, a state of mind, a childhood friendship, an adventure braved. The architecture didn't do that for me. I don't care for this phenomenological outlook that the structure of the place invoked a chosen pattern of thought. My teachers, my friends, they structured my growth at that school.

Or am i metaphorically choosing between walking towards the office instead of the playground? Over a decade later, i hope it's not that insidious.

But damn, if that isn't convincing imagery. I think the difference is intent. We have to remember, always remember that our creations will affect the lives of untold strangers...in ways we cannot possibly hope to control. And if we can't bend our phenomenological impact to our respective wills, how can we possibly hope to be responsible about it?

I could do worse for metaphorical imagery regarding nostalgia, though. There's the whole adage about standing in the same river twice (and how you can't). Browse some forums about that one if you want to read some truly moronic web-rats that have managed to crawl away from YouTube commenting for thirteen seconds. Still, i felt a stranger upon returning to the school. It's the same physically, but it's not the place i once spent my days, not anymore. That's why i take phenomenology with a grain of salt. That Damon's, though -- it was arbitrarily chosen, once. It had no attached memories, aside from sight/site-memory. Now that it has changed appearances, it has no meaning to me anymore. No architect could have planned for that.

A Letter to Ann Pelo

EDIT: I should preface this by saying that i really did appreciate the article. I think it's wonderfully thought-provoking and a fascinating subject. Don't read my rebuttal without reading the article first.

I stumbled across your article "Why We Banned Legos" recently, and i have to say, it bothered me somewhat. I'm not disagreeing with the original assessment that there may have been some disparity in the "fair use" of the Legos between the older and younger children, but the solution seems to me rather socialist and frankly, boring. In particular, i take offense to the statement near the end of the article, "All structures will be standard sizes."

Let me back up a few steps to explain myself better. The whole experiment is supposedly about "exploring power, ownership, and equity" but it seems to me that all you've done is restructured the location of power from the older children to yourselves (the teachers). This may not, in itself, be a bad thing. It certainly allows you to encourage a more "fair" use of the Legos; inasmuch as fair means "equal access to materials." Thus far, i have absolutely no objections. I fully support the opportunity for all the children to create as they will. With one caveat -- the "group of eight children that conceived and launched Legotown" invested time and effort to begin a project -- intellectual capital, if you will. After Legotown's initial destruction, though, this investment was stripped from them and given to the rest of the class. Hardly fair, considering that the rest of the class did not contribute to its original construction.

This is socialism, pure and unfiltered (value judgments aside, it most certainly is). In theory, this should benefit the entire community, but in practice it disenfranchises the students who were entrepreneurial enough to begin something new in your school. In time, given enough similar cues, they will conclude that it is unproductive to invest time and energy into ideas that they themselves will not benefit from, preferring instead to reap the benefits of the work of others. In Sweden, following the economic crisis of the 1990s resultant of this type of policy, this schema played out to its eventual conclusion: total political reform. When less than 30% of the general population showed up to work on any given day, changes needed to be made.

Equality cannot be forced. Some people are smarter than others, more attractive, more driven to succeed. In the case of your students, some are more interested in Legos than others. I support equal access to the Legos. What i don't support is governmentalized rationing of those Legos. "We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces" says the article. Why should this be? Are there so few Legos that none are left over with 15 or 28 pieces each? Some Lego pieces are larger than others -- is it still one piece if it's a 2x4 block (verse a 1x2 block)? Are "cool pieces" worth more than one block, and can each student have only a limited number of "cool pieces?" These are subjective questions, and the disagreements about worth are simply another form of power brokering no different from the original paradigm. Moreover, why should the houses be standard sizes, especially considering the newly instituted system of 'all public buildings'? Should not the school be larger than a single-family home, perhaps constructed by more than one student?
Diversity is inequality. If one student who plays with the Legos daily happens to have amassed a larger quantity of blocks (and thus, for example, a larger house) it might inspire another student to expand his own house in inventive and unique ways. If his quota of blocks disallows such innovation, though, his creativity has been effectively quashed.

The point is, not only has this new method failed to create an equal power structure, but it has furthermore limited the creative power the Legos granted the students in the first place. In my opinion, anyway; i can only conjecture from my exterior position.