During my individual tutorial I was recommended to watch a lecture video titled “the sympathy of things; Ruskin and the ecology of design” by Lars Spuybroek, below are the notes that I accumulated from watching the lecture. Lars has developed very far and very fast from the digital, he’s been liberated, powered and sent on a new journey within his self and work. Ruskin gave lars a sense of fresh air and a new perspective.
“as art changes, the world changes”
” art can be divided into classical and non classical and I believe you learn a lot when you do that”
Lars has developed very far and very fast from the digital, he’s been liberated, powered and sent on a new journey within his self and work. Ruskin gave lars a sense of fresh air and a new perspective. Gothic has always been a failed classicism, trying hard but not getting it right, as a political dimension it is very important in British history. Lars created the gothic digital which was incredibly unlikely but also convincing.
“the radical middle”
In the first chapter, the lecture tries to rearticulate Ruskings thinking, states that the nature of gothic seems closer to flamboyance than original gothic. When someone discusses Ruskin in a positive way, it is usually based on the ethics notion of “savageness”. The six characteristics of this are changefulness, savageness, rigidity, naturalism, grotesqueness and redundancy.
“For digital designers I would say the ideas of savageness and changefulness are expressed in craft and design”
“Ruskin doesn’t mean taking rural design and making great craft, there is some kind of relationship between craft and design, the craft is IN the design”
In Ruskin’s notion of the gothic, he states that all members are active members and are informed within the work, throughout the work they are able to “find each other” and that is what leads to the craft and execution of the artwork.
Is the gothic a much more successful form of digital architecture?
The lecture goes on to state that the gothic takes two things, one being the “notion of the thing of the Greek”, as well as the “partibility of the form of the Baroque”. The speakers theory was that gothic has a double notion, making it a much finer art than others, as well as stating that the notion of activity makes the art very political from the get go. Normally with art, it consists of elements and sub elements, but that does not happen with gothic art and architecture, the speaker states that this specific type of art is made of multiple single sub elements rather than an overall general element. This causing dozens of different types of interactions.
“architecture as a form of fragility”
OVERALL THOUGHTS ON THE LECTURE: Generally, I find lectures very hard to grasp, I found the individual talking in the lecture quite hard to understand as he was speaking very formally and my vocabulary isn’t one of great depth. however, I did notice and pick up some very interesting facts about gothic and architecture as an art movement and I believe some of these facts will stick with me throughout this semester, thus helping me with my project as a whole.