Matter and Mode
A blog, focused on buildings, the title of which comes from an essay by Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aims of Fiction,” in which she makes this compelling observation:
“It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see.”
So I try to be concrete.
Visit it here: tculvahouse.tumblr.com.
Or, you can take a look at the individual posts:
“On Landsdowne Crescent“: the doorway as the beginning of ornament
“Virtual Reality at Keble College,” on William Butterfield’s fancy brickwork
“Indelible Shadows“: Frank Lloyd Wright and Zorro
“Relativity and Rococo,” on Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower
“Preface to Kahn,” on something he said about stair landings
“Exeter Corrected?“: the first of several posts having to do with windows
“A Cozy Monumentality“: more on the Exeter Library
“More on Windows,” with Jim Jarmusch
“Front Door, Back Door,” at the Villa Snellman
“Learning How Big Things Are” and why that’s important
“Remembering Saarinen” in Columbus, Indiana
“Windows Frame“: an observation from the Grand Canal
“Thinking Windows“: Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art
“On Snow,” and the window in Louis MacNiece’s poem
“Warped“: two houses, Providence and London
“The Moving Window Writes“: Traquair House
“Yet Again By the Pacific,” from a weekend at The Sea Ranch
“Boxwood and Brick“: Jefferson’s serpentine walls
“The Same, and Different,” from my master’s thesis
“A Mystery of Time“: the Swarthmore amphitheater
“City Car“: the Citroën DCV
“Continuity and Character“: more about the surfaces of cars
“Fronts and Backs” at the Royal Crescent
“Approaching Jackson Square“: the recursive city
“A Place with No Backs“: the TVA
“An Eye On the Street?“: a simple house in Berkeley
“The Evolution of Housing in America, 1878-2021,” on that monstrosity proposed for UC Santa Barbara
“Facts“: Luigi Pirandello and the Kimbell Art Museum
Impossible City: New Orleans
(Places, June 2017)
“I don’t suppose any city in North America has been parsed so thoroughly in the last dozen years as has New Orleans. Before the failed levees drowned it in brackish water and press coverage and architectural competitions, the city was largely a mystery to anyone who hadn’t been there, and to most people who had. Now we are inundated with studies and proposals, paeans and diatribes, portraits and dramatizations, Treme and NCIS. We might even imagine we have the full picture of New Orleans. But of course that’s not true.” Reflections on photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Read more.
Beyond Dangerous Waters
(Places, April 2015)
“Just on its own, Micah Cash’s photograph, ‘Pickwick Landing, Downstream,’ offers plenty to ponder. Sober harmonies of hue and tone and texture. Rust cracking the enamel of modernity. A sign ruled for an absent message. A frame within a frame, a view blocked, a working landscape classicized. You needn’t have been to Tennessee.
“But I have been to Tennessee, grew up there, in fact. I learned to swim in Watts Bar Lake, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the TVA reservations, so I can tell you something else about ‘Pickwick Landing, Downstream’: I can tell you why the back of a sign is something to take a picture of.”