Architext

The Prelude

2025-11-20T19:22:00.000-05:00

This was supposed to be the day of my brother’s concert. Instead, I was trying to figure out how a fish ends up on the sidewalk. One moment I was waiting while Agong walked his second lap around the park. The next, I was in the emergency room. Later they explained: I’d rolled backward down a slope in my wheelchair, dropped over the curb, and hit the pavement. A little girl had seen it. The gash in my head was from the impact. The wheelchair was found pinned under my knees. I remembered none of it. With Alzheimer’s, you rely on other people’s memories.

My son was there, on my right. He had just driven up from New York. My daughter and Agong were sent out—policy, only one visitor per patient. I apologized, of course. I’m always apologizing. Sorry for the inconvenience. Sorry to have fallen on concert day. My son shrugged. He said we could watch the Red Sox.

It was one o’clock. Then it was three. Middle of the eighth, the Red Sox were losing 2–1. The brace hurt more and more. I kept asking the nurses to take it off. I forgot I had already asked. They repeated their line: no, not until the fracture is ruled out. A fractured neck without a brace can lead to paralysis. Fine. Meanwhile, I kept asking.

Eventually they rolled me into the CT machine. Five minutes. Then we waited an hour for the radiologist. No fractures in the spine. The brace came off. Relief. Brief relief. Then another hour for him to look at my hip X-rays. The absurd part was that I had been walking back and forth to the bathroom the whole time. Obviously my hip was functional. But common sense has no visiting rights in the emergency room.

I asked to be discharged. The nurse shook her head: potassium too high. I had just had dialysis yesterday. It never ends. If doctors knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t be here. Their prescriptions destroyed my kidneys. Now I rely on dialysis three times a week. The doctor responsible died during early in the COVID pandemic. Convenient. No scapegoat. Or maybe that’s the point—they know exactly what they’re doing. Billing, testing, covering themselves. A medieval torture chamber of jabs, braces, X-rays. The worst torture is the waiting.

Again I asked: can I leave now? Please? My brother is playing downtown. More blood drawn. My son muttered that radiologists will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. Instant scans, no waiting. He set a deadline: six o’clock, we break from the jail. We need to go to the concert.

In the center of the ward the doctors and nurses gathered behind their computers. They had a clear view of us, and we of them. A kind of zoo, but reversed. I thought they had forgotten my hip films and walked over. They told me to sit. Always: sit, wait, we’ll let you know.

Eventually I did make it to the concert. I wore a hat to cover the staple that closed the gash on my head. I asked my son if this would look ridiculous and he said, no you’ll look like Georgia O’Keefe. Jordan Hall, under the balcony. The light there is dim, and you can hear the creak of the old wood when people shift in their seats. My brother walked out, bowed quickly, and sat at the piano for the encore. He played Chopin’s Prelude 13.

The sound was clear, almost severe, and yet it felt like a letter that had been sent long ago and finally arrived. A message from 1835, traveling through his fingers, through our parents’ DNA, through me. I thought: the egg my brother came from was already in my mother’s body in 1918. Now it is 2025. The time lines don’t match, but they overlap. Chopin, 1835. My mother, 1918. My brother, and me.

The Prelude itself was written during Chopin’s stay in Majorca with George Sand. The whole set of twenty-four carries different moods—storms, prayers, fragments of weather. No. 13 is not stormy. It is calm, lyrical, something like a private thought said aloud. A pause in the middle of difficulty. My brother played it that way. The sound entered me, steady and unhurried, as if nothing had happened.

Fish Tale

2025-08-03T01:09:00.000-04:00

I was asleep on the couch when my son woke me. “Mommy’s choking on a fishbone.” In the background I hear loud hacking sounds. I go to the kitchen half-conscious and see my wife eating mouthfuls of bread, then spoons of olive oil, gagging desperately to dislodge the bone.

I pressed her tongue down with a spoon and tried to play hero doctor hoping to see bone to extract it. I couldn’t find the bone. Now she started coughing up blood but said she would wait for urgent care the next morning to avoid the emergency room wait.

There’s a weird vow echoing in the back of my head. That classic: Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish… in sickness and in health and fish bones too?

Yes.

I do.

Then I went back to sleep.

⸻

She woke me again around 3-ish. Maybe later. Poked me in the ribs—not lovingly—and said she thought she needed to go to the ER. This was after she’d fallen down a internet search rabbit hole and diagnosed herself with something called an esophageal perforation, which apparently has like a 20% fatality rate unless promptly treated by people wearing white coats and gloves and not an architect with no medical training in fruit of the loom underwear. I asked if she wanted me to come, not because I didn’t want to (I did) but because our marriage has its own strange rhythm of wounded independence and deferred togetherness and I wasn’t sure if she wanted help or just wanted to be the martyr who braves triage alone. But she said yes.

On the way she reminded me—not without heat, of my shoddy medical companion track record… that I once ate a tuna fish sandwich during the birth of our first son and that I almost missed our second son’s actual crowning moment because I’d gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a missing flan that I had ordered. She did not find this amusing and warned me to behave.

We cabbed it to Roosevelt Hospital, which I told her is a hospital with the weird claim to fame of being the place John Lennon was taken after being shot. I know this because I know things like this and absolutely no one ever needs to hear them. I did not tell her that the doctor supposedly pumped Lennon’s heart manually for 20 minutes while Yoko Ono screamed down the hallway and “All My Loving” played somewhere over the loudspeakers.

Admissions: metal detector, NYPD cops milling around, the usual ER panorama of disarray—stretchers, track-marked arms, incoherent yelling, that one guy whose bloody face looks like it lost a bet with gravity.

Miracle of miracles: we got in to the treatment area in 10 minutes.

Now the real waiting began. Vitals, triage, fluorescent lighting that somehow makes everyone’s soul look gray. She sat stiffly on a hospital bed with a Rorschach-shaped stain on the sheet that could’ve been rust or blood or god knows what. I lay down beside her fully clothed and in my winter coat, hood up, looking either homeless or deeply disturbed… my body was contorted and my legs half dangled off the inclined hospital bed so as to avoid the stain on the sheets. I promptly fell asleep again like the world’s worst emotional support animal.

⸻

Woken by a med student. Very young. Possibly not old enough to rent a car. He asked what the pain felt like on a scale of 1 to 10. She said 7. For reference, I’m assuming childbirth is a 10. My own pain threshold, it must be said, is somewhere around 2. I can tolerate stubbing a toe on coffee table and whimpering for an hour.

This med student peered into her mouth and saw nothing, but mentioned the possibility of a CAT scan to rule out the nightmare scenario of an esophageal rupture, which is the kind of thing that can lead to death via mediastinitis.

They wheeled her off, and I stayed behind in the bed again, now fully resigned to the idea that I might be lying in someone else’s dried trauma. And yet I slept.

They returned. They saw the bone. No perforation. A resident noted her tongue was, quote, “large,” which vindicated my failed attempt to fish out the bone.

Then at 7:30 a.m., in comes the ENT. This guy’s got a portable monitor with a long fiber optic cable, and the kind of bedside confidence that makes you trust him even though he looks 32. He tells her to gargle this anesthetic and not to swallow it, and the way she gargled—loud, comic, primal—made me laugh for the first time all night. She almost choked again just from that. The gargle broke the whole sterile hush of the place.

Camera goes up the nose. Down the throat. Monitor shows the epiglottis, then blood, then the Bone: long, pointed, impaled vertically in the soft pink folds like a miniature medieval Excalibur sword waiting for the right knight to release it. The ENT knight retrieves it with tweezers and drops it dramatically into a dish like a magician producing the card you picked.

“What kind of fish?” he asks.

“Dorado,” she says.

⸻

Forty-five more minutes waiting for discharge. Now I became useful. I started flagging down nurses with my trademark polite-desperate energy. I tracked down the elusive discharge RN. Got the papers. Freedom at last. If it weren’t for me we would’ve been sequestered there another 5 hours.

We walked home in the morning light, which was golden and beautiful. She was exhausted but okay. I was still in my winter coat. The fishbone sat god knows where, possibly now a teaching specimen, or in the trash. A week ago it was swimming in the ocean minding its own business.

The Art of Fugue in Tibet (or, What Happens When the Lights Go Out in the Middle of Bach’s Last Breath)

2025-07-20T19:52:00.002-04:00

Contrapunctus 14, the last movement of Bach’s Art of Fugue ends abruptly. Bach literally died while writing it. In his original manuscript, the notes stop and are followed by a message in Bach’s son’s, Carl Phillip’s, handwriting who was in charge of transcribing his father’s musical ideas onto paper as Bach battled blindness in old age:

“Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contra-subject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.”

Translated into English, it means:

“At this point in the fugue, where the name B-A-C-H appears in the countersubject, the composer died.”

The rest of the score is blank. Empty hand drawn staves extend to the bottom of the page.

Theoretically, a score is just symbols. Ink scratches on paper. Without a performer, it lies inert. But when a musician conjures Bach they’re not just reading - they’re channeling. They’re breathing life into a set of instructions written by someone who is no longer here. They align their body, their breath with someone else’s mind, often across a gulf of centuries and culture. The composer is dead; the music is not. And the performer’s job is to bring that ghost back into the room.

And when the musical seance is done well—you can feel it. The room changes. Time and space warp a little. It’s not just you hearing something—it’s you being in the presence of someone.

J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge—The Art of Fugue—a kind of farewell note… the musical equivalent of a man drawing a mandala on his deathbed and then leaving the last corner blank, mid-stroke, hand arrested in air. The final movement, Contrapunctus XIV, trails off mid-line. No final cadence, no ritardando, no D minor chord to finish. Just gone.

And here’s the part that will sound like a parable even though it isn’t one.

We were in Tibet. My sister was slated to play Art of Fugue in concert and I had the role of page turner. We were told the electricity might go out. This was presented with the same matter-of-factness as “the restrooms are down the hall to the left.” Something about rotating power grids, something about rationing, something something elevation and batteries. So I brought a flashlight.

Now imagine this: my sister onstage playing the 90-minute sequence of fugues and canons, each one built like a crystalline scaffold of pure intellect, themes folded into themselves like those snakes that swallow their own tails. There’s no tempo markings. No instrumentation instructions. Bach left it like a musical koan: interpret this how you will. Solve this labyrinth if you dare.

About halfway in, right during the triple fugue—this is the one that eventually spells out B-A-C-H (in German notation: B♭–A–C–B♮), a kind of contrapuntal signature, an audio fingerprint folded inside the fugue—the lights go out.

And not like a flicker. Total. Gone. The hall is in sudden full blackout. You could hear people, shuffle. My sister, maybe not seeing but somehow sensing, doesn’t skip a beat. She keeps playing. Unfazed. The music continues—disembodied, a sonic ghost in total darkness. And I, from her side , flick the flashlight on. Only the sheet music glows now. A small cone of light in the sea of darkness.

I turned the pages.

And for the next 30 minutes, we are in this dimension of negative space—black on black, notes bouncing around in near darkness—and the audience, who cannot see her, only hear her leading the musical odyssey. Everyone’s sense of hearing is heightened with nearly all visual distractions removed.

And then we reach the end.

Except—there is no end. The music stops. No resolution. No closure. It breaks off in the middle of the third subject, right as the B-A-C-H motif returns. And the story goes that Bach died while writing it. Like literally expired with the quill still raised.

And I click off the flashlight. The hall went from dimly haunted to utter black.

No one claps. Not right away.

Because we all know something had happened. Like we’d glimpsed the ghost inside the notation. The unfinished fugue—the final fugue that loops on itself, that encodes the composer’s name inside itself and then vanishes—had been played in the dark. And the only thing illuminating it had been this tiny cone of light, aimed not at the player but at the pages. The score. The artifact. The trace.

I think that’s when I understood what a musical performance could be. Or at least, what this piece is. It’s a mirror Bach left for us with his dying breath. And because he couldn’t finish it, we have to finish it. Not musically—I mean spiritually. Interpret that however you want. Just bring a flashlight.

Cultural Iceberg, Japanese Houses, and the Grammar of the Unseen

2025-05-05T20:26:00.000-04:00

I. The Iceberg Cometh

So there’s this diagram that shows up in freshman sociology classes that represents “culture” as an iceberg. You know the one. The tip above water, visible, shiny, obvious: language, food, architecture, fashion, and maybe pop music. And then this enormous, dark mysterious icy base of values, belief systems, social norms, etc.—all of which, while unseen, form the basis of the visible stuff.

If this seems a little too simplistic —i.e. the seen vs. the unseen, the iceberg model gets at something interesting: that what we build (materially, aesthetically, spatially) is conditioned by what we believe but don’t talk about. Architecture—despite being entirely physical, public, and experiential—is one of the most invisibly ideological expressions of a culture.

Enter: the Japanese house.

II. A Room Made of Air

The classic Japanese house—the kind Western architects copied and idolized in the 19th and 20th centuries, all sparse lines and wood joinery and the philosophical seduction of absence—is not “minimalist”. That’s the iceberg talking. The surface reads as “minimal,” especially from the perspective of an observer stuck in an overstuffed, over-ornamented Victorian house, but underneath the waterline is a whole system of aesthetics, ethics, that make the visual minimalism of the Japanese house not so much a style as a consequence.

There’s ma, for instance. Often translated as “negative space” or “interval,” but it’s more than that—it’s about the charged nothingness between things, the idea that absence is as meaningful as presence. The idea that what isn’t there is at least as important as what is. That the gap between tatami mats or the pause in a musical phrase or the shadow under a shoji screen is not just empty but filled with a kind of silent, participatory significance.

Western aesthetics focuses on things. Matter. Presence. Function. Even our spiritual architecture, cathedrals and temples and so on, are often designed to awe via accumulation: more light, more stone, higher ceilings, more iconography per square inch. The Japanese house, by contrast, awes by subtraction. By revealing how little is necessary to suggest infinity.

What’s fascinating—iceberg-wise—is that this aesthetic of subtraction is not simply a matter of taste. It’s rooted in centuries of cultural assumptions: about impermanence (wabi-sabi), about humility, about the body’s relationship to space, about the seasonal nature of existence, about death.

A room without furniture, in other words, is not “empty.” It is full of cultural code.

III. On Floors That Speak

Let’s talk about the floor, which is not just a surface you walk on. In Japanese homes, you remove your shoes at the entrance (genkan), transitioning from the contaminated outside to the purified interior. Your bare feet are now in physical contact with the home itself—specifically, with tatami: soft, fibrous mats made of rice straw, precisely measured and arranged in accordance with a grid that regulates the entire architecture of the house.

Pause here. This is already iceberg-rich. To have a floor that you touch—intimately, bodily, barefootedly—implies a whole worldview. The Western house (particularly in colder climates) historically keeps the feet insulated through shoes, socks, or carpet. It is made for the standing. The Japanese house presumes that you will be on the floor—sitting, reclining, sleeping, eating. The body’s relationship to architecture is horizontal, grounded, low.

And this architectural posture in turn conditions behavior: you move differently. You don’t barge into rooms; you slide. You don’t plop down on a couch; you kneel or sit cross-legged. The architecture enforces a kind of spatial humility, an awareness of gravity and balance that you don’t get in spaces designed for standers.

Also: the tatami is standardized—one mat is roughly 0.9m x 1.8m. The modularity of tatami defines the size of rooms, which affects the social choreography of those rooms: how many people can sit, how they face one another, what kind of ceremony (tea, mourning, negotiation, gossip) can unfold.

This is part of the iceberg, too: the unseen relational codes that determine spatial logic. 2 tatami rooms are for storage, 3 tatami for 2nd bedrooms, 4.5 tatami rooms are for tea, 6 tatami for living room. The number of tatami in a room defines activities with unspoken rules.

IV. Screens, Walls, and Ontological Modesty

If you come from a Western tradition, you probably think of a wall as something solid. Protective. Load-bearing. Permanent. The wall is the thing that divides space, creates privacy, sets up boundaries between self and other, me and you, inside and outside.

But in the Japanese house, walls are often paper. Or wood lattice with translucent paper—shoji. Or sliding doors—fusuma. In any case, they’re movable. Impermanent. Suggestive rather than declarative. They do not announce “this is a room” so much as hint 「とりあえず、ここは部屋にできる。」 or “this could be a room, for now.”

This mobility of boundaries signals a radically different approach to space which is ephemeral and in flux. The shoji can be slid open to make one big room, then closed to make two smaller rooms. The house adapts to context: season, guest, occasion. The architecture is not a fixed structure but a dynamic participant in human life.

Which suspiciously sounds almost like a Buddhist insight about impermanence dressed up as carpentry.

Again: what’s visible—the delicate sliding screen—is merely the detail of an entire submerged belief system. That belief system doesn’t show up on a blueprint. But it determines everything.

V. On Silence, Shadows, and the Aesthetic of Restraint

If you read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows—you get a 20th-century lament for the vanishing beauty of the traditional Japanese interior: dim, smoky, oblique, composed of shadows rather than light. The Western mind, says Tanizaki, wants brightness and clarity. The Japanese mind wants depth and diffusion.

And this aesthetic isn’t arbitrary. It’s moral. For Tanizaki, the soft glow of lacquer in candlelight or the quiet patina of a tarnished metal bowl is not just pretty—it’s ethically right. Because it aligns with a worldview that values restraint, imperfection, modesty, quiet. A worldview in which light can be vulgar, excessive, a kind of visual violence.

Again: iceberg. The visible aesthetics of shadow and restraint emerge from invisible values—about humility, about aging, about the sacredness of the ordinary. The Western obsession with clarity, transparency, and light is not universal. It is the tip of our iceberg.

VI. The House as Hypothesis

So what happens when you try to live in a Japanese house as a non-Japanese person? What iceberg are you standing on, and can it support you?

Many modern architects—especially Western ones—have tried to import the Japanese house wholesale. They go nuts for the clean lines, the absence of clutter, the seamless indoor-outdoor transitions. But often they miss the substructure. They replicate the form without the function, the look without the ontology.

A glass box with a tatami mat is not a Japanese house.

The Japanese house is not a product. It is a hypothesis: about how life should be lived. What kind of time you’re in. How your body should move. What silence means. Where your gaze should fall. What materials you trust. How much of yourself you should assert.

And unless you inhabit the entire cultural logic beneath it, the form can’t fully function.

Which is why the iceberg is such a useful metaphor. You can borrow the tip—build your house with shoji screens and a rock garden and some bamboo—but unless you also import the waterline assumptions, you’re just performing a style. The house won’t behave the way it’s supposed to. It won’t produce the self it was designed to produce.

Because architecture, like language, is generative. It doesn’t just reflect culture. It makes it.

Back to the Beginning - Trenton Bath House

2022-08-09T10:29:00.012-04:00

"you just like this cause of the name. if it wasn't famous you wouldn't have come."

"no no.... i really think this is great."

i've been accused idol worship before. liking buildings because they were designed by famous architects. to a layperson, the crumbling concrete block walls and asphalt shingled roofs looked like a dump. surely this was not deserving of a 2 hour drive to visit. or was it?

i made a valiant attempt to defend Lou Kahn's honor.

"This bathhouse plan looks like a simple 9 square plan, but look more closely and you’ll see it is underlaid with a tartan grid. see how the alternating 22-foot and 8-foot bands intersect to define large and small square spaces?"

I now started pointing around the various features of the building in a very excited manner.

“the narrow zones provide the square corner piers for entry storage and toilets and skylit rectangular servant zones for changing showering and washing. Kahn honors the hollow square cmu ‘columns’ by capping them with cast in place concrete slab lid like roofs and articulating vertical expansion joint lines at their edges. With the roofs springing from the corners Kahn highlights the inner square focal point of each structure. The roofs seem to hover mysteriously."

my passionate defense fell on deaf ears like a desperate used car salesman's pitch .

k and j were not buying it.

unfazed, I kept trying to proselytize the skeptics. “During the design of the bathhouse, Kahn was smitten with Palladian grids and how to integrate servant and served spaces. “The architect must find a way in which the serving areas of a space can be there, and still not destroy his spaces. He must find a new column, he must find a new way of making those things work, and still not lose his building on a podium,” he said. “Like the great Villa rotunda, where the servant spaces complement the central roof, here the Trenton bath house uses the same organizational and geometric logic."

palladian house grids

villa rotunda vs trenton bathhouse

J brutally cut through all my gesticulations and jargon down with his teenage take. "i can't believe we drove 2 hours to see a bathroom." at 13 years old, he has a concept of what kids normally do with their fathers. play baseball or board games, fix fences, go fly fishing, change motor oil. driving 90 minutes to see a bathroom in cornhole new jersey is not what he considers normal father son behavior.

i interrupted his "why are we here?" grievances by dispatching him to the urinal, "you should probably go pee and try to develop a sensitivity to great architecture. hopefully one day, you’ll appreciate these experiences…”

it was sweltering. 95 degrees and humid. i never dress up, but here i was wearing a dress shirt. the night before, i worried that i wouldn't be able to take pictures or videos here since using cameras in bathrooms is kind of dicey with people in various states of deshabille and associated privacy issues.

if caught, i was thinking how awkward the interrogations would be.
"why are you video recording a changing room?"
"for the architecture, sir...”

“Good to know you’re not just a pervert taking pictures of naked people…”

so i hatched a cockamamie plan. i put on a dress shirt with a front chest pocket. i slid my phone with lens poking out right above the brim and pressed video record. i walked around my apartment slow and steady to practice creating architecture video walkthroughs.

there have been times, where i've gone to sites that don't allow photos only to make secret bootleg videos as the security inevitably looks away. The videos sit in my hard drive like taxidermy shoulder mounts on a hunter's cabin wall. my most treasured kills have included forbidden scenes of the salk institute, frick museum, rockefellers’ estate, last supper, sistine chapel, massacio frescos, etc...

nothing was going to deter me from capturing the essence of the trenton bath house for my handful of dedicated blog readers.

anticipating "sir, no photography in the bathhouse. And absolutely no videotaping in the changing rooms." i pressed record and put my phone in my pocket with the camera peeping out. i walked around more deliberately and slowly so as to keep the lens level. There is nothing worse than going to a site, and not being able to take pictures.

to my disappointment, some middle-aged man was in the changing room putting his clothes on, marring my pristine video frames. i didn't want to look suspicious so i walked nonchalantly over to the urinal and started taking a piss. i left and circled the building for 10 minutes. Within the 9 square plan, the four corners and center are voids. You enter the central open air atrium from a corner. A reception desk fronts a square storage volume capped with a pyramidal roof. On either side of the atrium are the men's and women’s changing rooms which are also sheltered under pyramidal roofs. Opposite the reception in this bilaterally symmetrical arrangement is a ceremonial set of stairs leading up to the municipal pool. This set of stairs has a roof, but no walls. In this way kahn worked between solid and void.

When I returned to the locker room, I incredulously saw the same guy still in the process of putting on his shirt. my luck, i encounter a man in the changing room who fumbles buttons and can’t dress in a reasonably prompt manner.

he probably would've reported me to security if i started filming him overtly. every time i went in, i went to the urinal and peed a little more. i did this about 4 subsequent times at 5 minute intervals each. I have several outtakes on my hard drive of my trenton bath urinations as a result. on my last round, he finally left and i had the room to myself. i promptly took my camera out of my pocket and started filming the roof, and the iconic moments of sky over the showers and sinks. what a grand feeling of openness Kahn provided for those changing to go to the pool.

Despite being in the presence of great architecture I couldn’t stop thinking that the guy who I thought was the slowest dresser, probably thought i had the smallest bladder. and if i were endowed with faulkner's talent, i could write a novel ala 'as i lay dying' where the narrative perspective would stream of consciousness flip back and forth between him, the local slow dressing Trenton resident and me, the sweaty small bladdered architecture enthusiast in dress shirt.

As I lay Waiting for Man to Finish Changing (Chapter 1)

"what's he doing here all dressed up?”
"great, he's the only one in here, i'll feign use of the facilities so as to not act suspicious"
"glad he's gone... I don’t like putting clothes in with other people around. Uh oh… now he's back again"
"shit he's still here, i'm going to force myself to go pee again"
"why is that dude walking around with a phone in his front pocket?"
"this guy literally takes 20 minutes to put on a stupid shirt"
"i feel sorry for this guy. he's sweating and peeing a lot"
and so on and so forth..

I was the perverted dude in dress shirt standing in bathhouse front-pocket filming on the sly. I rationalized to myself, in today's cancel culture. what i was doing was rather harmless.

kahn would've never survived trenton if it were built in today's cultural climate. Pritzker prize winner Richard meier was recently taken down by five women, four of whom were former employees. they came forward with accusations of sexual harassment that included Meier groping their underwear and exposing himself to them. this seems tame to kahn's philandering 50's. Whereas Meier had to renounce his role at his firm and retire ignominiously, during the Trenton project, kahn had a wife, lived with his parents-in-law, had a hustle, and then a side hustle. that is, while Lou kahn raised a daughter with his wife, he simultaneously collaborated with mistress Anne Tyng on the geometry of the Trenton bath house. While Tyng carried Lou’s love child to term in secret in Rome, Kahn engaged in a side hustle with Marie Kuo, an intern working out the bath house entry mural which was based on the baths of Caracalla mosaics. After Tyng returned, Kuo, who didn’t realize Tyng was fluent in Chinese and could understand Kuo’s phone conversations to her mom concerning contraception and was aware of all of Kahn’s transgressions.

within the chaos of his personal life where he juggled 3 children from 3 women and an intern mural designer, Kahn conceived the purest of crystal structures. ideal perfection harmonizing ancient proportions with the integration of servant and served spaces. he made his architecture extra logical, legible and clear to counterbalance the chaos of his personal life.

While all these relationships were consensual, Kahn probably wielded his position of power to gain access to these women. Without cancellation, Kahn went on to design some of the world’ greatest buildings: the kimbell arts museum, salk institute, exeter library, british arts center.... similar in depravity, frank lloyd wright went on to design the guggenheim, usonian houses, falling water, taliesin I and II after running off with a client's wife and being caught moonlighting in louis sullivan's firm. jefferson designed UVA and monticello after serially impregnating his deceased wife’s half sister and daughter’s teenage slave/companion Sally Hemmings. Philip Johnson supposedly burned all his nazi white supremacist papers in the chimney of the glass house, etc.. many great architects did amazing work with very questionable morals. That is, the history of great architecture is constituted by the stunning work of socially deviant architects who refuse to submit to societal norms.

Having rationalized that my odd social deviant behavior of photographing changing rooms was relatively minor compared to Kahn’s dalliances, i proceeded to meticulously document the shower stalls and toilets. i started noticing odd water stains and signs of impending trouble where the sloped roof was held back from the perimeter walls. according to anne tyng, Kahn intended the water to run over the masonry surfaces. unfortunately, in New Jersey, Kahn didn't consider the impact of freeze and thaw cycles. Within 7 years of its construction in 1952, the water shedding off the iconic pyramidal roofs on the walls caused mold, disintegration, and cracking. The owners were about to tear the structure down until the county bought the property. For decades, the bathhouse succumbed to crumbling cmu and heaving slabs which were only recently repaired in 2020.

Looking beyond kahn’s cavalier approach to waterproofing and dereliction in detailing, Kahn's bathhouse marks an important change in his design philosophy. If an architect's life is analogous to sporting event, where there are critical moments that impact the final outcome… the trenton bathhouse was the turning point of Louis Kahn’s career. At middle age, Louis Kahn was written off, losing by a wide margin to the Great Depression, with no substantive designs to his name. In the second half of his life, from 1952 to his death in 1974, Lou Kahn came back with a vengeance, unleashing a string of amazing buildings. Looking back at the Trenton Bathhouse project, Kahn remarked it was the “generative force which is recognizable in every building which I have done since.”

The importance of trenton is that it was Kahn’s beginning. And according to Kahn, he didn’t “know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important.” The beginning is where the ideas were sparked, the beginning is the creation of something fresh and new. Within the crumbling cmu blocks and economically shingled asphalt roofs there were beginnings of ideas that Kahn would work tirelessly on for the rest of his illustrious career. After Trenton, Kahn had clear direction and goals to achieve in architecture.

Comparing Trenton to his last project, the Yale British arts center, one can see how kahn developed and evolved themes of servant-served, day light modulation, and building planning principles.

At Trenton, Kahn refined his approach to utilitarian spaces and articulated his notion of spaces serving and spaces served. Whereas each pyramidal asphalt shingled wood roof at Trenton rests on four hollow CMU column supports that serve as mechanical spaces or as circulation for changing room, in his British Arts Center, his blackened steel-clad columns and precast beam supports were hollow and served as mechanical spaces to convey air, electricity, and water. servant space is woven seamlessly into served space, articulated and harmonious.

At the BAC, Kahn continued the Trenton truncated pyramidal roof lighting motif but increased the aperture size and introduced louvers for a more diffuse filtered lighting suitable for artwork. Kahn figured out ways to control direct sun by adding layer of sunscreening devices.

finally, the trenton bathouse was supposed to be part of a larger complex never built that Kahn envisioned for a jewish community center that included a landscape of axial pathways on tree lined paths, and a day camp pavilion. Kahn developed notions of how buildings and space are organized in relation to each other. Spatially, at Trenton, each bathhouse room is conceived as an independent pavilion around a central atrium, which is open to the sky. In BAC, each gallery room is similarly conceived as a skylit gallery cell that surrounds a daylit central entry atrium, and double height picture gallery.

For the non architects and disgruntled teenagers, Trenton bathhouse is nothingburger meh, for the connoisseurs who seek enlightenment on the ideas of Lou Kahn, it’s an architectural provocation and a demonstration of what happens when architects find purpose in life.

Hopper House

2022-04-29T21:34:00.009-04:00

You ignore the sign that says private driveway. The narrow sandy road winds through the pine trees. The road seems longer when you know you’re trespassing. You see large houses set in the dark forests. You choose to come at night thinking it’d be easier to hide in the cloak of darkness. But in reality, the car lights make you more conspicuous at dusk. The trees start to thin out and you can see the evening clouds. On the left, a turn off for a car. You continue driving all the way to the end. You find the driveway is blocked by 2 wood rails forming an X. You park the car and step over the fence. It’s a slight slope down to a garage. The motion detectors trigger the lights and you just pray there are no security cameras.

At the end of the garage, a set of stairs emerge. You ascend and notice the stairs gradually get steeper towards the top till you reach the southeast corner of the building. There’s a strip of cobblestones at the semi exposed foundation wall. Another short flight of stairs to the left leads to an elevated entry perch on the left corner of the building. From this vantage point, a miraculous uninterrupted view of the bay opens up. Bayberry shrubs flow down to the beach and horizon.

Walking around the house you see a large deck. To the north, a really garish house. You recognize this blight on the landscape as the house that’s been covered in the newspapers. In fact, the way you found Hopper’s studio address was a news article concerning lawsuits filed against the neighbor. 15 years ago, a couple bought the Hopper property and built a 9000 sf monstrosity next door. It was so large it destroyed the view and landscape. All the surrounding neighbors wanted it demolished for violating various zoning statutes. For 6 years the house sat vacant pending lawsuits. The spouse died, the widow sold it to the current owners who promptly paid the town off $3 million to use the house plus an additional $500,000 to clear the legal fines.

There is no vegetation to hide behind. You are completely exposed on a hill. You notice the neighbor’s light is glowing bright and a car is parked in their driveway. You start thinking they are looking at you wondering what you’re doing on their property. Under the threat of surveillance you take pictures as fast as you can. A panoramic video to preserve the glimpse. You start making your way towards the entrance and walk briskly down the stair. You’re now on borrowed time.

You start to think if the neighbors call the police, how long would it take for the cops to drive down the roads and show up? With a single lane driveway, an incoming cop car would block your exit. You make a K turn on the dirt path. Your car is so long it overhangs the road and backs into bushes to turn out. On your drive out, you start mentally preparing a litany of ignorant excuses… “Sorry we didn’t know this was a private road... We got lost, we’re trying to find the beach…. Is this the way to Provincetown?” Nothing happens. Escaping without incident, you replay the scene in your mind.

You start thinking although Hopper’s house appeared to be a Cape Cod style house in volume it was very well designed. The house was kinked slightly non-parallel from the shore to create a dynamic tension between house and landscape. By running the stair diagonally to the side of the house for entry, you think Hopper is a genius for incorporating the sweeping views of the bay as part of the entry sequence. It’s a simple house that makes total logical sense. A double height painting studio that occupies over half the house's volume with large windows facing north, an entry through the kitchen on the southeast which receives morning light, a bedroom facing sunset on the south west and sculptural chimney at the center to tie all the elements together.

At home, you start reading random articles about the house to understand that which was not to be seen. You read about an artist who painted in Hopper’s cottage for 15 summers. He had befriended the owners that had bought one of his paintings in a local gallery. The most exciting thing the artist provides are photos of the inside of the house.

The wood flooring is striped in an alternating gray aged wood and dark stained pattern. Moldings on the doors are classical. Expansive views out of windows bring light to the entire house. A simple sculptural chimney forms the center and hearth of the house. The artist mentions in his writing the existence of an architectural model of Hopper’s house exhibited in Salisbury University, Maryland. He describes the model as painstakingly made. You find out the exhibition occurred sometime in 1993. Dejected, you think morbid thoughts like all the curators who put the show together are probably dead and you’ll never see the model. You start emailing random Hopper biographers who mention the model, but they don’t have the common courtesy to write you back. You enter stalker mode and start cold calling museums to see whether they have this model in their collection or not. One museum you call says they indeed have it in their collection and sends you some photos of it. Eureka you’ve struck gold.

The model is a valuable artifact. It’s like a fingerprint and a window into a designer’s soul. The model is a fossil record from the design process that reveals how the designer’s brain made decisions. Hopper’s model is no different. There are architects who paint like Corbusier, Steven Holl, and Zaha. But this is the first time you look at a painter who architected. Hopper’s model is made of painted cardboard. His loose pencil marks and notations are scribbled to indicate positions and appearances of doors. There are no cut outs for the windows in the walls of the model. Instead, all the windows are painted on the outside with a light blue color. On the interior, the attic floor, chimney, stair, furniture, painting supplies, and walls are detachable… allowing Hopper to insert interior elements into the house. The craftsmanship is crude. You imagine the 6’-6” tall Hopper hunched over a small model, cutting gluing and taping all these pieces of cardboard together. What’s as informative about the model is what is left out. Hopper didn’t model the site, the garage or the exterior stairs. These geometries and views which impressed you the most are not even documented. What’s important to Hopper is the placement of doors and walls. The sculptural chimney. For an artist who spent hours and hours meditating on buildings and painting them… when it came to designing his own house, these are the elements that he focused on in particular. Hopper’s design process regarding architecture is like his painting: hands-on, iterative, and tactile.

Looking at the model, you start making connections between the model, photos of the house and his famous painting, Rooms by the Sea displayed in the Yale Art Gallery. Initially titled “Alias the Jumping Off Place", Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea was Hopper’s painted vision of his understanding of the world. Critic Clement Greenberg stated, "Hopper happens to be a bad painter. But if he were better, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

Rooms by the Sea 1951

Sketch for the Painting

View of Room Painted

Model of the Room during design

The painting shows the corner of Hopper’s painting room opened to a view of water. In painting, Hopper took liberties to move the setting sun to the northwest, flip the door swing, remove the bayberry hill in the foreground. Hopper wasn’t concerned with painting reality, he was concerned with distilling the scene to the raw elements of light, color, water and architecture to provoke a feeling. Painted at 70 years old Hopper sketched the view prior to painting. Two decades prior, he had modeled the house before building it. In 1933, with his wife’s inheritance money, he designed the house they would summer in for the next 40 years of his life. The Hoppers were frugal. Their walkup apartment overlooking Washington square park in NYC had no heat and featured a communal bathroom. The Hoppers allocated what little money they had on architecture and their summer retreat.

Camel Hump. Past view from Hopper's House

When the Hoppers arrived, Truro was completely denuded of trees. The land was a barren wasteland. For 12,000 years the Wamponoag Indians roamed the same Truro area in loincloth year round… living off fish and shellfish in old growth forests. Within 200 years of their arrival the settlers cut all the trees down for firewood and building materials leaving the hills to look like camel humps. Into this scene you can imagine Hopper, the tall solitary figure walking in desolation quite alienated like a figure in one of his paintings. Something in this wasteland touched his soul and inspired him to paint. “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Detour Ledoux - Saltworks

2022-01-30T14:32:00.004-05:00

Antoine Lavoisier was completely brilliant. He discovered water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen was involved in combustion. His pièce de résistance was proving the law of conservation of mass in chemistry. For this, he carefully measured the mass of reactants and products in many different chemical reactions within sealed jars. Et voilà! in every case, the total mass of the jar and its contents was the same after the reaction as it was before the reaction took place.

To fund his laboratory experiments, he became involved with the hated Ferme Générale, a for-profit tax collection agency which reaped taxes for the monarchy in return for the right to collect the taxes. On behalf of the Ferme Générale, Lavoisier proposed a jar around Paris. He devised and commissioned the building of a wall around Paris so that customs duties could be extracted from those transporting goods into and out of the city at toll booth checkpoints. Unfortunately, for Lavoisier he failed to predict the combustible situation the jar would provoke. The people revolted, Bastille was stormed, and the bloodthirsty mob hungry for revolution was set loose and came after him.

When he was sentenced to the guillotine in the French Revolution for his role in tax collection efforts, Lavoisier decided his death would be his last experiment. Lavoisier wondered how long a head could retain consciousness after being severed from the body. He had heard of stories of severed heads looking around, saying prayers, or expressing unequivocal indignation when their faces were slapped etc…. He told his friend, “Watch my eyes after the blade comes down. I will continue blinking as long as I retain consciousness.” Lavoisier blinked for 15 seconds.

Claude Ledoux, the architect who designed the 55 toll collection booths for the wall around Paris, met a fate slightly better than Lavoisier’s. His head was spared, but his career was axed. With all his rich clients exiled to other countries, imprisoned, or decapitated, Ledoux never got the opportunity to build another building. Clientless and restless at the height of his career, Ledoux shifted his focus to designing a utopian city with futuristic visions of communal life and industrial urbanism.

Like Piranesi, Ledoux had started his professional life as an engraver before entering architecture, so working on architectural renderings was a return to his previous life before architecture. Two years before his death in 1804, Ledoux published Architecture Considérée Sous le Rapport de l’art, de Moeurs et de la Legislation which translates into the catchy English title “Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Customs and Legislation”.

A more accurate title of the book should’ve been “The Ideal City of Chaux: Where Fantasy Meets Reality.” Fifteen years before the revolution, Ledoux had designed and built the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans near the forests of Chaux. The complex of Saltworks buildings would become the starting point for the project of a Utopian city.

Before proceeding with insightful architectural analysis of Ledoux’s Saltworks, for those readers unfamiliar with 18^th century salt production practices within the pre-revolutionary French political economy, I’ll try to sum it up in a 4 short paragraphs.

To make salt, the French found and collected underground saline water sources, cut down trees to make fires and boiled off the water in boiling pans in 18 day shifts. It took teams of men to manage the boiling pans. For 8-9 boiling pans, a brigade of 100 people was needed: shifts of 2 people to skim the pot, 4 people to fire the stoves, 4 people to supply the wood, 4 workers to fire the stove. Over the course of an 18 day shift, the fire had to be maintained at a continuous temperature, otherwise the quality of the salt would be compromised. Barrel makers were employed to create containers to store salt. Blacksmiths and carpenters were constantly on call fixing and adjusting equipment. Salt making was a precise work.

If the salt extraction process sounds tedious, consider all the nauseating layers of control the French imposed on production: (1) tax collecting agencies for salt commerce (2) controllers of the extraction process (3) porters to register entry and exit and control the gates (4) controller of salt stocks (5) receiver to distribute the salt from each factory (6) director of salines (7) inspectors of wood (8) inspectors of work and maintenance (9) architecture inspectors (10) inspector general of the water pumps and wells (11) head of commerce of the Lorraine region and the (11) the King who used the tax money to fund his lavish lifestyle.

It's not surprising the etymological origins of the words ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘revolution’ are both derived from French. Bureau means "desk with drawers for papers, writing desk," in French and '-cracy' is the French form of the Greek root word ‘-kratia’ which means "power, might; rule, sway; power over; a power, authority. Revolution originally entered the French vocabulary in the 13th century to describe the ‘rotation of celestial bodies about the earth’ and was derived from the Latin word ‘ revolutio’ which means "a turn around". By the 18th century ‘revolution’s meaning in French evolved into ‘the fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression (political, social, economic) or political incompetence.

That is, in 1700’s France, people got pissed off and ready for revolution when they tried to make salt and had to endure 11 layers of annoying governmental bureaucracy and various taxations to sprinkle it on their food.

Now, back to the purpose of this blog, ~~useless guillotine trivia~~ architectural scholarship… in 1771, Ledoux was appointed inspector of Saltworks at the Arc de Senans in eastern France. Up to that point, the town’s salt factory was in the mountains near the source of underground saline water. When wood used to fuel the saline water burning pans became scarce, Ledoux started working on a Utopian vision with no particular site in mind.

Untethered to reality, he proposed constructing a 20 km canal of wooden pipes from the saline source to the edge of a nearby forest where wood was abundant. He reasoned it would be easier to bring the salt water to the boiling pan rather than wood to the fire. Semicircular in plan, and crystalline in geometry, the Saltworks “as pure as that described by the sun along its transit” would be planted like a seed next to the forest. The industrial production and hierarchical organization of the Saltworks would then sprout and sponsor the growth of an Ideal City.

Ledoux presented his Saltworks visions to King Louis XV in 1773. The King personally approved Ledoux’s plan and the Saltworks became built reality in 1779. Within 10 years, however, the Saltworks was abandoned after the French Revolution erupted in 1789. Unfortunately, since the complex was funded by the monarchy, Ledoux’s work was perceived as a symbol of the “Ancien Régime” and the Ideal City he envisioned was never built. Over the centuries, the Saltworks were used as a military barracks, camp for Spanish refugees and as a Nazi concentration camp for gypsies.

Today, one can visit the site and experience how distinctive Ledoux’s vision was. The central entry to the walled site is a Doric column portico. Compared to the typical ornate baroque ~~bullshit~~ architecture of his time, this was quite unusual and sober in the 1790s. Doric is archaic and rough. Ledoux then transitions the Doric columns into an artificial primordial stone grotto cave opening that funnels visitors through a neo-classical guardhouse opening onto a semicircular lawn on axis with the director’s pavilion which has bizarre columns composed of alternating round and square stones... Upon this entry sequence into the Saltworks, Ledoux has transported you into some sort of alternate reality.

The round window in the pediment of the looming director’s pavilion looks like a giant eye - nothing within this Saltworks compound escapes surveyance. “Don’t even think of pilfering salt from the premises.” Along the arc, communal housing is arranged for the salt worker brigades. Flanking the director’s pavilion symmetrically are workshop factories and pavilions for tax clerks. Ascend the monumental stairs within the director’s pavilion and you find yourself at the foot of a priest in a chapel bathed in mysterious light who recites a prayer in a creepy French accent. “Je crois en Sel, le Pere tout-puissant, créateur du ciel et de la terre. Amen.”

The 1800s didn’t understand or appreciate Ledoux’s Classicism nor his modernity but 20^th century architects rediscovered Ledoux and recognized his clairvoyance. 140 years before 1920’s Bauhaus buildings and Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, Ledoux was designing for industrialization in the new age of mass production. Whereas a traditional Baroque solution to the Saltworks would have been one large ornate complex housing all the activities of production (i.e., Versailles), in the Saltworks, functions were zoned separated into 11 discrete buildings: 4 communal housing, 1 gate, 1 director, 1 stable, 2 tax clerks, and 2 workshops.

Look beyond the surface of classical porticos and stone material, and you’ll notice each of Ledoux’s buildings are treated in quite a modern fashion in that they are specialized, articulated, and differentiated in terms of their height, floor to floor clearances, façade treatments, roof, fenestration. The housing featured shared double height centralized communal dining and kitchen spaces to economize on wood for the hearths and foster social interaction. Behind the housing, gardens were allocated to the residents for private use. Connections between buildings were minimized to minimize the risks to fire, and to break the scale of buildings down within the campus.

The salt workshop facilities had vents disguised as dormer windows. Landscaped area behind workshops were dedicated to storing wood for fuel. Large long span timber roof construction housed the boiling pan assemblies below. Internal layouts were repeated, to optimize salt production and processing. To reinforce efficient administration, the director’s building was centrally positioned to oversee all workers on site. Circulation routes cut through all administration buildings to ensure direct flows of salt.

To create a cohesive plan, Ledoux recognized the importance of tying all Saltworks buildings together with ornamentation, recognizable building typologies, and strong geometries. Stone ornamentation on buildings depict salt flowing from urns, thereby indicating the principal function of the buildings within. Entries to facades along the semicircular central court area are rusticated and emphasized to mark their significance. The simple geometries of the landscape and buildings are in harmony. Ledoux’s goal was to use architecture to shape a society and create a collective spirit, while emphasizing work as the ultimate value at the center of human activity.

At the back of the director’s pavilion, the stables open onto a small back gate. It was through this passage that Ledoux imagined the connection to the rest of his Ideal City of Chaux which would’ve mirrored the semicircular Saltworks in plan to form a complete circle. In the barren field, one can contemplate the complete world of what could have been, replete with all the unbuilt designs for a bridge, market place, graveyard, artillery building, school building, and housing types for coopers, blacksmiths, and lumberjacks, Temple of Memory, and even a brothel that Ledoux was allowed to dream in the last years of his life but not build.

The Joke, the Temple, and the Rhino (Intro)

2021-12-31T11:08:00.002-05:00

For the past 3 months I have been suffering tremendous writer’s block. I’ve been contemplating a lecture delivered by Lou Kahn at Ball State University (Louis I. Kahn, "Architecture", 1971-04-14 - YouTube), which sounds like a sermon in metaphysics, a standup comedy routine called the Bicentennial Prayer by Richard Pryor (The Sermon_Richard Pryor - YouTube) which sounds like a sermon in critical race theory, and some strange idiosyncrasies in Albrect Duhrer’s famous rhinoceros wood cuts (Dürer's Rhinoceros - Wikipedia). If I were a PhD student, my thesis would be titled something like, “The metaphysics of lou kahn through Richard Pryor’s Parrhesian lens of critical race theory with a bonus explanation of anatomically misplaced rhinoceros horns in duhrer’s woodcuts.” It sounds complicated and obscure, but with covid raging, what else is there to do in my free time?

I don’t have a thesis advisor, so I’ve been kind of floating around untethered in a sea of ideas. When I don’t understand something, I try to read about it. To my knowledge and prodigious internet search skills, there have been no academic attempts that discuss the above ideas in any real depth. No transcripts exist for any of the above material. Some people jog or go to museums as hobbies. In my spare time I transcribe things that have yet to be transcribed. In the search to provide new insight to things that already exist, the importance of the primary source material cannot be stressed.

So when someone asks me what I’ve been doing the past 3 months in my spare time, I respond, “I’ve been tirelessly transcribing Lou Kahn’s lecture at Ball State University, dissecting Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial prayer regarding racism in america, and looking at weird unexplained things going on in duhrer’s famous rhinoceros woodcut.” Usually my friends say “uh cool. Sounds interesting… then steer the conversation towards easier topics by saying something more conventional like “so how are your wife and kids?” to which we end up commiserating over our kids’ borderline psychopathic use of tik tok.

It’s been frustrating... when I have a couple good ideas and I struggle to pull them together. I think It would be great to pull these Ideas together like an expert juggler. I’m not one of those regular jugglers that just takes a bunch of banal bowling pins and throws them up in the air. I’m the more ambitious and dangerous type of juggler who you can’t stop watching. I like to juggle different things together like flaming torches, heavy butcher knives and used toilet brushes. At the heart of it, my superpower if I had any, is not flight, nor is it charming good looks, nor is it turning invisible… it’s making connections between things and coming up with theories and speculations nobody ~~is crazy enough~~ pauses to think about.

When I try to write about about subjects, but can’t quite keep them in the air simultaneously. It’s frustrating. I have juggler’s block. My mind starts straying, I look at the long list of things I want to write about and just end up procrastinating further and further thinking about more and more disparate things to juggle. I start reading, drowning in a sea of more and more craziness, wanting to throw up wilder and wilder combinations of things like Japanese haiku poetry of Basho, 1960’s jazz piano of Bill Evans, and the architecture of Carlo Scarpa.

Enter the unexpected lifeguard. It’s not everyday you get to ask a Grammy nominee and NYTimes best selling author (Crying in H mart) Japanese Breakfast questions about creative process, but that’s what I did today in a serendipitous open zoom forum.

() Me - “What’s your song writing and essay writing process like? What do you do when you get writer’s block?” And she actually responded, “I give myself assignments like write 1000 words a day (which translates to 2 pages of single spaced text) or write 30 songs for the month of June. I hope for something good.. sometimes I get 1 sentence, other times I get raw source material for future albums.”

I came to an epiphany today. Fuck it. Make a disciplined series of daily blog posts that show the struggle and process of writing. So here I’m about to set a set of dangerous objects in motion. Gather round ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to start juggling this flaming torch, butcher’s knife and toilet brush in orbit, and see if I can keep it going. A Kahn lecture, Pryor prayer, and duhrer misplaced rhinoceros horn. At best, I’m going to provide valuable insights to humanity, at worst, if it’s an epic fail, I might cut off my toe, suffer 3rd degree burns and die of a terrible infection on my self-inflicted wounds, and at the very least I publish transcribed texts so people after me can see the primary sources in Microsoft word format and can study it for their own PhD work. So in effect, my existence on earth either provides insight no-one really asked for, a humorous spectacle of self- mutilation or a service to those who are hearing impaired or don’t understand English but want to experience Richard pryor, lou kahn or Albrecht duhrer in English. It’s a win win win situation.

Part 1 – The Misplaced Rhino Horn

2021-12-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

From 1515 til the late 1930s, Dürer's rhinoceros woodcut image appeared in school textbooks throughout Germany. The level of detail Durer imparted to the rhino lulls one into thinking Durer knew what he was doing and the rhino was legit. However, upon close inspection, you can see a small twisted fictitious horn on its back. Look more closely, and you notice Durer’s depiction shows the animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of spotted turtle shells, ruffled fabric scarf around its throat, a full breast plate of chest armor, and scaly legs. Exactly what kind of beast is this? (For architects this is common Revit drawing experience. You are led to believe a Revit drawing is legit because of the polished line work and level of detail only to find out during construction it’s all a bunch of unbuildable nonsense. And you start thinking, what kind of beast is this?)

For an artist who could draw grass, rabbits, and rabbits to amazing detail, it didn’t make sense. With all of those aforementioned non-rhino works display prodigious observation powers. How could Durer draw plants so accurately, then resort to fictionalized fantasy for a rhino?

The answer… Duhrer never did see the actual rhino for which he made his famed woodcut, but that didn’t stop him from carving its impression out of wood. Chiseled above his fantasy rhino like the ingredients label of Campbells’s chicken noodle soup can is the Portuguese merchant’s eyewitness text which inspired the woodcut.

“On the first of May in the year 1513 AD, the powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon, brought such a living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. The elephant is afraid of the rhinoceros, for, when they meet, the rhinoceros charges with its head between its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach, against which the elephant is unable to defend itself. The rhinoceros is so well-armed that the elephant cannot harm it. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, impetuous and cunning.”

The rhino had been sent from India to the King Manuel of Portugal as some sort of diplomatic present. It was quite a sensation as a rhino had not stepped foot on European soil since the Roman times. Having read Pliny the Elder’s (79 AD) recounts of the animal’s epic battles with elephants, the curious king with nothing better to do in his spare time, arranged a fight between the rhino and a young elephant from his exotic animal collection, to test the account by Pliny’s testimony that the elephant and the rhinoceros were bitter enemies.

Apparently, the rhinoceros advanced slowly and deliberately towards its foe; the cowardly elephant, unaccustomed to the noisy crowd that turned out to witness the spectacle, fled the field in panic before a single blow was struck.

I hypothesized Durer must’ve drawn from his imagination before and predicted Durer didn’t just draw horns on rhino’s back without practice. He must have had lots of experience. Lo and behold, like all the artists of his time, Durer devoted a fair amount of his time to depicting imaginary scenes by illustrating bible passages. Mastering drawing what could be seen and what could be imagined meant Durer could easily pivot between imagination and reality. Four years before the misplaced rhino horn, Durer breathed life into mythical beasts from the Book of Revelation.

These Second Coming Apocalyptic Campbell soup can ingredients are much more exciting:

“And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast” (Revelation 13:1-3).”

After studying the rhino and the second apocalypse scenes rather closely I began thinking how it’s quite common for artists, architects, comedians to use texts as springboards to creation. In fact, 400 years later, Richard Pryor riffed on the same Apocalyptic passage as a sermon to joke about racism in America and Lou Kahn would delve deeper into biblical texts in his quest to design his unbuilt Hurva Temple design.

Part 2 - Critical Joke Theory

2021-12-29T15:21:00.002-05:00

If you smoke marijuana in Amsterdam, it’s legal, but if you deal weed in Indonesia, you face 12 years of hard jail time… if you chew gum and spit it on the ground in NYC it makes a stain on the street, but if you’re caught in Singapore spitting gum, you’re fined $2000…. if you’re a woman in Saudi Arabia, you wear a burqa and cover everything except your eyes, but if you’re a Maori woman in New Zealand you expose your breasts and cover your pubic area with bunches of fragrant plant material. If you were black in Africa in the 1700’s you would be captured, enslaved, and transported to the America as a commodity, sold at markets, condemned to work the plantations, banned from reading and writing with all future offspring being legally the property of your owners, but if you were white you could declare yourself independent and free and celebrate your freedom every July 4th.

After spending a week listening to sociology lectures online I’ve come to the conclusion it would be hard to navigate the world as a time traveling pot smoking gum chewing maori woman. One moment you could be smoking pot in Amsterdam, savoring naked haka dance memories in New Zealand, only to travel through Saudi Arabian airports in full burka mode with gumless layovers in Singapore to a time travel machine into a life of slavery on a Georgia plantation. Behaviors acceptable for one group of people may not be acceptable to others. For reasons beyond the scope of my logical brain, when a society feels threatened by women’s choice of clothing, or psychoactive drugs, or the color of one’s skin, or gum chewing, they find a way to regulate and modify group human behaviors through their legal system.

Having established the fact that cultural context drives the way people behave in the world, and pondering dark ideas that free will is an illusion, you may begin to think, is there a way to change society, to reverse global warming, end racism, or chew gum in Singapore?

(off topic side note: Chewing gum was causing maintenance problems in apartments, with vandals disposing of spent gum in mailboxes, inside keyholes, and on lift buttons. Chewing gum left on the ground, stairways, and pavements in public areas increased the cost of cleaning and damaged cleaning equipment. In 1987, the $5 billion local railway system, started running. It was then the largest public project ever implemented in Singapore.

It was reported that vandals had begun sticking chewing gum on the door sensors of subway trains, preventing doors from functioning properly and causing disruption to train services. Such incidents were rare but costly, and culprits were difficult to apprehend. In January 1992, Singapore Statute Chapter 57, was enacted to ban the chewing of gum.)

While chewing gum may be a tough sell now in Singapore, there are movements in America to end racism that are rather active. Statues of Jefferson and Roosevelt are being decommissioned in NYC and sent out of public view. Schools are introducing counter narratives of the indigenous and oppressed that were part of the nation’s founding but silenced. The foundations of these movements are nothing new. They were laid by those brave enough to speak the honest truth that people were too afraid to speak in public, or in Foucault’s words, those people brave enough to hold up a mirror to society, “To confront, oppose, or find fault with another individual or a popular view in a spirit of concern for illuminating what is right and best.”

45 years before the emergence of the current woke movement, cancel culture and critical race theorists, Richard Pryor was pioneering critical joke theory. 124 years prior to Pryor and a day after the nation’s 76th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered this piece of fiery “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” critical race theory oratory in protest of the continuing enslavement of millions of people.

“But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.” (1852) Frederick Douglass, "What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July" • (blackpast.org)

Douglass is kind of boring and predictable, wholly logical, safe, and rhetorical. He’s a serious dude, very articulate but incredibly soporific. If I were a high school US history teacher designing a syllabus, I would have my students listen to Pryor’s Bicentennial Prayer instead.

“We are…. gathered here today… to celebrate this year of bicentenniality in the hope of freedom and dignity. We’re celebrating two hundred years of white folks kicking ass. Now white folks have had the essence of disunderstanding on their side for quite a while. However we offer this prayer and the prayer is “how long will this bullshit go on?”

How long? How long. How long will this bullshit go on? That is the eternal question man have always asked, How long? When man first got here, he say how long will the animals kick me in the ass? How long before I discover fire and stop freezing to death?

We always here in our church of understanding and unity have tried to figure out how long. They say in the bible we will know how long when an angel come up out of the sea. He will have seven heads and a face like a serpent and a body like a lion. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to see no motherfucker look like that! If is see him come out of the water I shoot him in the air.

We only making one collection this year. We ask that this year you donate five or six hundred. We ain’t gonna fuck with you no more. We won’t be round your house asking for shit or nothing like that.

Let us offer as the choir sing that old negroid spiritual, “I will see” or “we will see” whether the case may be. if you sing alone it’s “I will see” if you’re singing with people it will be “we will see” see that shit works out right.

They’ve been rehearsing. Go ahead. (singing gospel: we will see, we will see, we will see, we will see, we will see… :||)

That was lovely. That was lovely. Yeah before I spend some more money on rehearsal, we will see. Bring me some shit like that.

Now I’d like to make some apologies to you because last Sunday, a spiritual thing happened. Nice family. the Walker family brought in their son. They asked me “can you heal my son?” well I apologize because he’s a big waterhead boy. And I wasn’t going to touch the motherfucker. Little nigger had a big head about this big and they wheeled him in. his head was bobbing back and forth. I was not about to touch that motherfucker. I’m telling you cause that shit is contagious. I said “go get that nigger a big hat or something. Leave me alone.”

And some of the deacons come down on me for that. And I like to say to the crippled people that come here. Can’t you find another church to go to? Goddamn you come in knocking shit down and breaking up furniture and shit. Learn how to crawl, shit. And you deaf and dumb motherfuckers, you motherfuckers that can’t talk. We don’t need you here. all the ‘hoo hoo’ shit kiss my ass. They got schools for you to go. Go learn how to speak goddammnit. Shit!

Also there’s some discrepancy about the baptisms last month because 3-4 people drowned. They was old people. I did not know a couple of them had asthma. I just put them under a little while I just thought the little bubbles were from the spit…” Bicentennial Prayer (Remastered Version) - YouTube

Pryor questions behaviors and social norms, provokes people with weird thoughts and makes people laugh hysterically. More than likely, he would get me fired as a high school teacher for his word choice and ‘colorful’ use of language. But if you look beyond his digressions into church donations, imaginary choir practice management, aversions to the physically deformed, degrading remarks about the crippled and the learning disabled, and dark jokes of baptism drownings of the asthmatic you can see how he created jokes using the same texts regarding Bible scenes of Second Coming mythical beasts from that Albrecht Durer read and illustrated 400 years prior. You can marvel at the creativity of delivering serious sermons in the persona of a southern Baptist minister that climax in vivid bible scenes. You can see his search for universal truths, like finding common ground between whites and blacks (ie., how to cope with oppressors, oppressive conditions) while speaking the truth about the reality of race relations in America. Simply put, you never know what Pryor’s going to say next in his monologues, like Durer and the rhino, he is able to weave existing texts into a jumble of truth, fantasy, and entertainment, and make you think.

Part 3 - Lou Kahn lecture transcript

2021-12-28T23:49:00.001-05:00

In his essay “Laughing with Kafka”, David Foster Wallace outlines the pitfalls of literary analysis. “We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it.” Some subjects are hard to communicate. There’s a futility in analyzing writing with writing. “This is a lot like the teacher's feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”

If you think writing about writing is hard, try writing about architecture. It's hard to write about concrete wall construction without boring yourself or your readers. That’s why when I set about analyzing an architect to digest their ideas for my own work, I try to understand them in as direct manner as possible from multiple angles. I visit their buildings, I photograph and draw their works directly and meditate on them. I look at what they drew, I read what they read, I listen to what they said, I read what other contemporaries wrote or said about them, I look through their most personal letter correspondence, I study their work habits, and figure out where they traveled and when... I figure out what they eat for breakfast, what color their underwear is, so on and so forth. In other words, I become some sort of a creepy archi-stalker creature.

When I analyze a building or ‘architectural rose’ in David Foster Wallace speak, I research the conditions it grew up in, look at its genetic makeup and all its descendants, listen to gardeners to see how it was watered and nurtured, read books on their forms and patterns of petal growth, I visit the rose in all seasons and sketch and photograph it in all types of daylight, I write about it…. Only then do then I proceed to grind all of its petals off, break it down into bits of data regarding circulation, program, mechanical, structural, proportional systems into a special goo send it through a mass spectrometer to explain what makes the rose so great so I can integrate their 'magic' into my designs.

Lou Kahn is an especially hard rose to deconstruct. His travel drawings are like colorful Chagall fantasies, his design evolution is meandering and non-linear, and his correspondences are messier. Even his own son, Nathaniel, made a film trying to figure out who his father was. He was a father who designed some of the greatest modern buildings in the world, yet lived with his in-laws for decades while fathering 3 kids from 3 different women in and around Philadelphia… He was a mystery to the closest people around him.

Lou Kahn died before I was born, but I’m separated by 2 degrees of separation from him since I worked for 2 people that were taught directly by him at Yale. James Polshek and Peter Gluck. When I looked at interviews of my former employers looking for insight into Kahn’s impact on my former bosses, these are the humorous dead ends I found:

Polshek interview:

You studied architecture at Yale while Louis Kahn was there. What did he teach you?

One day, he looked down at a drawing I was doing, and he said, “Mr. Polshek, trees don’t grow in rows.” I said, “They do if you plant them in rows.” He didn’t speak to me for six weeks.

Polshek told me about the day he found out Kahn died unexpectedly. He was dean of Columbia’s architecture school when he got a call asking him to escort Kahn’s wife Esther to the morgue so she could identify the body. “It was a macabre reintroduction to Lou.”

But you came to admire him?

We became friendly. What I learned from him was modesty. Personal modesty—he never cared about publicity. And the modesty in the expression of the building.

Peter Gluck interview:

“Lou Kahn… his students would sit at his feet “what is a school?” “a school is a bench under a tree.” Everybody would go “Woo hoo”. I don’t think he was an incredibly good teacher, his buildings were incredibly good each one was a course in architecture. Rudolph was an incredibly good teacher but his building were not so good. Never developed professionalism. All his projects were in deep trouble.”

I don’t think [Louis Kahn] was a really good teacher, but on the other hand, his buildings were incredibly good. Each one of them was like a course on architecture. Whereas [Paul] Rudolph, who was the Dean at Yale, was an unbelievable teacher, but his buildings were not so good

After listening to Kahn’s lectures, I understand Polshek and Gluck’s reaction to Kahn. Kahn’s lectures are like abstract bumbling mystical sermons in metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. the question of the initial conditions for the universe belonging to the realm of metaphysics or religion)…

Kahn collaborator and noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi wasn’t exaggerating when he called Lou Kahn "a philosopher among architects."

A typical architecture lecture involves showing some slides, talking about ideas, and maybe a funny anecdote. A Kahn lecture runs like a philosophical stream of consciousness... a sermon in philosophy where architecture is elevated to religion. The ideas are like precious jewels that are waiting to be mined. My brain can’t comprehend metaphysics, so I replay his lectures at 25% speed over and over on youtube and transcribe it and read it to try to understand it. Kahn speaks with a peculiar ‘Estonian immigrant who moved to Brooklyn young but lived in Philadelphia’ accent.

I’ve typed this particular Kahn sermon Louis I. Kahn, "Architecture", 1971-04-14 - YouTube to gain understanding on his unbuilt Temple of Hurva design. To understand the architect philosopher, you have to understand his philosophy.

Lou Kahn:

It sure it is a surprise, well I thought I was going to a coffee klatch, but it turns out to be a clambake... it’s great. I hope everyone can hear me. I have 2 microphones and a lot of batteries up here I think maybe you can make out what I say. you know it’s very difficult to speak to many people. I’ve done it before, but I must say that almost invariably what happens is that it becomes a kind of performance rather than an event. Because I think when you speak to just one other it can be extremely eventful. Somehow the lectures of one person to another can manage to come to a single point and it becomes generative. That when you speak to just another person you don’t feel as if your lines are necessary. That you feel like saying something like you never said before. And though I will try just to amuse myself not to put the first act first and the second act second, I’ll try to scramble it a bit. Because that’s only thing I can do. The memory leaves you of course, to a great extent because there are many people. But I’m very certainly gratified everybody is here. It seems as though, if you left anybody out, I think all of this college seems to be here.

In saying this also, I’d like to give you a sense of my recent thoughts. As the old ones sort of get worn by such performances when you begin to hear yourself say the say the same thing over and over again. Which one is prone to do. You just make up your mind that it probably it isn’t true at all. Because it doesn’t grow. If it doesn’t grow, it needs fortification.

I think everyone is tempted to define architecture and I won’t dare to define it because it is really a too all comprising of a thing… too wonderful a thing to try to nail down. I do believe it kind of begins with a room. A room. Which has a relation to a person. It seems walls when they’re far away and the walls when they’re close, they make you say different things. I’m sure that at a large place, you say something differently than you do in a small place. If you’re near a fireplace just with one other person as I mentioned a little while ago. I think it is truly generative time. And especially if it’s with a person you don’t know too well that you feel that you feel a remoteness in your personal relationship. Then it becomes even more sharply generative. Because you feel the necessity of renewing yourself. And for that reason, that which has been dormant, that which has never been said, somehow occurs to you.

The room I feel is also defined by the way it’s made. It is invariably an incomplete place if the way it is made this room is not made is not evident in the room itself. There is a kind of completeness about it. It isn’t just a partitioned off place where you feel other parts of it are somewhere else. It’s so important to think that a room is a great thing to have happened and to become part of the everyday, you know. It is while on the one hand when people tell you of free-wheeling spaces that I go back to the feeling of the room per se defines not easily partitioned off, something which is like an extension of self. Something that which is kind of piece of self… was made that it has in the end a superior position in the record in your mind of your past through circumstance than one in which you have just freely moved and tried to feel freedom. As sometimes you don’t feel it all. You just feel a kind of liberty, but maybe there’s a distinction between freedom and liberty. I think very much the room as religion.

Now a poet, an American poet who studied architecture and had it deeply ingrained in him though he became a writer… just in honor of his previous considerations of where his past expressions would be wrote a poem about architecture in which he said many things, but out of it I drew something I thought tremendously significant. He said, “what slice of the sun does your building have?” And also, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” when I thought of the sun striking the jamb and the sill of a window and that you’re acquainted with this place that you enter either in the morning, or get up in it, or walk into it. That you feel the marvel of it. In a room with another you forget the wind the rain and the trees and the birds and the sky. There is something about the world the within the world that has an effect on the mind. In fact the room is a place in the mind. It is very seldom that your mind flowers on Times Square. You endanger your life so much walking on any city street anyways that one thinks first of his life than of thought. But it is something that I think tremendously significant. that kept growing and growing in significance.

The sense that you are making a room. That you are making a society of rooms when you’re making a building. And if you think of it as a freewheeling space. Which I think is also of great importance today. In fact, it recalls a beautiful time in architecture during the Greek thought and realizations which were new… an emergence… a time of beginning, and I don’t know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important. And so a building is a society of rooms. You have absolute freedom to say what this society of rooms are. The function of the building is only a kind of start of what these spaces should be. That society of rooms. You honor the function without question. But it is only the stimulus around which things gravitate to try to glorify the sense that something must be. This poet who said, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” is almost like saying. “Sun, well you never knew how great you were do you… until you saw a building.”

And it must be considered in another light. I don’t want to lose a thread of thought of the room and if I was to deviate from it, then you just remind me because I’m going to fly over to a different kind of consideration.

That of silence and light. Silence is this feeling one gets in the presence of the pyramids, and not only isolated to the pyramids I would say many a great work has the same feeling. You felt this silence today, at least a few of us did when we heard this music. And this sum total of it all is a kind of silence. When Rachmaninoff used to play on the piano, and I heard him, I had the great privilege of hearing him, when he was finished with his work. It seemed as though the entire thing was locked in a cloud above you. Complete… the completeness of it was never lost. It wasn’t just a passing thing. And there you thought it had the quality of silence. A kind of wordless voice that simply reflected the inner nature of man which has this will to be to express. I say this manifestation of ourselves on this earth or anywhere we really are is the will to be to express. As though that’s the only reason for man. To express. And light that tremendous phenomenon I consider that all material is spent light. As though light was not light but was a kind of prevalence of the luminous. That it is non-material before it becomes material and the luminous. The prevailing luminous grouped in a wild dance of flame and a flame congealing spending itself into material.

So the mountains are spent light, the streams are spent light, the atmosphere is spent light. You are made of spent light. That part, that generative part or that you might say that ambient of soul or spirit from which emanates the will to be to express sweeps towards material or spent light and spent light sweeps to the will to be to express and meets in a kind of threshold which you call the inspirations as if to say the will to be to express meets the possible… meets the means to express the material the laws of nature are the means to express. You are a product of the laws of nature which made an instrument to express out of the kind of thing that you wanted to express in the same way as a microbe wanted to express something and became a microbe and wanted to express something. you as a man and the record of your odyssey through in the making is recorded in you like in everything in nature is a record of how it’s made. In the rock is record of the rock. In the man is a record of a man. It must be considered that you know everything really except that you may have a dumb instrument in the brain that can’t quite manage it. The brain is one thing the mind is another. The mind is the soul in the brain. The will to be to express is what makes the mind. And the brain is the instrument you got pot luck from nature because nature is non-conscious and you possess consciousness which is a demand on your part. Consciousness is that germ which makes the awareness that gives you the instrumentation for the will to express or the will eventually is the will to be to express.

Now I was asked to illustrate light you know. This is fascinating people and they wanted me to illustrate this. Now how do you illustrate light? Well you start like a dumb bunny. Well if one gave me a white piece of paper what could be whiter than that? Right? I thought that way myself. And I found that saw nothing. A white piece of paper is a white piece of paper. but I noticed drawings made by wonderful people that really knew what they were doing. I noticed the stroke of pen is where the light was not. And that was an important discovery where the light is not. You make a drawing with strokes where the light is not. So therefore, I had found that which could express light. Of course you know that meant the less strokes you made it with the more light. That probably is very true. I probably put too many lines on paper. I was very very cautious how many strokes. I put down. it did give a clue how to express yourself.

In the building that is being made, there is a tremendous spirit a will to be in the building when it’s beginning. In fact, you know just by the process of building itself. Not a blade of grass can exist around a building site. It is relentlessly aiming in the tremendous spirit to be. I’m talking of course of good ones not bad ones. But nevertheless they all start with a great deal of hope because the best is at that very stage when the final evidence isn’t there. But this will to be is very great. When the building built it is locked in servitude and the building wants to tell you about the story it was made. It wants to. “Hey look at my marble it took me a lot of money to do this marble I can’t, we had a lot of trouble with this. But I conquered it. It wants to say all this but nobody listens. Of course the building is going up the stair elevator going to laboratories and doing your work and all that kind of thing. When the building turns to ruin again, the building’s spirit emerges again. You see many buildings where it’s just ruins in which the branches and leaves grow in and out of the windows. I’m talking about old fashioned ruins. I’d hate to think of a ruin of concrete with a reinforcing rebar rods sticking out in all directions, rusting, various hues of red as being anything good as somebody said “a building is only good if the ruin is a promise to be good.” And I’m afraid we have a long to go to make buildings of today have the character but you know it did have that character you have that feeling that the spirit of its making comes back because it’s free of servitude. When people speak about the thing being functional that means it’s really suffering. It must feel the unmeasurable quality of this building must be felt and not the function… not the plumbing and all that kind of stuff. It is something spirit it’s made out of man. Something which nature hasn’t got. It could over turn 75 million times and couldn’t make a building without the intervention of man. Who says something which is inexpressible I express through a building or I express through a piece of music or in man playing cards. It is man’s paroxysm playing cards.

I’ll just throw in a little barb what is the sociologists think of this. It’s fine when one thinks of the nature of man through sociology yes but I go through history to extract let us say from history or crystallize all the circumstances out of it. It’s simply put that evaluate nature man through what through circumstances has revealed and this is like a golden dust that falls and you finger through this golden dust and if you can, this distillation away from circumstance and read history throughout your discovery as to the nature man you then have power of the artist cause that’s what he does. circumstance are of little importance to him. Subject matter is transcendent in there are kinds of thing in which has its own life and doesn’t have anything to do with the circumstance that led to it. You know painters of the most gory scenes of history do those gory scenes enjoy because you cannot make a work of art except in joy. it has nothing to do with the subject matter as it has which it what induces you to make of a portrait of the nature man. Another thought… is that in the same line of history. Or let us say when a work of art was made and what significance it has in relation to the way of life then as it is now. If you have but to reflect very little really that a work of art transcends the time. It started in time certainly. It’s influenced greatly by technically availabilities it’s Influenced by people around maybe you gather some you certainly gather something from it but it’s import is something beyond.

The music we heard today which was written hundreds of years ago is just as fresh now that it was then. Why? Because it is actually looked for truth which is different from fact. the truth you might say is a sense of commonality and it is in this the music is written. There are things that sort of start you but it isn’t what you end up with. And therefore what is you must assume has always been and what was has always been and what will be will always be as though today is yesterday and tomorrow is yesterday and tomorrow is today and today is yesterday and in connection with such things that have to do with art with has to with the art.

And the only language of man which is art and everything serves it including science. Cause science only deals with what already is and its discovery. Cause science cannot deal with that which is speculated on. It is really a discovery of what is. What is available. It has only to do with that of nature itself. Science deals not with man whatsoever. social science to me is no science. social studies yes. social Science no. science defies you see the strength the singularity of each person if only given the chance to become the singularity we would have the greatest crop in the world that is the minds of each individual. You see which one can only find the avenues of exchange which this can bring. that individual with another cannot matter what his degree of education is you see would startle you with that which presents his absolute personal kind of evaluation of things. you’ve spoken without education who tell you wonderful things and it’s a pity they can’t prime it. For that reason, I also believe in schools the schools of talent… natural talent.

I believe that man who dances beautifully and natural talent for dancing could eventually learn latin. If you just honor the fact that and give him the privilege to express what through what he does beautifully naturally that he would feel like giving something to himself and to others because of this honor bestowed to him. so all the free wheeling in the world means little unless some larger recognitions are made regarding natural talent. Schools of natural talent. you go to school where you get the greatest freedom that you ever could imagine you to have got. it’s the one place where you should not be marked or judged. But you should be severely criticized. Yes. Constructively mind you. Because that does nobody anybody no harm. It does no harm in criticism. tremendous harm in judgement. Judging one man and judging another.

I was remarking just up to kind fortify this idea. you know I took phsyics in school I sat next to a fellow who could listen to what the teacher said and put down accurately what he said. Everytime I listened to the teacher i wrote down what he didn’t say. I couldn’t listen you see and write down at the same time. I just couldn’t do it. So I copied his notes to pass my examinations. This is how silly this is. Now If the same teacher would come to me and say “lou kahn, you’re never going to be, or not lou kahn, by the way, I’m his stand in by the way. and so I say you I say I’m speaking for him now. And he says “Lou kahn I tell you must you must attend classes that’s one thing. Cause Being an architect you must know physics. It’s true because physics the nature Of nature you should know every part of it. feel it. it’s marvelous to know but to pass the examination I’m afraid not. Because knowledge when it comes to an individual it’s personal. Knowledge itself is in the book. it is yet not finished and never will be finished. and as soon as that’s taken from there to you it becomes personal. And if you impart this personal. you’re saying practically nothing. You’re saying something to yourself but not to the other man. so therefore you must attend class. And you’ll be examined. But all you have to do is draw physics. You needn’t tell me what it’s all about. Just draw what you felt physics gave you. And I think that would be very much constructive along the lines of my natural talents. My natural talents are such that I still do not know the size of a brick I really don’t know it. and I resist like mad knowing it. because it is not important to know it for me. For someone else it’s very important.

What bearing has this in architecture? The spaces the rooms. You can call them rooms if you like. You can call them spaces. Cause it depends on just how much you take in as the point of departure from which your creative instincts your invention and your attitudes play.... ( to be continued)

Part 4 - Lou Kahn transcript: Architecture dreams

2021-12-27T09:45:00.000-05:00

When listening to Kahn lecture about his Venice Congressional Hall design, it’s as important to listen to what Kahn didn’t talk about as much as what he did talk about. Kahn spent 6 years working on this proposal that would have spanned across the Canale delle Galeazze like a suspension bridge, with an expressed sloped post-tensioned concrete slab replete with two stair towers that would have risen from opposite banks of the canal. His proposal was ultimately rejected by city officials like Le Corbusier’s hospital, the Palazzo dei Congressi, because it didn’t work with the historical fabric of Venice.

From the onset of the project, Kahn had been warned by the city’s health commissioner, Vito Chiarelli that Venice had “innate inability to accept abstract forms embedded in its historic context,” but Kahn's refused to compromise his vision.

Kahn does not discuss the particulars of his Venice proposal, nor does he show any slides of it. Instead Kahn focuses on the importance of looking beyond the current reality and looking at the fundamental issues of a building project. At its heart, architecture is a dream… it changes the way people use a site, it inspires structural and technological innovations not yet realized. His design is a meditation on the evolution of a city, it’s a resolution to the paradox of building on water that involves public agencies that didn't exist, it’s a provocation and an uncompromising solitary vision for a new reality.

"In a recent visit to Venice. I, knowing nothing about the conditions but just realizing that what is happening to it, in a disregard for the considerations that were made a long time ago about what can make Venice a bearing city in the middle of a body a water a lagoon which is this big compared to Venice which is that big. And it’s so related to the Adriatic that allows the shallow body of water which is a lagoon to be replenished as the tide flows in and out and wash away all that renews the water around Venice and keeps a kind of balance of all the foundations and the flat areas on which you walk. With the coming of industry land was needed near the lagoon. Channels were dug for large ships to come in causing more water to come in from the Adriatic, destroying the balance of this very low amount of water that came in and out. Venice breathes… the water is a kind of breathing system you see. Which made that Venice always eventful for whatever the time of day it was part. It was a kind of water architecture.It was in which the order of water was considered seriously. As should be the order of winds, the order of sun, the order of structure, the order of construction, the order of time, and the order of spaces, and the order of movement which are all the orders that must be considered when you’re building a town for instance.

You’re not designing. Designing is already knowing everything and what you’re doing when you’re designing is you’re simply sharpening up making eloquent the elements that must be considered.

Design is the last operation. And the one that can be assigned in many many avenues. Design isn’t something… it is especially of one man really. There it isn’t. but the realizations of the inseparable parts is the design of one. That which conceives the indestructible elements that must be there as against some other place where there are other elements. That is something which is the strongest part of a conception.

This can be known as composition as it is in music. You know, a musician when he reads a sheet of music, he doesn’t read all the little details. He reads the music as fast I would turn the page practically and he sort of realizes what it is all about by simply realizing the composition. And not the design aspects of it, which are the infighting that goes in it to make this composition glorious, readable, and all that. Oh It’s a wonderful process. He wouldn’t hand it off to anybody else in the way but when people speak of having great teams on things. They can be designed in teams but provided you see there is some mind that never deviates from the inseparable parts which can be known the form of this building the form which means if you take one thing away nothing is there. Not just take it away and you have it still… you don’t. That could be part. That is a kind of order, an order of spaces which makes it so..

With all these problems in venice. The factories which are smoke belching and also all the waste that throws into the lagoon is causing a great imbalance of a lot of things just so many things you just think. If you just think of the most aggravated ecological problem, that’s it. You see… fish, fauna… everything and flora the water everything you can possibly imagine you see is disturbed by this there.

And you feel helpless. But you know as a newcomer. Humph. You don’t have the great responsibility, you’re not mayor of Venice. All of these things would tighten you up if you were mayor. you gotta talk to so many babies… and stuff so you have to you just sit back. And then just sit back and we just sort of sense that there be order, there must be an order to this, see and then you can see an order. It’s clear. You just build another Venice which is a factory. and it sits on an elevated platform with many sieves through the platform which allows the lagoon to replenish itself and not to allow land to be made without having things underneath the land you see. Let the water flow.

So you build yourself land which is just not land, that’s all. You can’t use the land there. The lagoon must have all the stretch it can so as not to make the tide rise too high on them. You lift it up and you set up an ecological government and you make this estate 3 times as big as it now. There should be no complaint to empowering the industrious. you leave them enough land to spread out. And then you set up a government, an ecological government in which every element you see is answerable to the ecological needs of Venice.

Because the land belongs to venice, so you set up an ecological government you see in this estate and you invent instruments which are called smoke eaters out of like which I have no idea what they would be but you turn to engineers to figure it out… but the point is the you make this statement because you have to make the statement and you must not think of technology if it’s ready or not. You must think in terms of an inspired technology. You don’t have to limit yourself and not consider that you have to wait for technology to be on the scene. If you’re not the dictator in this technology what kind of an architect is that? and what kind of work is it that doesn’t inspire a technology?

So therefore you need to say something outlandish and let the engineers who have that kind of mind scurry around for the answers. There’s going to be the impossible. what is not made yet is important because we actually live our life with greater acuity when we don’t think of needs. It’s disgraceful not to give needs it’s your birth right to have needs. don’t think you’re doing anything if you’re supplying needs. but if you touch the avenues of your desire that which is contained the yet not made and yet not said then you’re talking like an artist and that’s the role of man.

And so the engineer has to be yours too. He doesn’t know it, but he has to be really nice he’s a textbook ringer. you know he brings the textbook for things and and the reason for it is quite simple because he’s a servant of people who designs buildings. I’m talking about structural engineers now because he works for many people. an engineer can work easily for 50 architects and every whim of the architects he tries to satisfy. therefore he is just a servant of the object. once in a while you get a peep out of him. But in most cases you see most cases he’ll say “look I don’t think you ought to do this in concrete because it’s much cheaper to do this building in brick.” Now he’s talking about another architect where he learned this thing you see but it doesn’t apply to your building which can’t tolerate it. You wonder what’s wrong with his mind? it’s only because his mind is completely razzled dazzled by the number of servants he must feed to satisfy all these people who must be satisfied.

so I suggested this and it seemed as though to say venice is terribly important I said “all the industry in the world isn’t worth one giotto.” I said “Why don’t you consider this is as not being a difficult money problem. If you would have the problems of venice any other way it would cost a lot more. you see what was considered an industry would like to be there. only the best play the game properly. when I heard also the only industry that is in venice actually belongs to milan because they don’t have land enough to go to venice you see and they don’t to spoil their own city so they spoil venice. So this power is very helpful because you know when you see the issue there you just love the death out of it.

That is one thing when considering building in Venice. they are thinking of doing and but designs constantly comes a stopping point because the buildings there extremely charming and they’re very delicate, they’re lace like they’re unbelievable they’re just plain sheer exuberance all the buildings. Joy of living everything is there.

Now when you start to do your own scribbling and say it must be sympathetic to this you find that you‘ve go to be someone other than yourself. And I suggested in one portion of venice they build buildings on bridges none of them on the water, mind you. On the land, so the foundations are constant and the building are above and then you pick one area particularly where the bridges sort of group themselves in such a way that you get another piazza san marco probably somewhat larger but it could be a singleness from which you can see all around you as you can san marco. other places around venice you lose your way and that’s beautiful.

They never really would execute my design in venice… and I somehow wasn’t worried about it since you can’t trust this delicate lacy work to everybody. something has to happen in the establishment of a new order in venice which is not applicable in other places but is applicable there.

Now i’m sure it’s a dangerous thing that I suggested. it is my kind of way of stirring things up, but I think when I presented it, I didn’t feel accused in any way that I was playing truant or I was really doing venice wrong.

I hope nobody does it mind you but at least you shake venice into realizing something can be done. and so it was with the canals because the canals are not like Canalletto you see who visualized them full of festivity but why can’t you have boats which are restaurants? why can’t they be fantastic? you’re not going to Europe with those boats. you can make the canals live again just by new encouragements. it’s a wonderful place those things can happen. it’s very festive. now all these ideas you can put in the waste basket if you like. the point is that you’re stimulated by the problem and you’re thinking of it in terms of a new order but not a new design. something which can somehow be true to the water inspired architecture of Venice."

Colosseum Part 1 - Stealing from the Greeks

2021-11-26T00:00:00.002-05:00

Pablo Picasso said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” I saw first hand how great Christians and Roman architects stole heavily from the Greeks.

In Siracusa, I entered the Duomo di Siracusa and saw first hand the tripartite origins of the Christian church. The doric columns of the temple of Athena were incorporated into the church structure and left exposed.

In the outskirts of towns, the Greeks built large semi-circular open auditoria by excavating the stepped seating into hillsides. I saw how the Taormina, Siracusa, Segesta Greek auditoria were sited such that they were rotated away from the axes of distant mountains to create a dynamic tension between the built form and the site.

Siracusa

Siracusa embedded in hill

Taormina

Segesta

The Romans took the Greek form of auditoria, but modified it to suit their urban life and penchant for munera (gladiatorial contests). Instead of building auditoria into the outlying hillsides and integrating its siting and relationship to the surrounding landscape, the Romans built their auditoria in the heart of their cities from the ground up. Furthermore, the internal north south east west axis of the Colosseum aligns with the ancient cardo decomanus of Rome’s urban plan.

To build up their auditoria, the Romans used brick, stone, and concrete vaults like master builders. The site for the Colosseum was initially a lake in a river valley. To drain the lake, the romans installed 3000 meters of piping and drains 26 feet below the base of the valley to take the water to the Tiber River. Lead piping was used to 20 fountains and toilets inside the Colosseum structure. 220,000 tons of soil were removed from the site. On top of the drained lake, the Romans constructed a 40 foot deep concrete foundation to support the 100,000 cubic meters of travertine stone arches which were used to support the tiered seating. To execute their vaults and spans and foundations, the Romans used opus caementicum, Roman concrete. Unlike modern concrete, roman concrete does not use steel reinforcing, and it uses larger aggregate pieces bound together with cement. As a result, it was laid rather than poured.

Non-stop flow of cartloads of marble, wood, sand, and ingredients for concrete shipped from Carrara, North Africa and Greece were transported to Rome over a 10 year construction period.

Whereas columns in Greece were structural, for Romans, the doric, ionic, and Corinthian columns that line their facades of the Colosseum are half sunk into their walls and thereby decorational.

Colosseum Part 2 - Roman City Operating System v1.0

2021-11-25T16:49:00.002-05:00

Embedded in many European towns, remnants of the Roman City Operating System. At first, Roman planners developed castrum or fortified military camps in their conquest of the world. Later, to efficiently rule the world, Roman planners evolved their castra (off topic trivial fact- any English town name that ends with 'chester' like Manchester used to be a Roman castra) to develop an urban planning strategy that followed these principles:

(1) The city is composed of standardized parts.
(2) The city is organized according to social, cultural, political principles.
(3) The city accommodates constantly changing flows
(4) The city can be customized to local topographic, climactic, and cultural conditions.

Within the operating system, the following hardware is deployed to sustain the inhabitant and communicate with other cities in the empire:

(1) Basilica is a flexible building used for gatherings and commerce
(2) Capitolium is a temple of state religion
(3) Templa are religious building dedicated to god worship. Usually in the middle of the city
(4) Theatrum is used for games and performances
(5) Thermae are baths that provide city with hygiene service, socialization
(6) Arcus are monuments to commemorate military achievements. Usually located in prominent locations.
(7) Columna has similar function to arcus, used for commemorative purposes.
(8) Aquae ductus is the infrastructure system to transport water.
(9) Limites are the fortifications at the edges of cities like walls and ditches to repel invaders.
(10) Viae are the network of stone paved roads which connect the cities of the empire to each other. Usually 4-6 meters wide.

Cardo et decumanus are the primary perpendicular axes which define center of city. Cardo means hinge in Latin. The magistrate was responsible for determining the center of the new city. Based off the orthogonal axes, centuratio is the process of gridding the land for residential and agricultural purposes.

After the Forum is a centrally located outdoor space (usually situated at the intersection of the cardo et decumanus) for commerce and public social space. Many public buildings like the capitolium, basilica, and templa are adjacent to the forum thereby linking commerce and government. The forum is the place where trading for vases, animals, silver, gold, marble, olive oil, fish, spices, wheat and wine takes place.

Cosa Italy

Pompeii

Timgad Algeria

Valencia, Spain

Barcelona, Spain

Colosseum Part 3 - Sketches

2021-11-24T10:30:00.001-05:00

When I first stepped into the Colosseum 16 years ago, I sensed an underlying order. Given the crumbled state of the ruins, however, it was up to visitors like me to piece together the amphitheater and imagine how it once was. Inside the 'arena', which means 'sand' in Latin, which denoted the material that could soak up blood efficiently, 400,000 gladiators and slaves fought to their death to entertain the masses. Their last views on this fair earth were probably the blue sky and thousands of bloodthirsty raucous Romans packed into stands rooting on their warriors. Within the stands, walls and columns laid out in a perfect elliptical grid, and a multitude of stairs fitting within pie shaped wedges of space. As an architect, the real drama of the Colosseum was not in the arena, but under the stairs. As I sketched out spatial order and impressions of habitation, I could imagine concession stands selling grilled Italian sausages, throngs of Romans peeing in the bathrooms, and merchants selling souvenirs to the masses. Strip away the masonry and the walls, and you get a Heatherwick Vessel like hive of circulation.

Now as I revisit the Colosseum from afar, feverishly probing its plans, models, and sections and constructing 3 dimensional computer models trying to piece together its ideal state, I see the Colosseum Operating System more and more clearly. The Colosseum is modular Roman construction pushed to its logical extreme. Radial walls and columns define 80 bays within an elliptical grid. Within the grid, 4 typical pie shaped sections are deployed: (1) straight run stairs, switchback stairs, main north south west east entries, and radial passages. The spatial complexity of the Colosseum is surprisingly derived from only 4 typical sections for (color coded within the video) that are deployed within the bays and interconnected.

Colosseum Part 4 - Drawings

2021-11-23T13:14:00.001-05:00

To write about how Lou Kahn's experience in Rome impacted his designs in terms of geometry, organization, column spacing, and structure, (i.e., Salk Institute), I've dived into drawing the Colosseum. Online, there is surprisingly scant information about the famous amphitheater. Complicating matters is that the plans, and sections that are available conflict. The contradictory nature of drawings is probably due to the fact that the structure lies in ruins... it is up to the architects and artists to hypothesize and fill in the blanks to what was once there.

sangallo sketch

I found 2 clues to start my drawing: first, the Colosseum has 80 arches on the exterior ground floor. the clear opening between the arches is 13'-9", second, the outer ellipse is 617' by 513', and the interior ellipse is 283' by 178'. Within each of the 80 sections of the Colosseum there are 5 bay types: (1) horizontal passage (2) stairs up to 2nd level (3) switchback stairs up to 2nd level (4) switchback stairs down from 2nd level (5) stairs up to ring side seats. (marked in yellow below) That is the beauty of Roman architecture, within a 'simple' geometric order is variation that provides spatial complexity and function. It's said, the Colosseum could be cleared out in 12 minutes due to its vertical circulation design.

ground floor plan

top floor plan in progress

Surprisingly, my efforts in understanding and drawing the upper mezzanine levels of the Colosseum (which no one has done before) is riding on Vicenzo Lunardi, the man who pioneered hydrogen balloon flight. He drew crowds of 200,000 to watch him take flight in London in 1786.

In 1788, Carlo Lucangeli, architect and cabinet maker from Rome (1747-1812) took part in the test flights of Lunardi near the Mausoleum of Augustus, Rome. After several unsuccessful attempts to take off, the balloon took of with Lucangeli unintentionally aboard. He became the first person to fly over the city of Rome, including the Colosseum. The aerial perspective of the Colosseum inspired Lucangeli to devote the next 22 years of his life 1790 to 1812 to study the Colosseum. He carried out excavations of the hypogea (underground gladiator chambers) and paintstakingly made a wood model of the Colosseum at 1:60 scale is 8' by 10' by 3' high and is comprised of 70' annular pieces which fit can be disassembled to show interior circulation and sculptural details. It shows the Colosseum in it's ideal completed form, with 22 years of surveys and knowledge of the site embedded in its proposed configuration. Lucangeli's brother-in-law finished the model, Mussolini painted it over in white paint... today the model sits in the Colosseum museum. Currently, teams of Italian researchers have been photographing it, digitizing it in 3 dimensions, and writing about it for the past 10 years to gain an understanding of the Colosseum structure.

Colosseum Part 5 - Operating System

2021-11-22T02:59:00.001-05:00

Colosseum OS 80 AD

(1) Make an ellipse with 80 subdivisions, 20'-0" spacing between columns on the perimeter. Cardo decomanus (north south east west) axis aligns to city grid and are unnumbered gates. Gladiators enter from the east, dead gladiators exit to the west. The emperor enters through the south, the magistrate enters from the north,

(2) Add columns, walls and stairs.

(3) Within 80 wedges of the ellipse, there are 5 typical modular sections

(4) The sections are arranged symmetrically around the ellipse and allow 50,000 people to flow in and out of their seating within 12 minutes.

Colosseum Part 6 - Brontosaurus and Class Structure Theory

2021-11-21T00:30:00.001-05:00

For over a week I had diarrhea bordering on ulcerative colitis. The last meal I ate prior to the onslaught was tonkatsu ramen. Before that, I don’t recall eating anything unusual. In fact as an amateur forensic watery stool specialist, I could not logically deduce the cause of my illness as the opening to my digestive tract was covered by a Covid filtering mask that should’ve blocked any virus particles or salmonella floating in the air. So like Job, I just thought God was just fucking with me. He sometimes crosses over into my atheistic realm and tests my will.

The chicken and carrot soup that usually palliates such stomach illnesses didn’t work. In fact, it made it worse. 3 days into uncontrolled bowel movements I realized my system couldn’t handle any fiber at all... not even boiled carrots. So I ended up drinking a little clear chicken broth, and a couple spoons of plain yogurt every hour for 5 days before my body stabilized enough where I could handle egg yolks. By day eight I was eating a dozen egg yolks and soup. At the height of my stomach bug, I had lost 15 pounds, I thought I would never eat solid food again, plain yogurt never tasted so good held in my mouth, and I found myself daydreaming eating ramen and bananas like a normal human being.

Between my constant visits to toilet, I was feverishly preparing a fellowship application to do architectural research in Rome. I spoke to my first professor in school to see how he won the fellowship. He told me he had Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, and famed architectural historian Vincent Scully (who taught Maya Lin and Norm Foster among others) write his recommendations. I will not have any such Pritzker Prize architects vouching for me as I found out my only Pritzker contact, Glenn Murcutt is extremely busy and not writing recommendations for anybody now. Great. I just have 3 regular architects recommending me.

Without steady employment, I’ve been working 18 hour days on my fellowship application. To a casual outside observer, I probably looked as though I was wasting vast amounts of time formatting a book 4 times. For example, to update the typography to make it more legible and Asian scroll-like, I reformatted Finding Utzon for 6”x9” printing because the book looked unwieldy and un-Japanese at 8.5”x11” only to find out cheap online publishers can’t print on the inside covers of 6”x9” booklets. When quotations for custom local 6”x9” book printing exceeded $60 per book, I went back to formatting the comic for 11”x17” online viewing, and finally 8.5”x11” book printing formatting with gutters down the middle of the page.

A typical fellowship application for Roman architecture is esoteric and academic. In looking at previous year's proposals, successful applicants focus on arcane subjects like corners, or fragments of the city that have lost context, or particularly obscure buildings in Rome. Most people who apply for Rome fellowships are professors who can afford to take sabbaticals to travel. I’m applying as a professional who would ordinarily never have had the time to leave an ongoing project to go to Rome, but is currently unemployed and thus applying to Rome to find something to replace employment. Capiche? So I thought to compete with professors, I would prepare some academic research about the Colosseum to insert into my application to show my potential for independent academic research.

The final application is still in flux, but the academic research I’ll be presenting focuses on brontosaurus shaped stairs, and articulating how Romans reinforced their class structure through circulation: the gladiators got the glory and direct entry to the arena, the emperors and senators got the best view, the military got to protect the leaders, the citizens were stuck in the middle, and the architects got the longest promenade.

Colosseum skin. 80 radial entries were assigned to the 80,000 attendees to expedite efficient entry and exit into and out of the stadium.

Colosseum guts

Colosseum walls

Colosseum without walls. 79 AD

strip away the walls of the colosseum and the stairs and ramps resemble Heatherwick's Vessel in NYC

Articulation of circulation and class structure - Roman organization

16 years ago I jotted down some theories about the Colosseum in my notebooks. I was amazed by the simplicity of the design... 80 equal bays with an elliptical grid. Within each bay, a typical section: a straight run stair, switchback stair, or straight radial passage. Joined together, these sections comprise a 3 dimensionally complex spatial experience. People have devoted their lives to this building. A german archaeologist just spent the last 20 years excavating the hypogeum to reconstruct the gladiator and animal dungeons and their elevators to arena level. 300 years ago, cabinet maker Lucangeli took an accidental inaugural hot air balloon ride over Rome, fell in love with the aerial sight of the Colosseum below and then spent over 20 years building a huge ideal wood model of it that could be taken apart. Currently, I’m spending every waking moment learning computer modeling (to augment my employability) and reconstructing the Colosseum in 3D to understand it.

Lucangeli Wood Model

Brontosaurus stairs

Brontosaurus detail

Brontosaurus in habitat notice passageway under belly through legs

walking the corridors of the colosseum

modular construction of the colosseum in color coded sections

Colosseum Part 7 - Co-loss-eum

2021-11-20T16:59:00.001-05:00

As i was applying to the Rome prize i asked a former teacher, turner brooks, who had won it in the 1980's for advice. he chuckled as he recounted how he went to rome to look at baroque to learn how to infuse those crazy forms into vermont wooden structures. then he confessed that for his successful application bid, he had philip johnson, robert venturi, and vincent scully write his recommendations. 2 pritzker prize winners and a legendary architectural historian that had taught the likes of maya lin and norm foster. the only pritzker prize connection i had was glen murcutt who notoriously does not communicate via e-mail and takes 6 months to respond to written letters.

despite the lack of flashy recommenders, i proceeded to apply.... learning 3d rendering programs and analyzing the colosseum to show the kind of research i would do in rome if given the opportunity to speculate on the ruins. i found out today i unfortunately did not make the next round of the application process.

Where Poetry and Architecture Intersect (Part 1)

2021-10-18T09:19:00.006-04:00

At the inside corner of the L-shaped Brion family cemetery he spent 10 years designing, in a spot where dead flowers used to be thrown away, Carlo Scarpa is buried upright standing up in knight’s position. "If there was an elegant way to die, it was his: he died in Japan in the land he had loved most, after Veneto where he first saw the light. He was wrapped in a great Kimono, an honour the people of that far off land reserve for their greatest sons and laid in a wooden box, a bed a cradle,” as the poet Ungaretti called it- “not a coffin- sealed with flowing white ribbons.”

Scarpa died in Sendai Japan, after falling down a set of concrete stairs. According to his New York Times obituary, “after the fall, he spent 11 days in the hospital before he died in the 11th month of the year, unable to talk and only able to write backwards, he created tiny illustrated books for friends, making beauty until nearly the last moment.” It’s fitting that the “Numerology which so intrigued him: The number 11 — the number of letters in his name, though he never gave a formal explanation — is buried everywhere in his buildings, as well as in his hundreds of strikingly beautiful, impressionistic architectural renderings” was also embedded in the last days of his death.

Why was he in Japan, at the height of his career, at the age of 72 so far from his home in Venice? He was, he often said, ‘‘a Byzantine at heart, a European sailing towards the Orient.’’ For this trip, Scarpa was specifically in Japan tracing the footsteps of famed Haiku poet Basho’s Hiruzumai journey

Basho started his recount of his Narrow Passage to the North like this: “Prologue Days and months are the travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of the ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind- filled with a strong desire to wander”…

In developing Brion tomb, Scarpa wrote of poetry and architecture : “I would like to explain the Brion Cemetery…I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry. The place for the dead is a garden. I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes.”

Lured to Japan by Basho’s poetry, Scarpa’s voyages to the island taught him “the importance of harnessing water through arched bridges and constructing recessed floors that allowed the current to become part of the building — crucial for someone working in a city built on canals. Japan also inspired some of his favorite motifs: spareness and balance, the absence of the unnecessary, the imperfect grid of the shoji screen” which he would poetically embed in his own work.

Before his own untimely death, Lou Kahn’s last writing was a poem about Scarpa’s work - ‘Beauty’ the first sense Art the first word then Wonder Then the inner realization of ‘Form’ The sense of the wholeness of inseparable elements. Design consults…Nature to give presence to the elements A work of art makes manifest the wholeness of the ‘Form’ a symphony of the selected shapes of the elements. In the elements the joint inspires ornament, its celebration. The detail is the adoration of Nature.”

Death by Dentist (prologue to forthcoming Isamu Noguchi architectural analysis)

2021-08-15T17:24:00.014-04:00

I was a couple months overdue for a teeth cleaning but dreaded visiting the dentist because I found out coworkers were getting very sick despite being fully vaccinated. K. was remarking more persistently I was getting stains on my teeth and they seemed to be worsening by the week. So I booked an appointment.

Immediately after I arranged the appointment, I started regretting my decision. I got morose and asked my kids, “how will you feel when I’m gone? Are you going to miss me?”

K. said, “Stop the guilt trips. You and the kids went to the dentist in the height of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines, so why stop now?”

I replied, “but now it seems different. With all the media focusing on Delta’s high infectiousness and death toll and images of burning funeral pyres on new delhi streets… it seems like it’s more dangerous….”

“so why are you going to the dentist?”

“I wouldn’t have gone, but you kept glancing at the stains on my teeth.”

Everyone laughed nervously when I start pinning the cause of my impending demise on K’s criticisms of my dental situation. We live in dark times, and my humor is darker.

Life in times of covid means you literally put your life on the line doing the most mundane tasks that involve breathing in public. One day you’re buying roast beef at the grocery store, sending a package at the post office, eating potato salad in the park, or riding a subway, and 2 weeks later you’re intubated with an oxygen mask saying goodbye to loved ones through a hospital iPad held by strange nurses dressed in full protective gear.

To make myself feel better, I started researching the risks of going to the dentist during covid. I read in some scientific papers that dental cleaning generated aerosol water spray substantially dilutes any potential viral presence…. I got a harebrained idea that to limit my exposure to the delta variant I could alternate between holding my breath and breathing through my mouth while the hygienist was cleaning my teeth. The water mists would somehow form a protective vapor shield to guard me from airborne covid nanoparticles.

I go to a dentist who sets up atypical shop in the basement floor of a brownstone with no individual rooms. Imagine the scene, there I sat in a deathtrap with 3 other reclined patients in one living room all with their mouths gaping wide open spewing virus particles all over the place.

2 of the patients were teenagers with functioning thymuses and then there was an old guy. I started thinking of how the studies in Israel show covid vaccine protection wears off over time till it confers no prophylaxis in 6 months. if these guys were vaccinated in March then I was kind of screwed. If they were vaccinated recently, that would be better… but then again Pfizer only offers 72% protection against Delta so I was kind of screwed. the delta strain in nyc is 90% prevalent.... in my neighborhood 70% of people are vaccinated… so the chances that one was not vaccinated was 30%.... but then again, fully vaccinated people carry loads of virus as shown by 73% of partyers in Provincetown who were shedding massive amounts of virus asymptomatically thereby spreading covid around cape cod. I read china did extensive studies of contact tracing people riding trains next to infected passengers. About 30% of the bystanders sitting in close proximity were infected after the trip. But those studies were made when the wuhan strain was prevalent. So as I was trying to figure out complex actuarial statistics and probabilities of my death in my head, the dentist was scraping plaque and trying to chit chat with me like how I was doing in life, had I seen any great movies lately, and so on.

I was kind of holding my breath so as not to breathe too much over the course of the cleaning. I answered her tersely but politely, then breathed through my mouth while the dentist water jet was causing me to gag every few minutes. i imagined the 3 other patients looking over at me choking in my dental chair, gasping for air. I was the one who looked and sounded like a covid infected patient.

2 weeks later, I somehow managed to escape the delta variant, and survive gargling and choking to death on fluoridated water to write this philosophical tale. Every day I wake up after potentially exposing myself to a deadly virus and can breathe clearly, it’s like a blessing. I have a gratitude for the small things in life. If I were thinking religiously, I would look up to the sky and thank god that I had the opportunity to clean my teeth of stains, didn’t have any cavities, and not have to visit the dentist again till next year.

Then if I start thinking like a cold hard atheist, I wonder what compelled me to go to the dentist during a pandemic in the first place? Who am I really, and what destructive force within me makes such reckless decisions like this? Some force within me just put my life on the line for a couple stains on my teeth. If I had died it would have been the worst decision of my life. Indeed, Nietzsche summed it up in his Genealogy of Morals quite succinctly

“We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? ….. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point." Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not knowledgeable people.”

Two centuries later, Woody Allen took it one step further in Hannah and Her Sisters and said, “Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God – I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”

We do things, we don’t know why we do them, and yet we do them over and over again.

The Arrival - Indonesia

2021-06-30T23:23:00.001-04:00

From the airplane through the dim blue dusk light I could see the ships on the calm Jakarta bay. By the time I had disembarked the plane, night had already covered the city. It was a three hour air-conditioned taxi ride to Depok. We were insulated in the taxi from more than just heat. The sweet smell of cloves and leaded gas, the crowds of people in the noisy darkness, the fried rice and Gado Gado stands that line the street all the way to Depok were just outside the taxi window. At that point I felt like going home already. I had visions of New England. The crisp autumn air, colored trees, and clear running streams. Then I looked outside the car window to see that the traffic and the people in the roadside stands were unstirred despite my visions.

Ecocircles

I was an outsider, a trained biochemist trying to break into the conservation biology world. I relished listening in on the conversations between the scientists. Across the table sat the head of national parks in Indonesia and Conservation International Jatna Supriatna. “The interesting thing about this archipelago is that Indonesia used to be one landmass. Now all the species are on the islands and some have been isolated for years. The scientists around me talked about biology’s increasingly prominent role in conservation — its usefulness investigating the evolution of species, genetic diversity between species, and current trends in migration and mating behaviors. Then Jatna talked about his training. He had gone to University of New Mexico. Homework for his herpetology classes meant catching rattlesnakes. Next he talked about his primary research in Sulawesi. He had spent several years there trapping monkeys in the jungles. He once caught several monkeys at night but decided to wait till morning to take blood samples. When he returned, the monkeys had been killed. They had been slaughtered to death by local villagers who viewed the monkeys as agricultural nuisances. Jatna subsequently talked to the village’s chief to have the the town know that the macaque maura was an endangered species. That night 50 angry town farmers surrounded his house with knives and machetes intent to drive him out of town.

Lenteng Agung

We checked into a boarding house by the University of Indonesia. The Indonesians thought it was funny when we said we are living in LA- Lenteng Agung, that is. There, the women live on the first floor while the men occupy the second and third floors. Across the backyard, the speakers of the mosque start blaring prayers at 4 o’clock in the morning. The prayers sound as if Martians have landed on earth. At first a staticky screechy prayer creaks out of the speakers. It is quickly followed by a deep monotone melody chanted by an imam. Soon the oscillating buzz of hundreds of praying Muslims accompanies the imam’s chants. The voice for the speaker crescendos as the imam professes his worshippers’ love and respect for the supreme God Allah. I lay awake in my bed staring at the wall waiting for the strange alien sounds to stop. Eventually I manage to sleep somehow only to be a woken up by the 7 AM prayer shift.

Indonesia - Language and Customs

2021-06-29T23:14:00.000-04:00

Bahasa Indonesia

Indonesian is an easy language to pick up as there are no tenses, conjugations, or tricky pronunciations. There are a few rules: the subject precedes modifiers, add a ‘lah’ at the end of a verb to indicate a command, add ‘mem’ to the beginning of verbs if they are followed by verb and object. Many words have been taken and modified from the English, Dutch, and Chinese languages. Most of the Dutch words in the Indonesian lexicon are remnants of the Dutch colonial era and concern tax and monetary issues. Indonesian words like ‘lelah’ and ‘semua’ sound like and have similar meanings to their Chinese counterparts leile and shenme. Indonesian words like transmigrasi, expedisi, biologi... have easily detectable English origins.

A few common expressions in Indonesian are funny. Membuang air kecil, or to throw small water means to piss in English. Membuang air besar, or to throw big water, means to shit. Male genitalia is called burning dan telur or bird and eggs.

A few English words which have interesting Indonesian roots are orangutan, rambutan, and boogeyman. Orang means man and hutan means forest in Indonesian. Literally, orangutan translates to man of the forest. Rambut means hair in Indonesian. Quite aptly, they named a red hairy tropical fruit Rambutan. the Bugis are the tribe of people who live in the southern peninsula of Sulawesi. They were the crazy people infamous for charging at the Dutch colonial ships and artillery. The term boogie man has been ever since for crazy fearless people.

In addition to the national language, each region and culture within Indonesia has its own language. “Pa, Loka mako tana kana parekai ceba que?” means ‘Mister, can you tell me if there are any monkeys here?’ in bugis language. “Pa mau tanya ada yang pelihara monkey disini” is the same phrase’s Indonesian equivalent. For monkey alone, we used a plethora of different appellations: lancing, Monyet, kera, ongki, ceba, boti, yakis, seba....

Here’s an example of a translated Indonesian joke. “What’s the difference between a monkey and a professor? A professor has no hair on his head and a monkey has no hair on its butt. A dirty limerick; “anu saya besar, besar any saya, kalau tidak besar, bukan anu saya” means “I am big, big am I, if it’s not big it’s not me. Obviously the limerick concerns the birds. A lewd pun I would recite to break the ice in conversations was “apa bedanya dengan jalan di desa dan jalan di Jakarta? Jalan di desa banyak jalan berlubang-lubang, jalan do Jakarta banyak lubang ber-jalan-jalan.” What is the difference between the streets of villages and the streets of Jakarta? The streets of the villages have a lot of holes, the streets of Jakarta has a lot of holes (slang for whores) walking.

Indonesian Social Customs

I had my first lesson in Indonesian customs at a restaurant. Nature was calling. I looked around urgently but couldn’t find a washroom. I flagged down a waiter and uttered my first words in Indonesian, “Dimana kamar mandi?” or as they say in Chinese “ce suo zai nar?” or as they say in french “ou se trouvent les toilettes?” or as they say in english, “where are the toilets?” The waiter directed me to a dirty room with a hole in the floor and then proceeded to fill a bucket of water in the sink. I thought my query in Indonesian was somehow misunderstood and walked away puzzled . Then fellow researcher Myron (who’d been living in Indonesia for a year studying tarsiers) sensed my confusion. He came and put his arm around my shoulder while redirecting my gaze back to the hole in the floor. “Indonesians shit and piss in that hole, use their left hand and water to wipe their ass, and then flush their crap down with that bucket of water sitting in the sink.” I responded with ‘oh’ and mysteriously didn’t feel the urge to use the bathroom anymore.

Now what do bathroom logistics have to do with customs? A lot. Never use your left hand in greeting somebody... you just used it to wipe your ass. Also, never eat with your left hand— the right hand, right and left feet being cleaner alternatives. People don’t use knives or forks there to eat, they use their hands. The obvious difference between a first and third world country is how far removed food preparation is from the ass wiping process. In America we use toilet paper as our first barrier between ass and mouth, the we wash our hands with soap to kill any stray pathogenic microbes, then we eat with forks and knives that have been cleaned in drinkable tap water and soap. In Indonesia, they don’t use toilet paper, seldom use soap to clean their hands, prepare food with their marginally ‘rinsed’ hands, then eat with their hands and bowls ‘cleaned’ in magic hepatitis Giardia water and soap. Within a month, I was running into bushes, shitting green uncontrollable turds for a week as my body ‘acclimated’ to Indonesian hygienic standards. The grad student I was assisting, Ben, lost 20 pounds to giardia. His doctor told him he looked quite skullular when he returned to the States.

We had the delight of waiting in the immigration office in Ujung Pandang for a week in August. There, I learned a lot of conventions concerning official state business. First, wearing a hat in government offices is strictly forbidden. Also forbidden are flip-flops, shorts, and white T-shirts. I made four separate trips between the immigration office and our car in the parking lot to change my attire. In a country of 95°F and unbearable humidity, shorts are never worn. It is dishonorable to wear shorts because the rebel student government protesters of the 1960s wore shorts. Like now, back then protesters of the government were subsequently labeled communist and executed. Hence people who wore shorts became extinct and never passed on their jeans (genes). Never put your hands on your hips, or show the bottom of your feet, as these are indications that you want to start a fight. And finally, Indonesians become very nervous if you stand. They will always say ‘silakhan duduk’ — which means “please have a seat.”

In a 90% Muslim country, dating is not taken very lightly. I met many students at University of Indonesia who were pushing 25 and had never kissed before. Moreover, many women wear Jibabs — sheets which cover everything except for the eyes and the palms. I tried in futility for three hours to convince a woman with stunning palms and eyes to take off her jibab , but she said she will only be seen without it by her family and her husband. In her refusal, she turned down my marriage proposal and $40,000 in unmarked bills. It’s startling that the population in this country is 180 million and rapidly growing. When two people do date, they subsequently waste no time proliferating — sometimes siring 10 children. Life for Muslims is sacred, hence the lack of contraception or population control

There is less personal privacy there. Everywhere you will meet people will ask the following set of questions. “where are you from? (This question always comes first no matter what) where are you staying? where are you going? how much does it cost to stay where you are staying? do you have a lot of money?” and for me, the questions extended to “you’re not from Japan? are you sure? where is your country? when are you going back? What’s your name? What kind of name is that? how come you don’t look like an American? what’s your religion? how can you not have a religion? what’s going to happen when you die?” And so on.

Possessions are also public here. If you leave a guitar sitting in the car, someone is liable to reach in, take it out, and start playing it. The same rule applies to books, drawings, hats, sandals, etc... Although there is less privacy here, it also means there’s more of a sense of community, trust, and family. A handful of my conversations with locals ended up in their offering of rooms for me to stay in. Not only did they offer a room for a night but sometimes stays for three months for me, my friends and family if they ever came to Bali as well!

Project Gibbon

2021-06-28T22:43:00.000-04:00

For the first two weeks, Ben a PhD grad student from Columbia, Akbar a masters candidate at University of Indonesia, and Taufan, a conservation worker from Bandung University and I took a road trip around western and central Java sampling Hylobates Molloch or ‘oa’ as the Indonesians call the gibbons. Ben, checking in at 6 foot and 3 inches and I, sat cramped sideways in the back of a stinky old, “back-door-has-to-be-opened-from-the-outside” beat up Suzuki jeep. Gibbons are extremely hard to track in the forest, so with our limited time and ample laziness we took blood samples from pets and zoo animals for DNA analysis. Upholding rigorous scientific methodologies, we interviewed their owners of their pet gibbons' provenance of capture to locate them geographically. There are only 2000 gibbons left in the world today. Gibbons are a species of ape. Their current route to extinction is aided by their loyal mating behavior. They mate for life, and if one made dies or is captured the remaining mate remains single for the rest of its life. They have leathery small black faces, is gray fine haired coats, and long arms and legs specially adapted for swinging through trees. We inspected pet gibbons in the back of gas stations, in backyards, in cages over lakes, in cages outside houses, over a fishpond at a Muslim religious school, etc... Gibbons in captivity have significantly shorter lifespans compared to those left in the wild. Like humans, gibbons in solitary confinement are prone to disease, unsanitary conditions, and depression.

Along the route we would occasionally stop off at natural wonders. We swam in the warm Indian ocean at night, hiked up yellow is hot sulfur waterfalls, drove through rustling tea plantations terraced on mountainsides....

The process of taking blood is rather straightforward. For those interested in attempting this task: (1) first catch the gibbon with a net, slipknot , or by hand. (2) inject it’s muscle tissues with ketamine tranquilizer. (3) Wait for it to become drowsy and sleepy. (4) Feel for its vein in its inner thigh. (5) While feeling the pulse of the gibbon’s vein with your left middle finger insert the needle at a 30 to 45° angle right on your finger and then draw the blood into the syringe. (6) Lyse the cells immediately in SDS buffer to prevent clotting (7) Freeze the sample as soon as possible. Although drawing blood is relatively easy, tranquilizing them is not. Like most humans, gibbons don’t enjoy long needles stuck in them. Unlike most humans, gibbons will bite, jump, swing and screech to avoid being pricked. Our most difficult encounter with gibbons was at the Bandung Zoo. There, four gibbons live in spacious high ceiling yet affordable black cage. They would swing 30 feet above us on the top of the cage. We spent hours walking and climbing around the cage attempting to bait them with delicious bananas. The gibbons were smarter than we looked and were content to ignore us and swing freely high above. Finally, the zookeepers went inside the cage with nets and brought the gibbons down. We suddenly became the main spectacle for throngs of curious Indonesian spectators who observed us in the cage as strange foreigners catching, tranquilizing and drawing blood from their zoo’s gibbons.

Akbar

2021-06-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

A 32-year-old master's student from the province of Aceh, northern Sumatra. He would always sport a red Blackhawks hockey team cap, shades, and a locked fanny pack. He drove us around Western Java on our gibbon road trip. Fearlessly, he passed cars from the left, from the right, around blind turns, in traffic. He had once raced cars and felt the need to continue the recreation on the windy trafficked roads of Java. He later revealed his cousin drove even faster and could even drive on two wheels.

Akbar’s outdoor experience included spending a year near Palu studying and ebony forest, laborious forestation and tree growth studies on the Togian islands, and sampling oa and macaques all over Indonesia. He would tell us of his encounters with black poisonous snakes by the caves in the Togians, the sea snakes, and how he would just sleep outside in a hammock when he was doing data collections.

He was a player and wasn’t bashful about making that fact known. Several times he would tell me of his exploits... Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian — he had experienced it all. One night he was intent on bringing me out whoring with him. While I declined to participate myself, I accompanied him in the back alleys of one town we were staying at. There, as the women watched TV, had conversations, or played cards, men could pass by their homes and view and pick them out through their living room windows. Akbar brought one girl back to the hotel that night. I continued to roam around, and was actually offered interesting conversation and food by a pimp and two whores, ( a man, his wife and his wife’s friend). Needless to say, I expanded my vocabulary that night. Afterwards, Akbar noted his whore’s enthusiasm, skill, and cleanliness. Beyond women, he also liked fish. Fish heads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.