Architecture Hot and Cold

Richard Sennett's The Conscience of the Eye; The Design and Social Life of Cities comes highly recommended by this blog. The frontispiece includes a quote from Goethe:

From early on I have suspected that the so important sounding task "Know thyself" is a ruse of a cabal of priests. They are trying to seduce man from activity in the outside world, to distract him with impossible demands; they seek to draw him into a false inner contemplation. Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world - the world which he only comes to know is himself and himself only in it.

The book is introduced with a discussion about how "The ancient Greek could use his or her eyes to see the complexities of life."

The temples, markets, playing fields, meeting places, walls, public statuary, and paintings of the ancient city represented the culture's values in religion, politics, and family life. It would be difficult to know where in particular to go in modern London or New York to experience, say, remorse. Or were modern architects asked to design spaces that better promote democracy, they would lay down their pens: there is no modern equivalent to the ancient assembly. (p. xi)

He is using the ancient Greek experience to say something very important about our own experience of, and the way we "see", the modern city.


Inside and outside! Connections and dis-connections becomes a major theme:

The divide between inner subjective experience and outer, physical life expresses in fact a great fear which our civilization has refused to admit, much less to reckon. (p. xii)

He ends the introduction explaining how ancient Greeks (I guess he means the Athenians) were no sentimentalists, but that their encounters with difficulty and diversity "was instead thought to be that through exposure to the world the individual gradually found his or her orientation, found how to keep a balance." (p.xiii)

This condition the Greeks called sophrosyne, which could be translated as "grace" or "poise". Today we would say such a person keeping his or her balance in the world is "centered". A city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life. Through exposure to others, we might learn how to weigh what is important and what is not. We need to see differences on the streets or in other people neither as threats nor as sentimental invitations, rather as necessary visions. They are necessary for us to learn how to navigate life with balance, both individually and collectively.

Sennett, still referencing the ancient Greeks, then connects the idea of seeing with acting, or making!

But for the Greeks, to balance oneself one had to act as well as look. The result of caring about what one sees is the desire to make something. The Greeks called this desire poiesis, from which we derive the English word "poetry," but their word was broader than one art in scope. the balanced person wants to make a speech, a battle, love, as well as a poem with the same qualities of grace and poise. As a result of his or her own engagement in making or doing things carefully, sophrosyne and poiesis were intimately related.

Whilst Sennett refuses to go so far as Donald Olsen in his book The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna, this blogger is very tempted to flirt with this notion.