On perspective
A minor street runs parallel to the major avenues pine and spruce. Parked vehicles on the one side and open road for traffic on the other. A one way passage flanked by brownstones locked into an eternal staring contest and ginkgo trees with their great awkward limbs standing guards on both sides - caught, it would seem, day dreaming about the sky. The homes, syncopated like couplets or twins: nearly identical but wearing different bows. All personality here is reduced to the design of ones flower boxes or the things put on display: surfaced rhizomes, hanging disco balls, resting kittens, opaque curtains, prayer cards, and pink tulips far past their bloom.
What new thing can be said about the urban except that a floating bee knocks at my door?
Standards are the annihilation of perspective. And “architecture operates in accordance with standards” Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture.
In those early days of the pandemic when personal responsibility was not yet clear and parts of the world were still rehabilitating themselves to the fast changing terms of normalcy, we boarded a train to some far suburb of Philadelphia. I had suggested we play the game 20 questions that will make you fall in love because I was suspect that my company was indeed in love with another. This is what one does when they have become exhausted with turning over questions of personal pursuit. Evidence of love elsewhere is sought for what it can instruct to the observer. But alas, Eros landed no arrows that day, as far as I am aware, but my reading list nonetheless grew:
“What was one text that you think was important for you to have read?”
“Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture.’
Almost a year passed and I had still made no effort to retrieve the book. One would think that such a remarkable year suspended in a uniquely sedimented relationship to space would indeed encourage the reader’s pursuit, and it did, but most of my time was simply spent crushing garlic and writing to H.
Gabriella was the smartest student in Wallace Elementary Schools 3rd grade class 2B. Leanza was her best friend and we texted; the philistines attempt at an Erdos number. At the time, she had told the class her dream was to become an architect, a word whose meaning I did not know. Eager to hide my shameful ignorance and liken myself to the smartest girl I knew, My dream was also to become an architect he shared.
My earliest memory of being moved by a building was unsurprisingly at church. A restless child with no appetite for moralisms but cautiously interested in self-destructive ritualisms (I would later become a smoker), the weekly sermons were a test in endurance that I regularly failed. For all the boredom father Alex summonsed in me, Our Lady of Grace Church did offer at the very least much to observe and day dream about. Like an overturned ship, the house of prayer was massive and we sat in the hearth of its belly. Fine doric columns rose from the pews and connected with the roof where elegant lines and scaffolding scattered themselves at the site of their structural kiss. The ceiling was painted a dull blue but studded with perfect golden stars across the buildings upper galaxy. It was as if the architects knew the people who prayed under its shelter, entered the space for no other reason than to think about what they had just left outside. The young church cover indeed did just that. Ignoring all the peeling paint.
So it wasn’t wonder that the building stirred within me. It was nothing like the time I first climbed the eastern staircase of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, nor the first morning I saw 322 Delancey St singing red brick in the sun, not even like the time I entered the tiny dorm room looking over a hill that ran into a Connecticut beyond that belonged to a boy who would one day mean too much. It was none of these things; but the built church spoke to me in a quiet voice offering something of an escape from its ennui. “We touch the axis of harmony” says Corbusier to this feeling I attempt to describe.
Both Jazaret and Micah have said “perspective” is part of why they are here. The perspective of white passing indigeneity or of authors about 10 years their senior. Though I read and love with a fury, I no longer consciously exalt in the virtue of perspective to orient my intentions. Part of being colored means distrusting in the distrust pointed inwards and sometimes even out. Though perspective here has been raised as a claim of variety, and ironically made notable because of its singularity between two of our youth, the way we talk about perspective is distinctly about a vanishing difference.
Idiosyncrasy of this sort was corrosive and anti-evolutionary to Corbusier which is why he sought to usher in a new age of architectural pedagogy and practice through the science of standards. Source, origin, seed, a thing by which to build from and in effect, abolish perspective.
The child in me asks why they said perspective and what earned the world its explanatory salience. Was it just the easy refrain into a national repository of moral rhetoric that get circulated and passed along like local legends; compelling and almost always impossible to verify. Or does it signify something deeper. A distrust in the generatively of their owner’s perspective to borrow their word. To speed this along: I don’t know but all I need is to ask.
Why are you here?
What will keep you here?
What does PAR mean to you?
As he stepped out into the morning, I caught the golden glow of this now familiar block through the glass door of our vestibule. He cut left and exited the frame with an abruptness that falls off like the final verb of a poem. As he inhaled that first breath of morning air, a fresh release so clean it feels dense with meaning and philosophy. As he saw the eastern green leaves catch the light of the sun, showing their truth to those of us watching. As he became more and more a perspective far off.
Did he think of me?