The Geometry of Beauty and the Corruption of California

There is in San Francisco a store I go to when I am sick for home and want to look at things that are good. It has not only toys of Tintin and Babar, but also books and music CDs. Today there is something new: the books of the Modernist architecture!

I ask there the man why a store of toy can have these things. “I like it just,” he says, “as far as I'm concerned, Tintin is just another example of good design. ”

Thus I gave him the money. I bought the Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition, to show texts (purportingly!) fundamental forms of the essential geometry in nature, architecture, and furnishing at the house.

One year ago I would say, this book is refutation of Mr. Lord! All things - chairs, seashells, automatic manufacturers of coffee - are reducible in this test with the constellations of geometrical forms simple. The modernism is not manufacture simply of a house in the shape of a cube - triangles, and the circles are allowed too!

Even there is an analysis of a print of Jules Cheret showing his composition is based on a pentagram, the result of a pentagon reversed incribed in another pentagon. In America it is perhaps a problem, but since majority of the French are Satanists already it is without concern with us.

I always believe the centrality of geometry in all vision experience. It is natural to think of the first master, Corbusier, in this context. Corbusier is both the avatar and destruction of the movement - his powers too great for his control. Now they burn the buildings of his vision, and it is true he made prisons and served dictators. Perhaps he was trying to free Stalin's mind. Hhis design for the Palace of the Soviets is here - now you see he can understand: curves are not so bad. There are not only squares, but circles and spirals, too.

Maybe this is heresy, and I will be burned too. It is the corruption of this place California. Brecht said “The LA” was a place where “you can rot without feeling it. ” When I came to this place a man said to me that San Francisco purifies you completely or corrupts completely. Perhaps I was here too long. When I now look at a house I sometimes see just a house, when I look at a coffee maker maybe I want a coffee drink, when I look at a shell sometimes I see just a shell…

The Guardian offers more analysis of Modernism (I cannot have enough!) here.