I go Hugo

It’s kind of a crazy day here today, don’t feel like I can write as much as I would like today. Yet I have all kinds of things to discuss:

1. My two hour lunch at work, delicious Italian food and gnocchi.
2. The death of architecture, as described by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
3. The state of the brown line this morning, as opposed to yesterday morning.

For now I’ll just keep writing till the ladies need me again, it’s been sporadic, but when they need me I need to jump, so jump I shall.

Victor Hugo Quasimodo huh? He tends to go on and on for pages about one thing or another, some of these things I’ve skipped, some of these things I read with interest. Such as his diatribe on the Death of Architecture. Which to him, was printing. Quotes of course, are Hugo’s.

“The book will destroy the building”

He states more or less, that before the printing, architecture was how we explained ourselves, how we told our history, even how we rebelled. He talks long and hard about ways that architects of old used to rebel against authority in their buildings, things people wouldn’t notice unless they knew to look for it.

But then:

“The great accident of an architect of genius may occur in the twentieth century, as that of Dante did in the thirteenth; but architecture will never again be the social art, the collective art, the dominant art. The great poem, the great edifice, the great work of humanity, will no longer be built; it will be printed.”

There’s a Trivial Pursuit question “What is known as the Mother of all the Arts”? and the answer, is architecture.

I suppose that is how we explained ourselves, told our stories, hieroglyphics and pyramids and building and masonry and religion and all of it broiled up into one big huge mammoth book.

Anyhoo, the train was different this morning, suffice it to say, we’ll move on to that later.

Gotta go jump.