ENGINEERING REASONS FOR BEAUTIFUL BUILDINGS. Chicago architects usually seem to be proud of engineering innovations and enjoy explaining how features of their buildings are intended to solve engineering problems rather than aesthetic considerations. So I was pleased by Mies’s explanation in one of the articles on 860-880 Lake Shore Drive that although design elements in the building were required for strength, the real reason was that “without the steel section [I-beams] attached to the corner columns… it did not look right.” The obituary on Bruce Graham cites his pride in tube construction, which uses an external steel frame rather than an internal cage of steel. His Hancock Building and his Sears Tower used tube construction. Of the nine tubes in the Sears Tower, only two reach the top. Graham was proud that the tubes permitted the use of less steel and made it stronger. He demonstrated the design to his engineering partner with a package of cigarettes.
ENGINEERING REASONS FOR BEAUTIFUL BUILDINGS.
March 12th, 2010ARCHITECTURE FOR COMFORT—MIES VAN DER ROHE.
March 12th, 2010ARCHITECTURE FOR COMFORT—MIES VAN DER ROHE. An obituary in the Wall Street Journal (March 10) for Bruce Graham, who designed the Hancok Building and the Sears Tower in Chicago, included a story about Mies van der Rohe, an architect I greatly admire. Graham said that he had once asked Mies why he didn’t move into 860 Lake Shore Drive, a landmark Chicago apartment skyscraper that Mies designed. (Here and here are some photos of the building.) Mies said: “There’s no place to put the furniture. I was born in a little village in Germany. I can dream and imagine this new world, but I can’t live in it.”
SCHADENFREUDE.
March 11th, 2010SCHADENFREUDE. I have from to time posted on critics who support dismissive judgments with affectations. This morning the Financial Times (March 11) had a review of the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island. The critic makes the point that the movie is not for the intelligent: “Thought can be fatal, here…..” He compares it to a painting which he considers a “kitsch classic.” and says the movie would be more enjoyable “if you could take out your brain and experience it only with eyes and ears.” I was amused to see that he begins his treatment of the film by saying: “Fancy people call it schadenfreude: joy in shadows.” Of course, the dictionary definition of schadenfreude is: “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others.” The etymology is: “Etymology: German, from Schaden damage + Freude joy.” (The German word for the shadow is der Schatten.)
A NEW EMPHASIS ON DEFENSE?
March 10th, 2010A NEW EMPHASIS ON DEFENSE? I look at the Baseball Musings blog more than any other baseball blog. The blog reported recently on a conference at MIT on sports analytics which featured some very impressive speakers. The session described here featured Rob Neyer, John Dewan and Dan Duquette. I posted last week on the success that the Seattle Mariner had last year by emphasizing defense. John Dewan says that: “the Mariners, the Tigers and now the Red Sox are all improving their defenses to win more. John says the Red Sox will gain six to eight wins with their defensive improvements.” (Among other changes, the Red Sox have signed Mario Scutaro, whose defense I posted on last year.) Dewan also pointed out (and other speakers at the conference agreed) that with improved statistics we know a lot more about fielding than we did 15 years ago. I would add that other teams, including the White Sox and the Yankees, seem to be stressing defense this year.
VAN GOGH, THE LITTLE GARDENER.
March 9th, 2010VAN GOGH, THE LITTLE GARDENER. In light of Robert Lane Fox’s appreciation of Van Gogh as a lover of gardens, I was struck by another passage in Letter 537. Van Gogh compares the contemporary art market to the tulip mania in the Dutch flower market in an earlier century. The comparison is poignant because Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime. The comparison is also comforting because Van Gogh expresses the joy he gets from painting even without a market for his work. He writes: “Suppose, I say, that like tulip mania at the end of the previous century, the art trade, with other branches of speculation, were to disappear at the end of this as it came, that’s to say relatively quickly.
Tulip mania may have perished, BULB-GROWING REMAINS. And for my part I’m content, for better or worse, to be a little gardener who loves his nursery.”
VAN GOGH’S CHOICE OF PALETTES.
March 8th, 2010VAN GOGH’S CHOICE OF PALETTES. My impression is that popular legend portrays Van Gogh as an inspired madmen. The letters show a very different Van Gogh—one who thinks through what he does and studies intently what other artists have to say. In letter 537, for example, he discusses a passage from a book by an art critic: “True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour [the sentence is italicized in the original]— that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once. May I not simply understand by it that a painter does well if he starts from the colours on his palette instead of starting from the colours in nature?” I am quoting this letter not only to show how Van Gogh studies and analyzes, but also because it shows how important the choice of the palette for a painting was for Van Gogh. I came across letter 537 because Richard Dorment, in the New York Review of Books (March 25), quoted from the following passage in the letter: ” Suppose I have to paint an autumn landscape, trees with yellow leaves. Very well — if I conceive it as — a symphony in yellow, what does it matter whether or not my basic yellow colour is the same as that of the leaves — it makes little difference. Much, everything comes down to my sense of the infinite variety of tones in the same family.
If you think this a dangerous tendency towards romanticism, a betrayal of ‘realism’ — painting from the imagination — having a greater love for the colourist’s palette than for nature, well then, so be it.”
VAN GOGH, GARDENS AND COLOR.
March 7th, 2010VAN GOGH, GARDENS AND COLOR. Robin Lane Fox, who is a distinguished gardener and a distinguished classical historian, had an article in the Financial Times (February 6-7) which was inspired by the Van Gogh letters. Van Gogh loved gardens and flowers. Fox says that gardeners today are still often encouraged to plan in terms of the “color wheel”, which at the time Van Gogh was painting was a recent development. (A French chemist promoted it in the 1860’s.) The color wheel arranges the colors in graduated shades. (Annalisa looked over my shoulder and suggested “chroma” instead of “shades”; I was unfamiliar with the word.) The idea is to use opposite colors or neighboring shades. Van Gogh never mentions the wheel, but his letters show that he knew its ideas. Van Gogh kept a basket of balls of wool in different colors to test whether shades could be combined. He wrote his sister that there are “colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a COUPLE [italics in original], which complement each other like man and woman.” I think of painting in terms of what the eye sees; you paint what you see. The idea of choosing a palette for a painting seems novel.
THE VAN GOGH LETTERS.
March 7th, 2010THE VAN GOGH LETTERS. The complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh have now been published in a fully annotated, indexed and illustrated edition. They are available here at an absolutely wonderful website. Van Gogh often illustrated his letters and those illustrations are reproduced at the site. Van Gogh is a wonderful thinker about art. He was also a great writer about himself. Richard Dorment in the New York Review of Books (March 25, 2010) writes that: “In these pages we come as close as literature can to taking the reader inside the mind of another person.”
MORE RAP VIDEO THOUGHTS.
March 6th, 2010MORE RAP VIDEO THOUGHTS. Kids, note that the rap video portrays Hayek’s view that a bust is the result of the preceding boom. Rap: “The place you should study isn’t the bust. It’s the boom that should make you feel leery, that’s the thrust.” Explanation: “The “lower [than market rate] interest rate set by central bankers makes excessively speculative investment, especially long term investments, seem less risky and therefore more profitable.” This is consistent with the critics of Alan Greenspan who argue that the Fed set interest rates too low during the period leading up to the crash. Russell Roberts, the genius behind the rap video, argues here that he had thought that Keynes and Hayek had been discredited, but that now they have surged back into favor. He also says that: “I once thought econometrics—the application of statistics to economic questions—would settle these disputes and the truth would out.”This is another confirmation of John Meyer’s prediction of almost 50 years ago that I posted on here: “Nature doesn’t run very good experiments.”
EXPLAINING THE RAP VIDEO.
March 5th, 2010EXPLAINING THE RAP VIDEO. Kids, here is an excellent explanation of the Keynes-Hayek rap video I linked to yesterday (link via instapundit). Keynes and Hayek are usually considered to be diametrically opposed, with Keynes being the liberal and Hayek the conservative. But notice how each of them stresses the importance of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. Take Keynes first. Rap: “C, I, G, all together gets to Y .” Explanation: “It’s the central equation of macroeconomics. C + I + G = Y.” I is investment and when Keynes explains what determines investment, he winds up saying that investment is determined by “animal spirits.” Try testing that proposition empirically. As the rap says: “Business is driven by the animal spirits….” For Hayek, uncertainty and lack of knowledge make centralized planning and centralized policies ineffective. The Explanation gives an example of the difficulty of designing stimulus programs: “How many of …[the unemployed]…” are dry-wall hangers who won’t benefit at all from highway building?” Rap: “That simple equation, too much aggregation .” Explanation: “One major criticism of C + I + G = Y is that those four simple looking variables conceal tremendous complexity.” Kids, if you listen to the rap and read the explanation, you’ll know a lot of macroeconomics.
