DOGEARS003 - Dreams that become young
Controversial Swiss architect Le Corbusier on aspiring dreams
There is a piece of paper that has been floating around my various desks since I copied out the text on it over twelve years ago - April 14th 2012 to be precise. I don’t pay it the respect it deserves, letting it drift between various drawers, folders and stacks of books, but it seems to have a stubborn endurance. An endurance that is echoed by the message on it, a transcription from an old architecture journal that contains a message far beyond architecture.
The writer, Le Corbusier, is considered the founding father of Brutalist Architecture and a controversial figure. Through many modern eyes, his tower blocks and rabbit warrens of raised walkways are a policing nightmare that became run down and crime ridden, a remnant of poor urban planning and ghettoised thinking. When they were built, they were ushered in as visions of an urban future that would redefine society. It is this future that his writing around them romanticises - one of gardens in the sky and modernist cities that spiral upwards through different zones of living. As a student working on an architectural photography project, I was struck by brutalism as a whole but particularly his idealistic, meandering writing, copying this particular passage into my journal and later ripping it out to pin somewhere.
Every so often, this transcription pops up from wherever it has buried itself. Most recently this week, I found it as a bookmark in a copy of Carl Jung’s The Red Book (a text I have been slowly battling through for years now). When it does, I read it for the umpteenth time and feel that it has survived for a reason. From the cryptic, scientific tone of its opening, it seems to unravel to the lofty ending paragraph with a stark poetry that matches Corbusier’s buildings, never failing to mesmerise and energise me in the same way it did when I first stumbled across it.
End of a world: deliverance
The base of the matter
Indefinable space
These describe an atmosphere in which a living human being, compelled by others in all sorts of endeavours and inventions, performs an acrobatic feat, unsurpassed and unrelenting in proportion, function, final aim and efficiency. At the circus, one is breathless while watching to see if the man will reach the end of a hanging rope by means of a perilous jump. One does not know if he trains for this every day, if for it he renounces a thousand frivolities of a soft life. Only one thing matters; has he arrived at his goal at the end of the waiting trapeze?
A somewhat similar peril exists in the course of twenty-four hour days which are the daily fare of life, having to be able to accomplish the necessary feats which lead to the end of the course: the firming of exact aims, regularity and consistency of effort, exactitude and minuteness of matter, choice of time, steadfast morale etc… Overcoming work if it were not stimulating.
Evidently, the problem is to cut through the complexities, to attain simplicity. To cut through the chaos of life to pursue an aspiring dream: not one that remains young, but one that becomes young.
— Le Corbusier, Paris, 21st September 1956
My aspiring dreams these days might be less lofty than those of the student version of myself who copied this text, but this is a forever timely reminder to strive for them all the same.
Back in two weeks with a standard issue ANT.
See you then,
MQ.