Niall Hobhouse to Mary Keen
Was very tempted by Kim’s last arch reply, and the discussion of yesterday, to remind him of: ….the book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden … and it ends with Revelations. (Wilde?)
You are all quite right to hammer me on over-intellectualisation. The consensus against it is very powerful, but I do wonder if old Goethe wasn’t wrapping something sharp and uncomfortable in his suave generalization.
One possible defense is that there is, or there can be, a time for ideas and a time for instinct. I do spend the three non-art-dealing days doing the following: stage-managing the way in which architecture is taught, commissioning buildings, planting trees, and collecting architectural drawings. The process of design has become my special subject, although this doesn’t have to mean that I get it right on the ground.
In relation to the LSE Urbanism at least, I think I have learnt two things - that experimental process can often uncover good new design forms, and that you can’t do anything good in the city without an analytic understanding of the way in which a building will work - both in the context of its neighbours, and for the people who use it.
My worry over the walled garden project is not a surfeit of ideas per se, but that the ideas may not be good ones, or even right for the purpose. Of course the FOA analysis is a bit vieux jeux; but it is their capacity to synthesise different strands of research that interests me at the moment. I doubt that we will build the current version of their plans; it is just that there are a thousand other configurations implicit in their approach.
When something exciting emerges we will all recognize it, and by instinct.
So the unaddressed issue is perhaps that none of us, in our very different ways, are yet convinced by what’s on paper now. There’s a long way to go.
Desktop gardening - THE new pursuit.