Introduction to Washington Square by Henry James, translated into French by Camille Dutaud (Paris: Denoël/Club du livre du mois, 1954). PN Review 40, no. 3 (January–February 2014).
RAYMOND MASON
(1922–2010)
WHERE HAVE ALL THE EGGPLANTS GONE?
Raymond Mason was born in 1922 in the English Midlands. After studies at the Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts which were interrupted by the war, he returned to work at the Royal College of Art, the Slade, and the Ruskin School of Fine Arts, Oxford. In 1946 he made his first trip to Paris and immediately fell in love with the city; the asthma from which he had always suffered suddenly vanished; he has lived in Paris ever since. From paintings and drawing he went on to sculpted landscapes and tableaux of such subjects as the Barcelona tramway and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and a striking life-size sculpted impression of an urban crowd (La Foule) exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1968. Inspired by the “example” rather than the actual work of his friends Giacometti and Balthus, he has elaborated an art which aims to “include everything,” and of which the Les Halles sculpture is the most ambitious example to date. It is at the Matisse Gallery until November 23 [1971], along with a large group of preliminary drawings.
* * *
Les Halles, the fruit and vegetable market of Paris, held at night, under the stars, at the historic center of the most beautiful city in the world, was much more than a commercial phenomenon.
It was a place of happiness. Powerful and vast because it made an infinite number of persons happy. The news of its condemnation caused a general sadness.
The work in Les Halles was hard. The rain and the cold were hard to bear. Among the men and women who worked there, many were hard, crude human beings. Nevertheless, the enchantment was such that this hardness was transmuted into a strange sweetness and the toughest characters became gentle. Of course this was partly because of the pleasure of working together, but the work was also subtly ennobled by the fresh beauty of the country produce. Actually, the market of the Halles Centrales was the last image of the Natural in the City. It is now a Paradise Lost.
I have attempted in the present sculpture to reconstitute, to the best of my ability, this superb vision. My work will obviously be a poor substitute for the emotion that this magnificent display caused in me. But I hope that at least it will speak quite clearly to the spectator who reads its title, The Departure of the Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, reminding him also of that other and no less definitive departure of the men and women mentioned above who are symbolized in my cortege. A moment of silence. It is the man of the Middle Ages who is leaving. The “little vegetable” of our species, who emerged out of the earth and assumed any old shape. But he was a natural man and he always sprouted. We shall never again see a head like that, and we shall never see his like again.
And then there is a church, one of the most remarkable in the world, the only witness of the centuries that have now come full circle. Witness? An actor itself, and no doubt the principal actor. Towering over the market, it supervises all the thousand activities and wares, giving them a grandiose scale, the essential and spiritual dimension—and this was felt however obscurely by each member of the chaotic, teeming congregation at its feet.
In case you don’t believe me, there still remains a fruit and vegetable lady with her back to the wall of a corner of Saint Eustache. Ask her whether she would have preferred something other than those huge stones during all the years of cold nights. In Les Halles, one was much closer to Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris than to Zola’s Belly of Paris.
Such a long association of ideas and things had produced an interpenetration of forms and styles which I discovered little by little as I developed my sculpture. The main stem of the cabbage leaf which I had suspended at the center of my composition was supposed to follow the serpentine “line of grace.” Yet soon, the leaf with its veins began to suggest the late Gothic of the church. The bristling stone finials were echoed in the artichokes. And this prolix architecture multiplied in mounds of fruits and vegetables: In its windows, triangular spandrels are filled with circles, and in its upper stories, stone crates are displayed to the sky, in equilibrium, forever.
The acquired certitude of a vast web of related forms held for me the subject that I wanted to make live again, and made me decide to sculpt and paint not only the heart of Paris but everything that is to be found there—including the heart. I would detach each tuft of cauliflower, each artichoke leaf, just as I would also enumerate the windows of the rue Montmartre and the rue Montorgueil. Night would flow everywhere like a reservoir of ink, emphasizing the drawing.
There were moments at the end of the day when I would say to myself, “Look—there goes a potato nose.” And there were even better noses, the color of eggplants. The cauliflower returned, in the form of an ear this time, and even the Adam’s apple (it is behind the cabbage leaf). And I was delighted to be able to place an embracing couple in the middle distance and to say to myself: “Here is a suggestion of the forbidden fruit.” A sympathetic spectator will perhaps find other crosscurrents of ideas, more serious ones, I hope—which would only be normal given the fact that the work occupied my thoughts continually for two years.
A work of art. Does one ever know what to put in it? In this hour of simplification, the answer seems to be: As little as possible. For me the answer comes to be an embarrassment: Everything. Certain people have explained to me in a friendly way that I am going against the current.
Yes, I am against the current. I always hear of movements and tendencies in art, of men who have made breakthroughs in painting and sculpture, of an avant-garde which has already reached the year 2000. The perpetual “movement” that artists are supposed to follow.
As for me, art on the contrary should be the means of intercepting thought in its flight, of confounding it with matter, giving it body and weight so that it might halt time, resist the centuries.
I really don’t want my little parade from Les Halles ever to start.
ARTnews 70, no. 7 (November 1971).
IANNIS XENAKIS
(1922–2001)
THE COSMIC CITY
Faced with the drastic urban and architectural situation of today, we are obliged to lay down axiomatic foundations and to attempt a formalization of the two “sciences.” This is why the first question is that of urban decentralization.
It has been customary for a number of years to speak of the decentralization of the major urban centers, of the dispersal of the industrial centers over the whole of the nation’s territory insofar as possible. This tendency has been transformed into governmental policies that favor economically the transferring of industries and the construction of housing, and not only of large and small industries but also administrative centers and universities. The obsession with decentralization is, one may say, universal, in France as well as in Japan, in the United States, etc. That is to say, in all the countries whose urban concentrations are gigantic. Moreover, in a few generations the “demographic thrust” will render the situation of the cities of the future impossible and deadly, if the urbanists and the governments do not change their traditional mentalities and points of view, rooted in the past and henceforth ineffectual. The solution given to the question of decentralization will determine the shape of any urbanism as well as of architecture.
Must one then decide in favor of decentralization or on the contrary accept centralization?
First of all, if we place ourselves in the role of observers of contemporary history, it is clear that we are witnessing the development of a powerful force, blind and irreversible, which creates urban concentrations despite all the joint efforts of governments, a force which augments the density and the area of cities. It even seems that a simple but terrible law might be deduced from this observation: The major centers grow faster than the small ones, in a logarithmic curve.
Next, if we place ourselves in the sociocultural perspective of exchange
s as well as in that of technology and economy, we see that the large centers favor expansion and “progress” of all kinds. It is a historical conclusion that has been arrived at for thousands of years but continually forgotten, whose equivalent could be found in other domains, for example in complex biological cultures or merely in the abstraction of phenomena of masses, which, in following the law of high numbers, render possible the advent of exceptional and rare events which would be highly improbable (= impossible) in smaller populations. On the other hand, decentralization leads to a dispersal of centers, to an augmentation of the length of routes and of the duration of exchanges, to an airtight specialization of collectivities and to sociocultural stagnation. The university cities prove this, as do the workers’ cities and all kinds of “cities” within a country, thus invalidating the theories of linear cities and similar naive notions.
These reasons and conclusions are in the air and simple to observe even for those who do not have the leisure to consult or learn to read the statistics of specialized services.
But in that case, why decentralize?
In reality this policy stems from two principal tendencies:
a. the suffocation of present-day cities beneath the mass of anarchical communications and the poor distribution of activities over the national territory;
b. a tradition and mental inhibition of geometrization and planning of urban entities which, having sprung up again with new vigor in the nineteenth century, became fixed and rooted during the 1920s under the influence of cubism and constructivism.
This second tendency has already shown that it was powerless to resolve the simplest problems, such as the construction of new cities, even when the urbanists have the total cooperation of governments as was the case with Le Havre, Brasilia, and Chandigarh, which for the moment are stillborn cities. In fact it is impossible under the present educational conditions of urbanists and architects (a conservative, oversimple education) for these individuals to resolve a priori on paper the birth, composition, and development of a city which is one thousand times more complex than the problem of a dwelling or a housing unit, problems which are themselves solved haphazardly. This deficiency results in urbanist situations on paper being limited to barren combinations of straight lines and rectangles corrected by incongruously curved spaces (= “green areas”). It is in fact this same deficiency which causes those who have the responsibility of parceling out the territory to be led astray by the biological complexity of a city emerging from the centuries, such as Paris, and who, weary of breathing gasoline fumes and of endlessly waiting in all kinds of lines, preach the explosion of this living complex encroaching on the green desert, rather than attacking, for example, the real problems of the automotive industry, to say nothing of the solutions given by the so-called avant-garde urbanist architects which are in fact nothing but short-sighted and cringing naiveties, since the impossible decentralization-panacea-for-all-urban-ills has not been for them a point of conscience.
Thus, under the tyrannical yoke of these two forces, one real, the other mental, we proceed to decentralize on paper, creating satellite cities (= modern slum cities), dormitory cities, or specialized cities equipped with an absurd architecture (shoe boxes or rabbit warrens), standardized sometimes with a grotesque decorative affectation (Stockholm, for example), or sometimes without (Paris or Berlin).
It is also true that the algorithm of the plane, the right angle, and the straight line, issuing directly from the depths of the millenniums and which is the basis of contemporary architecture and urbanism, has been strongly consolidated by the “new” materials: concrete (because of wooden molds), steel, and glass, as well as by the relatively simple theory of plane and especially linear elements.
But if concentration is a vital necessity for humanity, the present ideas of urbanism and architecture must be changed completely and replaced by others.
I shall outline a group of ideas which lead to the conception of the vertical Cosmic City.
Here is a list of axiomatic and implied propositions which will perhaps help us to imagine its face and formalize its structure:
1. The absolute necessity of promoting vast concentrations of population for the general reasons listed above.
2. The high concentration and the enormous technical effort needed imply total independence with regard to the surface of the Earth and the landscape. This leads to the conception of the vertical city which can attain heights of several thousand meters. This independence leads in turn to a giant standardization in which the formalizations of theoretical conceptions and their putting into practice will be necessary and alone effective.
3. The shape which the city is to take will have to eliminate the stresses of anti-economic flexion and torsion from its structure.
4. Daylight and a direct view of and over space are to penetrate everywhere. Hence a relatively negligible thickness in the vertical city.
5. Since the city will be vertical, its occupation of the ground will be minimal.1 The liberation of the ground and the technical advances of such a city will result in the recovery of vast stretches of land and an automatic and scientific cultivation of the soil utilizing electronic means of management and decision, for the classic peasant with his manual toil is destined to disappear.
6. At the outset, the distribution of collectivities will have to constitute a statistically perfect mélange contrary to every present conception of urbanism. There will be no specialized subcity of any kind. The mixing process will have to be total and calculated stochastically by specialized bureaus of the population. Young people and workers will live in the same sector as old people or government officials, for the mutual good of all categories. The living heterogenization of the city will happen by itself later on.
7. Consequently, the internal architecture of the Cosmic City will have to be oriented toward conceptions of interchangeable locales (cf. traditional Japanese architecture), adapting itself to the most varied uses, with internal nomadism (movements of populations) becoming more widespread after a certain level of progress. Mobile architecture will thus be the fundamental characteristic of this city.
8. Since this city will be fashioned by universal technology, it will be suited to lodging the populations of the far north (or south) as well as those of the tropics or the deserts. Climatic conditioners will thus equip certain of its sections so as to render hundreds of millions of human beings independent of climatic and meteorological contingencies, so that they may attain temperate living and working conditions at any latitude. Thus, its entirely industrialized and formalized technology will transform it into the veritable biological collective garment, receptacle, and tool of its population.
9. Communication will be effected by means of cylindrical coordinates with the advantage of great vertical speeds of from 100 to 200 kilometers per hour.
10. Communications through the transport of materials (men or goods) are to be accomplished by new techniques—for example, moving sidewalks or streets at slow, medium, or high speeds; vertical or horizontal pneumatic express travel for passengers, etc. Hence, suppression of all types of individual locomotion on wheels.2
11. Three-dimensional transportation (by air) will be favorized by airfields at the summit of the Cosmic Cities (hence a considerable saving in fuel). The lost time between city and airport will be eliminated.
12. The great height of the city will have the advantage (in addition to the very high density it will be able to achieve—from 2,500 to 3,000 inhabitants per hectare) of rising above the most frequent clouds, those moving between 2,000 and 3,000 meters, and of putting the populations in contact with the vast spaces of the sky and the stars, for the planetary and cosmic era has begun and the city must no longer be earthbound but oriented toward the cosmos and its human colonies.
13. The transformation of industrial and domestic waste in a closed circuit will take on vast proportions to the benefit of health and the economy.
14. By definition, the Cosmic City w
ill not fear the devastations of war since disarmament will have been accomplished on Earth, and outlets and other expansions will be sought in cosmic space, the present nations having transformed themselves into provinces of a giant World State.
Rapid summary of technical data of the Cosmic City:
The preceding fourteen points require technical solutions that utilize shell structures and in particular warped surfaces such as hyperbolic paraboloids or revolving hyperboloids which avoid efforts of flexion and torsion and (except at the margins) allow only for cutting stresses of compression.
The form and structure of the city will thus be a hollow shell with a double partition, crisscrossed because of the ruled surfaces employed, having the additional advantage of using linear elements which will always be cheaper.
The 5,000-meter altitude is at the limit of normal pressure and oxygenation which a man can endure without any special apparatus and without previous adaptation. Which is to say that the Cosmic City can “leap” this barrier and grow taller than 5,000 meters on condition that artificial pressurization, humidification, and oxygenation are provided.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 36
