Building to house a single rare book

Le Pavillion d'Un

Building to house a single rare book. Harvard Career Discovery Program in Architecture, July 1981

"	Thomas, Daniel says, was now to ravage Georgia, but Sherman, from all accounts, has done that work once for all. There will be no aftermath. They say no living thing is found in Sherman's track, only chimneys, like telegraph poles, to carry the news of Sherman's army backward."
	(--Mary Chestnut, 26 Feb 1865. A Diary From Dixie: Electronic Edition. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, 1823-1886, Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997)

nother assignment was to design a building to house a single rare book. This project was titled: Le Pavillion d'Un. The reason for this name was that the building was to have only one instance of each design element. If the design included stairs, there should be only one staircase. If the design included columns, there should be only one column. Etc. Obviously, taken literally, such a requirement is impossible to satisfy, but, equally clearly, a design can more or less closely fulfill some interpretation of the spirit of the requirement.

The particular rare book which the building was to house was the subject of an Edgar Allen Poe story. The book was reputed to be impossible to read. The teacher explained this meant that the book was very difficult to understand. I did some library research and found out that the truth was rather that the book was so execrably printed that the difficulty was in making out what the letters in the words were. When I pointed this out to the teacher, he was not pleased, and, of course, his dismissal of my having corrected him made me displeased with him.

We had about a week to do the project, and I spent more than half the allotted time getting nowhere. I was close to panicking that I would end up with nothing. Then I somehow managed to "sublimate" my frustration by imagining that Curtis LeMay bombed the building (this fantasy "killed two birds with one stone": both my frustration with my failure to come up with a design, and my frustration with the teacher, as described above).

After a couple false starts, this idea soon led to a solution which thoroughly delighted me. I thought of Sherman's march through Georgia, in the American Civil War, and also Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. The project would have one foundation: the burnt out rubble that remained from a plantation house, after General Sherman's troops had razed it, and also forever destroyed the form of life which had inhabited it. (See above)

My building would have one window, facing west: looking out on a "garden" of rubble and a single naked chimney rising at the other end of it (an allusion to the serene reflecting pools with faux Greek temple facades at their far end, often seen in neo-classical villas...).... Thru this window the reader of the book could watch the sun physically go down, and meditate on the metaphorical sun (the light of the mind which is the light of the world) setting on Western civilization (Universal Culture): Der Untergang des Abendlands.... [I did not at the time know Cyril Connolly's: "It is closing time in the gardens of the West...."]

ach student had to make an oral presentation concerning what they had done. When I gave my presentation, including situating the building in its cultural context, as described above, I felt embarrassed to be saying such things to persons who probably would have no idea what I was talking about -- and, sure enough, when I was finished my presentation, nobody had anything to ask or say, and the class immediately went on to the next student. (The reader may wish to refer to my WEB page on a demolition contractor's grave site to think about in relation to this project, even though the juxtaposition is entirely coincidental, for I did not know of the grave site when I did this project.)

Your critique of my design?

Go  to interactive VRML model of this design (requires VRML + JavaScript). Visit  my real-life avatar of this project (my "work cubicle", aka: "Le Cube d'Un"). Go to psychotherapist's office design (1992).   Return  to student apartment design.  [View intro: Architecture and morality] See  [real] garden I designed, inspired by "Wedded rocks" at Ise (Japan). Return to Brad trying to get into Yale architecture school.   Learn why a city can deserve to exist (Louis Kahn). Go  to demolition engineer, Albert Volk's, grave site (reminiscent of French Enlightenment visionary architecture). Read  Edmund Husserl's lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935).

 
Dec 2003: German auto makers build factories that go beyond postmodernism.

See  famous postmodern house whose famous postmodern architects were "heartbroken" when the client cancelled construction.   Our Century: "The century of barbed wire". Think  about The Decline of The West: Is the adventure over? Think  about the prideful a-mentia of The West in our time. Dies irae  (believers' response to sacrilegious cartoons...). "Shipwreck with Spectator" (Life as a journey...). Return to H.F. Broch de Rothermann page.   Play with signifiers. Go to The End of the Internet.

What's new on this website? Go to website Table of Contents. Return to Brad McCormick's home page. Return to site map.

http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/pavillion.html Copyright © 1998-2006 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net 23 April 2006CE (2006-04-23) ISO 8601) v05.04