Mjøslandsstabburet

Fordi han elsker engene og stabburet etter sin oldefar, har hele Toten forsøkt å gjøre den siste kulturbærer av engene til latter, og de har lyktes med å etablere ham som en forfulgt og hånet "deplorables", hvilket i klartekst er intet annet enn en moderne husmann, slik hans tippoldefar var det på dette stedet. Imidlertid vant hans tippoldefar alt, han ble kvitt sine husmannslenker, vant sitt fedrealter og ble en stolt disippel av Totenåsens apostel, med sin egen særegne åskultur og delereligion. Troen, kulturen og fedrealteret, livets treenighet, ble hans, materialisert i dette stabburet av hans sønn, som fikk leve som stolt kulturbærer av denne flotte enga hele sitt liv.

Til neste år har stabburet 100-års jubileum, men ingen kommer til å feire denne store begivenheten og dette høydepunktet av våre forfedres gullalder. Derimot hyller alle flokkdyr, med bygdedyrene i front, den nye Rausteinshytta, et ikon for vår tids juggelalder. Nå har juggelalderen kronet Mjøslandets tak, Østhøgda, med sitt seierssymbol, og alle flokkdyrene i hele Mjøslandet ser mot nye Rausteinshytta og Hovdetoppen, for å kopiere juggelgudene og juggelkongene sine, da de er livredde og engstelige for smakspolitiets hånlatter. Som har etablert den siste kulturbærer av engene og den gamle åstroen, som et eksempel til skrekk og advarsel for dem som ikke underkaster seg smakspolitiets nådeløse smak.

Men han slår tilbake, og investerer i disse dager tungt i kamerautstyr og kunnskap, hvor han ikke minst tror den nye treenigheten fra Tamron kan fyre av kraftige skyts, som vil kunne ryste smakspolitiet og dekonstruktivistene i grunnvollene. Hans store forbilde er Islands tårefotograf, Rafn Sigurbjörnsson, og målet er å oversvømme Mjøslandet med 1.500.000 fotografier av våre forfedres gullalder, tildelt allmenningene, som en gang stod så sterkt over Totenåsen.

"Tårefotografen - den siste gjerning og mening"

-Wikimedia.

Død over minimalismen, leve maksimalismen! Artikkel av en amerikansk skribent, med en rekke talende eksempler på den estetiske fattigdommen i minimalismen. Det gjelder både arkitektur og interiørdesign. Mitt intrykk er at mange velger minimalistiske løsninger i sine hjem fordi de er enstelige for hånlatter fra smakspolitiet hvis de gjør noe feil. Det beste måten å unngå å dumme seg ut er ikke å gjøre noenting, og her er minimalismen et trygt valg. Alternativet er å kaste seg ut i en hemningsløs jakt på det vakre, mangfoldige og overraskende. - Audun Engh

- DEATH TO MINIMALISM

Videre av Audun Engh:

Artikkel av den britiske filosofen Roger Scruton. Han leder den britiske regjeringens "Building Better, Building Beautiful commission". De skal foreslå tiltak for å sikre at nybygg blir utformet slik at befolkningen synes arkitekturen er vakker. Målet er å redusere protestene mot fortetting. HELE TEKSTEN ER KOPIERT NEDENFOR. Man må registrere seg for å lese artikkelen på nettsiden.

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SITAT: "Our role as commissioners is to explore the features that people most appreciate in the buildings around them. My hope is to find the way in which ordinary people can make their opinions heard through the planning process, so as to feel settled in a place of which they can be proud.

I don’t have an easy task. But someone has got to do it, and why not a philosopher, whose only interest in the outcome is the very interest that everyone shares, namely the interest in beauty?"

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HELE ARTIKKELEN:

Here's what I want from modern architecture, explains housing tsar Roger Scruton.

Architects need to stop aiming for the 'iconic' and focus on everyday beauty, says the chair of the government's new architecture commission, Roger Scruton.

The creation of a commission to examine beauty in new building created a stir in the media, with the chairman subjected to a hate storm of unusual turbulence even by the standards that he regularly has to endure. Hate storms arise when powerful interests are threatened, and this was no exception. There is hardly a person in this country who is not aware of what Milan Kundera has called the ongoing ‘uglification of our world’ and who does not hope that something might be done about it. No one I talk to denies the need for a large number of new houses. But they all hope that this need can be reconciled with our deep-seated desire for beauty.

Kant wrote that in judgments of beauty we are ‘suitors for agreement’. Through aesthetic judgment we strive for a world that signifies and amplifies our humanity, and even if we are attracted to eccentricities and original gestures, we want them to fit in to the community, just as we fit in ourselves. I would go further, and argue that aesthetic judgment is rooted in the sense of neighbourhood. It is, in my view, the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself that is most evidently violated by the uglifying blocks that are being dumped on our cities. It is evident that the planning system must deliver the houses and infrastructure that we need; but it must also deliver what people want to see, namely something that they can take pleasure in, as we take pleasure in our home.

It has been repeatedly written in the architectural press that the establishment of a commission on beauty in building is merely a reversion to the ‘style wars’ of the last decades of the 20th century. Rehearsing all the snobbish contempt for the ‘Nimbys’, with their ‘historicist’ fantasies and Christmas-card pastiches, the articles showed no awareness that the debate has moved on since David Watkin’s devastating critique of Pevsner, and above all no awareness that there are philosophical arguments as well as visceral sentiments that might be offered in support of Kundera’s critique.

It is of course right that we should avoid a return to any kind of style war. At the same time, though, we should recognise that the dispute over style is a clouded reflection of a deeper and more fundamental conflict over place. The modernist era was rich in stylistic innovations. It produced the humane and imaginative factories of the Bauhaus, the elegant housing projects of Oud, and the villas of Mies and Le Corbusier. But it also produced a kind of style-less vernacular, typified by the glass curtain-wall and the ferroconcrete cube. This purely functional idiom gave rise to buildings that are no sooner built than they are on the way to dereliction.

Versions of these place-destroying structures are to be found in every city in the world today, sometimes reshaped into gadgets, like the Walkie-Talkie building in London, more often just dulled down into blank mirrors, which face their surroundings with an icy inhuman gaze. They define the nowhere above the city where the ghostly corporations hover, malign enchanters of the life below. Their impact is apparent to everyone, since they challenge our need for a place that belongs to us and to which we in turn belong. They remake somewhere as anywhere, and therefore as nowhere.

Our need for belonging is part of what we are and it is the true foundation of aesthetic judgment. Lose sight of it and we risk building an environment in which function triumphs over all other values, the aesthetic included. It is not that there is a war of styles — any style can prove acceptable if it generates a real settlement, and the point is recognised by a great range of contemporary architects, and not only by those committed to some traditional grammar. The issue is no longer about style wars but about a growing recognition of the deep truth that we build in order to belong. Many committed modernists begin from this truth — for example, Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness and Rowan Moore in Why We Build. Among the new settlements that are proving popular there are as many built in polite modernist styles as there are in some kind of traditional vernacular. The important point is that all of us, the homeless and the disadvantaged as much as those who have invested their savings in a property, wish for a house that is also a home.

It is for this reason that ordinary architecture, however adventurous in its use of materials, forms and details, cannot rely on the excuse of artistic licence in order to creep through the planning process. In art we attempt to give the most exalted expression to life and its meaning. In everyday arrangements we simply try to do what looks right. Both cases involve the pursuit of beauty. But the two kinds of beauty touch different areas of the psyche. To create art you need imagination and talent — what the Romantics called ‘genius’; to create everyday beauty you need only humility and respect. In art, we are free to explore life in all its varieties, to enter imagined realms, and to open ourselves to our highest aspirations. Artistic beauty lies at the apex of our endeavors, and to fall short is to fall flat. To rise to that peak requires a distinct artistic personality, and an original and creative use of the available forms.

In everyday life, by contrast, beauty is a matter of adjusting our arrangements so as to fit to the contours of ordinary needs and interests, as when we lay a table, plant vegetables in rows or arrange the pictures on a wall. Everyday beauty lies within reach of us all, while artistic beauty is the occupation of the few. Much architecture lies somewhere between the two, being to a great extent a matter of fitting in and doing the job, but also overcoming aesthetic problems that require imagination and even inspiration for their solution. For ordinary people, however, it is the everyday fitting in that counts, and this is manifested in all the criticisms that we hear of recent developments. In everyday building it is as risky to stand out, to dominate, to be boastful and ‘iconic’ as it is in social gatherings. Everyday beauty is a matter of manners, not style.

Our role as commissioners is to explore the features that people most appreciate in the buildings around them. My hope is to find the way in which ordinary people can make their opinions heard through the planning process, so as to feel settled in a place of which they can be proud. I don’t have an easy task. But someone has got to do it, and why not a philosopher, whose only interest in the outcome is the very interest that everyone shares, namely the interest in beauty?