a new york state of mind

....[c]ontrasting urban ecologies of capitalist and precapitalist cities. In the latter (he uses Naples as an example), there is no delusion of total command over Nature, just constant ecological adaptation. The city is an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic Mediterranean environment. ‘Things are allowed to remain in a halfway real condition, and delight is taken in the way things come to their own equilibrium and completion.’ Although the objective hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis) are arguably greater than for any other large European city, Naples is on familiar terms (heimisch in Freud’s sense) with the ‘old dragon’ of catastrophic nature. Anxiety does not infuse daily life on the slopes of Vesuvius.

In the ‘Americanized big city’, by contrast, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity (Unheimlich). Indeed ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately.’ In part, this is because the metropolis’s interdependent technological systems—as Americans discovered in the autumn of 2001—have become ‘simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable’. More profoundly, the capitalist big city is ‘extremely dangerous’ because it dominates rather than cooperates with Nature.

The Uncanny is precisely that ‘nothingness [non-integration with Nature] that stands behind the mechanized world’. Although Bloch is acutely aware of the imminent dangers of fascism and a new World War, he insists that the deepest structure of urban fear is not Wells’s war in the air, but ‘detachment and distance from the natural landscape’.

The subject is teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism; and if this mechanization with or without purpose, this universal depletion of meaning, should come to fulfillment, then the future void may prove equal to all the death anxieties of late antiquity and all the medieval anxieties about hell.

--------From Mike Davis, 'The Flames of New York' with references to Ernst Bloch's 'The Anxiety of the Engineer'


The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ...Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.
------Juniper.

The static idea of perfection of the Greeks, the Doric column, proportionality compared to wabi, "deliberate imperfection". Rowan Moore, writing about how the Twin Towers stood in stark contrast to the spirit of its Japanese architect, would say that the Towers were built to last for ever, to resist the changes of Nature in a sort of timeless space. All architecture is frozen time but this perfect abstract symmetry is nothing but a product of the human mind-a mind cut off from Nature, a grey matrix that is a reflection of the squares of the mind.

The Swami, returning from NY, had nothing to say about the sky scrapers or the city, as if her memory had become a desert. The regularity of its shapes, the grid which was a map for lost lovers, seemed to stunt all thoughts. But eventually she said:

there is something oppressive about buildings that have lost the scale of the human. One may initially be impressed by them-as one is by the outward forms of a civilisation-but very soon this feeling fades away to reveal an unnameable disquiet. Logic, mathematics, without the human touch, subjectivity, turns into a totalitarian nightmare, closed to Nature. One's eyes soon grow tired. But look, and look again at a fleeting cloud. Is this not a more perfect shape? Where the human hand becomes invisible, there you will see perfection.