LIVING ARCHITECTURE
& Construction Management
CLASSIC BEAUTY IS NOT JUST SKIN DEEP
The actors who move us most have learned to wear themselves inside-out. They move us because they are able to access and connect with deep inner emotions. Acting is the acting-out of internal feelings. Good acting is when the audience identifies so much with the emotion being conveyed that we forget the actor and know only the character. Great actors are classic beauties.
Classic beauty can be ugly. It can be terrible. It can be scary and mean. Classic beauty can be timid and shy. It can be an innocent child. Classic beauty can manipulate or acquiesce. It can murder or it can die by its own hand. Classic beauty is REAL. It is not just skin deep. Classic beauty is a growing fetus of honest expression attached to the womb of emotion. Classic beauty is an honest and living thing.
CLASSIC ARCHITECTURE IS NOT JUST SKIN DEEP
Classic Architecture (as opposed to "classical") is an honest and living thing.
Classic Architecture is like a great actor. Classic Architecture wears itself inside-out and outside-in. This is what makes it beautiful.
Classic Architecture is simply beautiful and beautifully simple because it does what it is and is what it does. The spatial emotions of Classic Architecture are brought forward and honestly expressed; just like a classy actor becomes the truest character.
Classic Great Architecture creates its own character. This is why we like being inside it.
But, just like some actors (and many people and even more architecture) beauty, all too often, is only skin deep.
I call this only-skin-deep-stuff "Facadomy" and define it as "Designing or acting-out only on the fa�ade; full-frontal, two-dimensional, barley skin deep "Pornotopography".
It's not very difficult to separate good architecture from bad, classic architecture from crappy. Crappy architecture is about as easy to spot as totally fake two-dimensional personalities or two-bit losers/actors. (Can we say Reality TV?)
Like old gold-rush-ghost-town-bundles of full-frontal-hey-look-at-me-right-now-streetscapes of frolicking Facadomy, much of American Architecture is all about presenting the best side forward. First impressions are carefully celebrated.
But what about second and third and forever and always impressions?
I don't know about you, but when I walk through architecture I walk THROUGH architecture. Good architecture is experienced way past the front entry experience. It is experienced over time. Otherwise it sucks.
It is the same with people.
I have met people where I wanted to say, "You're about as deep as a puddle of poodle-piss on a hot concrete sidewalk." It's the same feeling I get when I look at crappy architecture.
There exist several ways to quickly spot and avoid piss-poor people and piss-poor architecture; posture, politeness, poise. Today though, we'll start and end with the first and foremost piss-poor indicator.
Facadomy; Full-Frontal-Fakeage.
You can spot a Facodomite a mile away, human or architectonic. Simply observe the obvious and atrocious act of presenting only the front and pretty side. Look around. It's everywhere America. Drive down any street USA. Look at just about any subdivision. The homes are even required by code to have "the front fa�ade sixty percent stone."
Jeepers! So every side and rear elevation is allowed to be cheap and ugly.
Check it out. Open your eyes. It will make you sick.
(Unless you watch mostly Reality TV.)
Ask yourself, "Is your personal architecture, your Living Architecture only eye candy?
Reach in deep and explore and express all of who you are. I promise, you will enjoy much more your architecture.
And when you see buildings that stand all slutty along the street, buildings that strut their stuff like so many strung-out, sad, pathetic wannabies, call down the developer-pimp, call down the architect-costume-makeup-artist, call these fakers down and demand they clean up their acts.
Then again, like prostitution, if there wasn't a market for full-frontal and nothing-else-architecture, it wouldn't exist.
I guess we're just going to have to change the market!
I long for the day and the way where people and architecture open up and act always with class.
Be a Class-Act-Cop. Send me some photos of what ugly you see and let's be loud about it.