Drownout France

Endless, repeating, in cheap neutral color paint (low pigment content), concrete building materials, prefab components, weak gestures of resident customization (see the TV antennas on each balcony?), and the watery semblance of "luxury" for the "people" (balconies).

What struck me about this East Berlin apartment complex was how it delivered on all the Reagan-era criticisms of the Soviet Industrial dream.

What struck me next was it's resemblance to the General Grant Houses on 125th Street and Broadway in New York. Or, while you're at it, take your pick. All over America, in the 1960s, the poor were shuttered up in similar accomodations.

In fact, take a look at your local suburb (Bayside, Queens for example). More of it. Or the hills around Athens the downtown of Rio de Janeiro or, in fact, the banlieu here in Paris (Strasbourg-St-Denis).

Capitalism produced buildings not one whit better or more luxurious for its poor and downtrodden than did Erich Honecker.

CDG1. 26 Juillet.

One can imaging the architects of Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, constructing the first great continental airport. One sees their exuberance in the central interconnecting silo of CDG Terminal 1, where departing and arriving passengers criss-cross in mid-air in the ventral chamber of this great furnace of a building.

Unlike so much other architecture of this period (cf. Columbia's awful East Campus, the loathsome Memorial Library at Stanford, Madison Square Garden, most of Chicago, and so on), I solemnly judge this interior chamber of CDG1 to be a success. (The outside is neat too; they used this process on the concrete that makes it look like wood beams.)

Richeliu. 21 Juillet.

You may know the Cartesian conception of mental life; after all, it is more or less the prevalent one today. Any member of the laity will tell you: your mind is one thing, with much stored information on whatever specific topics. But thinking, or recalling, or other processes are something that take place within the metaphor of a single large "space".

A great big room, wherein the "Universal Instrument" does its prodigious work.

Two of the finest Parisian libraries are the former principal site of the national library, named for Cardinal Richeliu (the guy who helped Louis XIV the young king do his thing), and the Bibliotheque Mazarine, named for a wealthy gentleman-scientist who left his books to future scholars.

These are very beautiful libraries. And they are enormous, high-ceilinged open spaces of sunlight and reading tables, bordered with skyscraping shelves of books. You need ladders to get at them.

Mazarine. 30 Juillet.

Not to toot the old horn here, but "the modular mind" is more or less the dominant view. That is--different pieces of your mind do different jobs and sometimes talk to each other but not always.

Now think about the modern library. In particular, think about a university-style library with its specialized bibliographic rooms, vast floors of domain-specialized collections, functionally separated chambers for preservation, historical documents, media-specific documents, course materials, and so on. That is: the modern library is the modern mind; and the classic libraries you see here are the Cartesian. To see the modern theory of thinking, see the library. Quad erat demonstrandum.