online: 30 october 2008 modified: 29, 30 october 2008 29 october 2008 visual order
neoclassic
...i am sitting in a formal garden set out in precise symmetry of lawns and flower beds within miniature rectangular hedges 30 or 40 cm high... having noticed the flowers in one such bed i know without looking that there will be similar flowers in a symmetrical bed on the other side of the invisible but all-important centre line...
...similarly with every detail of the buildings and gateway that are arrranged symmetrically around the garden-courtyard: once one detail is in the exact place prescribed for it by the design, all the other details can be inferred by obeying the imposed visual logic, the embodiment of authority made visible,
...these words are abstract and inhuman but a sense of visual and social comfort disguises these negations in the public certainty and social ease of those who operate and accept the offices and roles of this form of order...
...but that's enough of this protest... i prefer to think of things that are disobedient to these visual commands and reflect instead the unpredictable complexity of all that is unifluenced by the shape of this garden and these buildings...
...the most obvious informal presence is the clouds and sky, and perhaps the man with a shoulder bag who is walking quickly by... but he like all of us animals is a symmetry from the front, or from behind, though a beautiful asymmetry from the side... but on looking at two people walking obediently beside a flower bed i notice that from the side their asymmetry is ugly with back bent, head stooping downward, and movements ungainly (and this can be said of many of us, so poor is our stance or lack of poise... children excepted)...
...but now i halt these visio-political grumbles and sit back to enjoy the imposed peace of this visual order of the late 18th century and accept it as a museum of architecture that is past and a visible tyranny that has lost its power, i hope, in the prospect of decentral order being open now to everyone...
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