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“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of
by LeoPanthera 1y ago
“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
- _joel 1y agoReminds me of Trigger's broom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM
- Epa095 1y agoWhat a beautiful quote!
- madaxe_again 1y agoIt’s a great listen - the original broadcast is available on the BBC and elsewhere. https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.sh...
- LeoPanthera 1y agoThe "multimedia" project accompanying it on CD-ROM is delightful, but it requires either Windows 3 or Classic MacOS, so it's difficult to run today: https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs (Edit: This version seems to be the Windows 3 version only.)
- jjmarr 1y agoThis is the whole point of the "banana taped to wall" art that everyone mocks. Part of the work is a certificate of authenticity and a detailed guide for taping a fresh banana to a wall (it must be exactly 1.6 meters above the ground). Because the banana rots, this gives you permission to recreate the banana taped to a wall as needed for display. It's brilliant because it makes you question what the "essence" of a work of art is. Literally anyone can tape a banana to a wall. But you don't have the artist's intent allowing you to do so.
- spacedcowboy 1y agoI thought that was just for scale ?
- jjmarr 1y agoForgot to link the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- detaro 1y agoBut it's also like much other installation art for decades. Art piece as instructions and a "license" is nothing new.
- satvikpendem 1y agoMy other favorite piece of conceptual art is An Oak Tree, a glass of water placed on a shelf at some height. The piece claims itself to literally be an oak tree.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoIt's not the atoms, it's the pattern of the atoms.
- gostsamo 1y agoVery nice novel about one of the fires as well by Yukio Mishima.
- asicsarecool 1y agoI wrote a nastygram to the Smithsonian after they replaced all the canvas on the original wright flier. Maybe Douglass would have approved. That makes me feel slightly better
- radlad 1y agoFrom Wikipedia: > Work began in 1985. [...] The wooden framework was cleaned, and corrosion on metal parts removed. The covering was the only part of the aircraft replaced. The new covering was more accurate to the original than that of the 1927 restoration. Also of note: > In 1910 the Wrights offered the Flyer as an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, but the Smithsonian declined, saying it would be willing to display other aeronautical artifacts from the brothers. Wilbur died in 1912, and in 1916 Orville brought the Flyer out of storage and prepared it for display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[30] He replaced parts of the wing covering, the props, and the engine's crankcase, crankshaft, and flywheel.
- cam_l 1y agoThere was a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, who wrote about this idea. Specifically about the Ise shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years. It had been popularised as a piece of architecture on par with the Parthenon. He rejected the comparison with western monuments as the Ise exists as a project of continual renewal. Not just in practice, but socially, religiously, and also in style and detail. It is a ship of Theseus, but where the whole ship is replaced, it is not even necessarily the same ship, and besides, the ship is just the tangible form of the communities of teachers and craftsmen and fisherman which exist around it. It is the lost wax part of the cast. (Isozaki was interestingly also a metabolist along with Tange and Kurokawa, which I guess I think is, in a tangential sense, related.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-architecture/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-archite... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine
- Fluorescence 1y agoMaybe the same can be applied to the human patterns too because this bit made me feel a bit sad: "mechanised winding system, ending the requirement for somebody to climb the narrow, winding staircase each day to the clock room to do the job by hand" It feels like something has been lost even if I don't know what. It's not that I want the job but we might be modernising and automating away human purpose in the world. There is something about someone visiting the mechanism daily that feels like it gives it life. An act of observation. There may be some practical sense to it e.g. spotting problems and what you "feel" in the mechanism as you manually wind it.