Pericles, Søren Kierkegaard and the PM

Peter Jones of the Spectator pithily compares Boris Johnson to the Greek hero Pericles. The Athenian and the British Prime Minister are, according to Jones, proponents of a ‘hard line, needs must approach’, the former shutting off Athens from the Spartan invaders, the latter shutting down Great Britain in response to the Coronavirus outbreak. The comparison is a tad grandiose but nonetheless instructive. Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th Century Danish theologian and philosopher helps explain Jones’ comparison. Kierkegaard proposed that a person might achieve goodness through action in faith and that, however absurd action might be, a leader might ‘through his action receive the highest good’. Jones was right to compare Johnson and Pericles, but the duo should be accompanied with the countless leaders in the NHS at this time who are putting their front foot forward and saving lives day by day. Although Kierkegaard was famously cynical of the methods of the scientific researcher, he would approve of the action of scientific men and women in the NHS today, and of the bravery of Johnson and other decision makers.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/pericles-would-have-approved-of-the-pm-s-response-to-the-pandemic

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kierkegaard-Concluding-Unscientific-Postscript-Philosophy/dp/0521709105

Virtual tours of modernist architecture

Virtual tours of modernist buildings have an air of the dystopian. Tempted by the promise of an experience of great American architecture from the comfort of self-isolation, I opened the Instagram self-made video.  The grainy hand-recorded image is of Greycliff House, New York for the Martin Family the subject of this particular #wrightsvitualvisit, designed to acquaint isolated fans with Wright’s extensive range of modernist architectural projects. Built in 1931, the structure is poised gallantly on the precipitous black mass of rock from which it overlooks a murky, even more grainy, grey lake in the background. Of course, the footage is not in any way crystalline and professional but it’s a great effort, an act of altruism. However, it’s an interesting interruption to the usual experience of visiting a modernist building. For one thing, the viewer cannot modulate or self-direct the journey through the house.

The archdaily.com website offers slightly more professionally dubbed viewing experiences of Wright’s European counterpart Le Corbusier by cleverly embedding google street view into the frame. However, like the Wright virtual tours, the image is empty of life, strangely frozen in time and space. Revolutionary emphasis was put on pictorial resting spaces by Le Corbusier within the house, framed so beautifully by a handrail here, a concrete window frame there, all of which are cleverly staged by movement and travel through an open plan interior.

I think therefore Le Corbusier would find the archdaily.com experience convulsively bizarre because, from the comfort of your own bedroom you can’t revolve around Savoye’s staircases, but you must pivot and peer from a stationary position, fixed by the hand held camera. What the great modernist architects would appreciate about self-isolation is the way that our homes are being tested to their limit: their role as ‘machines of living’ is foregrounded in our stationary experience of them. Let us find a way of reigniting the utopian spirit of Le Corbusier and Wright from within our homes and experience their houses from behind a google street view lens. 

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/wrightvirtualvisits/?hl=en

https://www.archdaily.com/936442/gaudi-wright-niemeyer-and-le-corbusier-take-a-virtual-tour-through-iconic-architecture