Poetry is in Everything?

 Understanding poetry as human making, makes the poetry of architecture easier to comprehend, but risks obscuring poetry’s meaningful, musical, and magical complexity.

“It’s not just building… it’s building worlds.”

— John Hejduk

Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be moving and transformative. ...One way to reopen human practices of worldmaking — architecture, theatre, poetry, teaching — is by risking more inclusive collaborations.

“Poetry is in everything / the city / this table / the streets,

in each minimal, common, and ridiculous motion”

— Fernando Pessoa

 Where do the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture meet? 

Find more here: http://www.artslettersandnumbers.com/calendar/2021/9/6/archi-poetry-amp-invisible-theatre 

Thank you Lisa, Andria, Max and Saba; thank you Grant Guy and David Gersten. 

Space for those who never go there

"A man with a book goes to the light.
A library begins that way...
This one starts with a man who wants to read a book...
Inspired by a great teacher the fortunate young man
winks to the chapel as he passes...
He was there though he never opened its door...

Not daring to enter the Piazza, I
diverted to other streets
toward it but never allowing myself
to arrive...
Space for those who never go there,
those who must be near and don't enter
and those who go in."
— excerpts from "The Continual Renewal of Architecture Comes from Changing Concepts of Space", Louis Kahn (Perspecta, v.4, 1957).

when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you

Ray Bradbury on why we read.

“…you’re very curious, aren’t you, to find out how I fell in love with books. Now remember this, love is the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do. So that’s what you learn from books… You see, libraries is people. It’s not books. People are waiting in there, thousands of people, who wrote the books. So it’s much more personal than just a book. So when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you… So you find the author who can lead you through the dark. And Shakespeare started me there… and Emily Dickinson led the way for me, and Edgar Allen Poe said, ‘This way. Here’s the light’. So you go into the library, and discover yourself.”

—Ray Bradbury.

https://youtu.be/Pqp38_uS-eg

 

Posted for #StudioBilbio, a studio/seminar on the architecture of public libraries.