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Show In comparison to the continumorphic floor plan the Chartres Gothic floor plan looks like a coffin for the dead. The comparison here is between something living and something with rigormortis. Living space is a reality just as dead space has marked the history of architecture. Architecture is an ancient fossil. Its intellectual foundations are bankrupt. Imagine that we are still inspired by the Greek model so that our government buildings are still shadows of the mumified past. This might have something to do with the deterioration of governments in our time. Certainly the Reagan administration had an official contempt for envrionmentalists. We notice the Rsagans enjoyed their retreats to their ranch in the wilderness. I refer to this as naturalistic hypocrisy, (see the section on natualistic hypocrisy) Migrating Americans dragged the withered box carcass across the ocean and plopped it down in the new world where its worn out sides could not breath another flourish another embroidery. Then Mies Van Der Rohe gave us the logical conclusion of centuries of abstraction with steel and glass Cartesian coordinate boxes clean and precisely executed the final expression of Euclid's definition of a point - that which has no part. The glass wall is nearly pure Euclidian metaphysics in material form. Imagine a plane you couldn't see and yet that's exactly what you have in "modern" architecture. Those metaphysics though took 7000 years to run their course untill now the twentieth century enviornment is destitute. Despite the leafy touches zero space is a nightmare a hell. -25- |