Wandering in the fourth dimension
May. 24th, 2020 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Museum Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades
This had been on my to-read list for some time and I picked up the Kindle edition at a heavy discount. In the introduction, Meades describes it as a book about place: not the place or a place, just place. It's an essay collection, collected mostly over the 1990s and 2000s, loosely grouped together, with chapters ending - or perhaps interpolated by - scripts from some of his television programmes.
As such, some of the material is familiar, but some of it is new, and it's always original. A friend of a friend once said that Meades' television programmes were "best watched with a glass of wine in one hand and a dictionary in the other", true enough on both counts, and the same can be said of the writing. Yet, somehow, the whole is not quite the sum of its parts. The problem with such a temporally extended collection is the risk of repetition - and some subjects come over as repetitive rather than thematic. Albert Speer and the Theory of Ruin Value get several mentions (as does the surviving ruin - now a municipal car pound in Nuremberg; the functional and extant Viennese Flackturm are omitted), and not just in the sections on totalitarian architecture (with scripts for Jerry-building and Joe-building). Meades riles against Arts and Crafts as effectively the end of history for domestic architecture in Britain, though he acknowledges some of Lutyens' work as good architecture. He remarks that Ebenezer Howard never mentioned architectural style in Garden Cities of Tomorrow - which is perhaps to miss the point, that Letchworth Garden City's style is down to the fashion du jour for the early twentieth century, and not an intrinsic property (the slightly later Welwyn Garden City does not share its style). A fan of Brutalism, he decries architectural populism and repeatedly bemoans the demise of the Tricorn Centre. (The word "brutalism" is explained as in part a pun on a French word for concrete; hence we can surely retrofit here a metaphor about the education level of the populus, too).
The scripts do come across as disjointed - both as a reading exercise and visually, printed in a monospaced font. If you were looking for a polished oeuvre, these would be reworked into essays that were easier on the eye. Meades' style, however, is to eschew polish and seek out blemishes, incongruity, fragmentation, happenstance.
This had been on my to-read list for some time and I picked up the Kindle edition at a heavy discount. In the introduction, Meades describes it as a book about place: not the place or a place, just place. It's an essay collection, collected mostly over the 1990s and 2000s, loosely grouped together, with chapters ending - or perhaps interpolated by - scripts from some of his television programmes.
As such, some of the material is familiar, but some of it is new, and it's always original. A friend of a friend once said that Meades' television programmes were "best watched with a glass of wine in one hand and a dictionary in the other", true enough on both counts, and the same can be said of the writing. Yet, somehow, the whole is not quite the sum of its parts. The problem with such a temporally extended collection is the risk of repetition - and some subjects come over as repetitive rather than thematic. Albert Speer and the Theory of Ruin Value get several mentions (as does the surviving ruin - now a municipal car pound in Nuremberg; the functional and extant Viennese Flackturm are omitted), and not just in the sections on totalitarian architecture (with scripts for Jerry-building and Joe-building). Meades riles against Arts and Crafts as effectively the end of history for domestic architecture in Britain, though he acknowledges some of Lutyens' work as good architecture. He remarks that Ebenezer Howard never mentioned architectural style in Garden Cities of Tomorrow - which is perhaps to miss the point, that Letchworth Garden City's style is down to the fashion du jour for the early twentieth century, and not an intrinsic property (the slightly later Welwyn Garden City does not share its style). A fan of Brutalism, he decries architectural populism and repeatedly bemoans the demise of the Tricorn Centre. (The word "brutalism" is explained as in part a pun on a French word for concrete; hence we can surely retrofit here a metaphor about the education level of the populus, too).
The scripts do come across as disjointed - both as a reading exercise and visually, printed in a monospaced font. If you were looking for a polished oeuvre, these would be reworked into essays that were easier on the eye. Meades' style, however, is to eschew polish and seek out blemishes, incongruity, fragmentation, happenstance.