The Long House: Think Beautifully

In the light of the Projective Cast

[think beautifully » pull away » move » start walking » open lid » take apart]

- At twilight. In the Orchard –

For the briefest of moments, allow me to set this time assail and we will share dominion over a world at peace and a world of illumination as this is a celebration. And onto you.

I feel I’ve been allowed to become the flaneur.1 Just as I feel that I have become the caretaker, and I’ve always wanted to be the storyteller.

As an ambassador of reverence in the collective redemption of lost time.2

And so, on this day grant me that moment to efface the walls of time and cast our projection through the vanishing point of the ferrous sun, across the crystalline and light-filled ocean of time experience. Exactly and approximately past the Sargasso Sea of memories, in to the land of Devine Kings. Into the City of the Virgin. Into the city of Siena. On to THIS day, the very vermilion-GREEN spring day of April 22, 1339.

For this is where we are and cast upon us here is this illumination bequest through me by Ambrogio Lorrenzetti: the first great master and mentor of this thesis (figure 1).

For one of the first times in written history there exists depth beyond the Byzantine icons guilded surface, as if on the proscenium of a theater this scene deploys a penetrable landscape.

A visual paradox that is in fact two paintings sewn together at the perfect moment: the gatefold transition in between the Well-governed City and the Well-governed Country. This space is orchestrated by the tactical placement of shape, calculated color and positioning to create a visual trisect of foreground, midground and background: a hierarchy with harmonic depth.

Layers of variegations punctuated by moments of spatial continuity. Lorrenzetti sings to these visual ques to narrate this pictorial space a century prior to the knowledge of perspective drawing techniques.

I felt this analysis extrapolates those visual ques to emphasize their conductive formula. I see this as actual constructs of architectural space with true oblique objects placed contradictory to the natural perspective.

The nature and genius of this placement allows the kinetics of the eye to forgive its peculiar translations—into an ultimate state of harmony.

During the course of this analysis I felt that somehow I was illuminated as if standing upon a great precipice when the visual absolution came. I remember the feeling of reverence aglow as the sun shimmered in resonating intervals upon the dancing shapes of the children playing near the crenellated top of the kingdom gates (figure 2). I remember thinking “this is the living voice—the brilliant pictorial viva voce shines upon me."

The state of spatial fluidity has come to pass; the age of kinesis of the resonating eye is upon us.

Always return to this city I will, for this is the Good City that harbors an atmosphere; an atmosphere to usher in a great house: the Long House it shall become.

For here we were then, in that theocentric universe time of near past, and up until that day what truly mattered for man was to find himself only in God’s cone of vision.

But then the gatefold opened and revealed this pictorial revelation to the world.

For, through the 14th Century eyes of Amobrobio Lorrenzetti’s, the world saw space in perspective—and the world split asunder as this momentous shift in the history of representation inaugurated a conquest for projective space.

Mastery of the perspective reigned in what was beCAME known as The Great Renaissance. The viewer assumed a frontal vantage point in the construct of this inner universe.

The age of kinesis was a quest for depth in transformed space. The second great master and mentor of the thesis was born out of the High Baroque, his name was Borromini.

It is the year 1641. The world was to pause again in its orbital momentum and see with a new set of eyes, for the gatefold looked back and revealed the curvilinear.

This trajectory transformed space by wrapping the vantage point around to the side.

The dead reckoning of perspectival space was placed in rotational momentum. This continuum of tangencies was illustrated in Borromini’s great masterpiece, San Carlino in Rome.

This analysis portrays the maxim for San Carlino’s kinetic space as it reveals how the curvilinear moves your eye as you feel the experience of the space from outside, in, through and with the architecture (figure 3).

Marshall McLuhan states in his book, Through the Vanishing Point, Borromini’s poetry in San Carlino sought to unify disparate facets and experiences of 15th Century life by directing attention to the moment of change from the center to the periphery edge.

Footnote references:
1 Translator’s forward, pg. xii, The Arcades Project. 2 Benjamin, W., pgs. 416-455, The Arcades Project.

[think beautifully » pull away » move » start walking » open lid » take apart]