Why can't any of these theorists say things simply? We learn in every writing class to be more precise, yet some of the most respected minds have such excessive jargon that I'm getting lost between the lines while I try to figure out what they're saying.
Anyway.
I actually liked this reading, once I figured out what Jencks was saying. It automatically made me think of my time in Barcelona this summer and being inside Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. I looked up Gaudi and he wasn't really classified under any genre... all it said was "beyond modernism." But seeing Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, how could that work NOT be postmodern? I hadn't seen any of this work before, and I remember the feeling that overwhelmed me when I came up from the underground metro and looked up at the towers of the Sagrada. There is nothing else anywhere in the world that could possibly come close to the intricacy in the sheer size of that monument. When I think of a holy space, I do not think of columns resembling the bones of a human body holding up a ceiling of honeycomb and abstract, acute flowers. The staircases flowed in elliptical patterns and rolled like waves upwards, their sides bending inwards and dipping into points. I'm trying so hard to explain it in a way that makes sense, but I think that's the point of what Gaudi was trying to do... make it NOT make sense. He structured a majority of the architecture of the Sagrada mimicking nature- flowers, beehives, fruits and vegetables.. all of it came together in a place to worship. The Parc Guell is an expanse of garden for over a mile, and the intricacy found at the Sagrada reflects within the walls of the garden. There is desert, there is mosaic, musicians, roses and cacti... all within the same structure. The play of difference that creates a cohesive entity is what Jencks was talking about. Gaudi was way beyond this time, and his work is a direct reflection of that.
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