This from a website designed to help students avoid common errors in English usage:
"To 'flesh out' an idea is to give it substance, as a sculptor adds clay flesh to a skeletal armature. To 'flush out' a criminal is to drive him or her out into the open. The latter term is derived from bird-hunting, in which one flushes out a covey of quail. If you are trying to develop something further, use 'flesh'; but if you are trying to reveal something hitherto concealed, use 'flush.'”
Good advice, but what if the quail being flushed is also the substance of the idea that needs fleshing? In the above definition, fleshing out is depicted as an additive process, lumps of flesh, meaning and form piled by a dedicated creator onto a prefashioned frame. The frame was made to hold the flesh, shaped to contain an already previsioned, imagined, quantity of flesh. As most of us know from experience, however, when the frame and flesh stand in for the structure and content of a not yet fully-formed idea, the process of fleshing is more akin to the flushing process, not additive but delving, seeking. The substance is more like the quail and the criminal. The quail above, and the criminal too, are concealed from those who seek them, pursuer and pursued. The frame is a scaffolding that comes up in pieces, loses its relevance, has to be torn down, re-erected, in a new shape to fit the new content it supports, the latest flushed meaning. In short, to flesh out the truth is to flush out the flesh, piece by piece, to coax into the open what has hitherto been concealed.
In the context of this debate and the questioning of certain design practitioners, the substance concealed is also the debate itself. Seriously. The students are criticizing, postering, getting agitated; Mau and his mysterious troupe burrow away from the gaze of the hunters, and talk behind closed doors about...? probably about many of the ideas the students are talking about; and the faculty, the moderators, are alternately calling for a debate or squashing one - that is, when they're not trying to shove the latest in green gospel down our throats. Everyone in susurrus.
So what's the main thing under scrutiny, the elephant in the china shop? It's not Mr. Mau, it's a lot bigger than Mau. It's...dare I say it... "Sustainability." Green gospel. We're drowning in it. Little green goblins hide in our lockers and taunt us with their sexy photos and clever text. The captioned photos, misshapen frames, aesthetic disasters, promise salvation while providing only a mixture of good intentions and a dixie cup of spiked Kool-aid. Better living through chemistry is now better living through design, better living through sustainability. It's the wave of the future, it's right, we've got to save the earth, we can save the earth, buy the book and drink the Kool-aid.
What's the truth about Sustainability? I don't know, you tell me. I know what it often is when some unwitting professor tries to teach it to my particular brand of architecture grad student (poor prof!); it's foggy philosophy, laced with undefended personal ethics, taught to the beat of "Baraka" and "Dances with Wolves," seductive but insubstantial, a call to arms without providing arms, and the occasional, thankful glimmer of useful technology or efficient environmental/ planning strategies.
What is sustainability in truth? I don't know, but I can tell you now what I think it is and I'm sure many of you, my colleagues, will agree. Sustainability is a badly drawn quail hiding in the rafters of a shuddering scaffold. It's not a movement, it's a partially formed idea, rife with contradictions and intentions and innovations, and we, students and faculty and designers alike, are the hunters, the truth seekers. As such, we have a responsibility to flush out the flesh, and to load the armature to the point of breaking. Only then can we attempt to build a better armature, a more worthy frame. So I say, tear down the frame, get the quail, rip it apart, discard the offal and salvage what's good. Come out criminal, with your hands where I can see them. The hunt is on.
Cara Ellis
M.Arch Candidate
AIADO, SAIC
April 19th, 2008
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Cara Ellis
MArch
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1 comment:
Talk about getting us fired up. As the craziest and perhaps least eloquent among you, I want to call BULLSHIT. Green technology is a good idea but it won’t save the world. So I say, save yourself, and think of a better way to make a community.
We live in a post-modern world so lets start creating our own reality. Let’s get rid of all the baggage we have been handed down, because you know things we take as fact are being disproved every day. Where do your allegiances lie? It is your journey, you have a choice. You can follow the herd, or go down the path less traveled.
Let’s start with a skeleton. We will call that modernism. It makes for a good foundation, but no one really wants to look at. They thought they knew it all, but shouldn’t we leave that to God. They tried to take all the fun out of life, but the life they took all the fun out of was their own. Didn’t they try to make life better through science and technology? Isn’t that the same path the green movement is on? Modernism tried to throw it all away and start again. Now we are dancing on its grave.
Nothing is as simple as it seems. We cannot just forget the past, nor can we be bogged down in tradition. It is a different sense of time and space. It is not about spatial gymnastics, as some would have it. But a combination of all the things we love about Art and all the technical prowess of Engineering. Add a pinch of flexibility and we have Architecture, with a capital A, in all its glory. Is it a box for living? (or any of the other uses structures are used for) or is it Architecture? Now it is time to go crazy, get nuts. We live in a time when the creative energy is palpable.
Jeff Erken
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