Common Place No. 35 by John J. Parman

"Late Summer" & Other Writing Common Place No. 35 | Summer 2021

I went through a lot of papers recently and unearthed manuscripts going back to the 1970s. Some are on topics that I'm collecting as a third small book series, "Subject Matters," but others are memoir pieces, poems, etc. I added the title piece, "Late Summer," to the first book in the second series, "Memoir & Reflection," that will be sold through Pallas, the storefront and gallery that Elizabeth Snowden runs in San Francisco. The series marks our tiny editorial studio's foray into book publishing, taking advantage of short-run digital printing. "Late Summer" leads off this new issue—a miscellany, in essence, drawn from my "writing barn" finds.

Late Summer 1. A woman cries at the pier, thinking of the contrast between her unhappiness and the happiness of her exhusband. In the moment, I see that nothing can really be said or done. She feigns the loss of a contact lens, and the conversation shifts. I was here once myself. We've all been here, comparing our unhappy fate with the presumed happiness of others. Perhaps, too, she experienced that peculiar double vision of longing, which sees reality and then layers memory over it. The unreachable aspect wrenches your heart and you feel tom from it by this disrupted past. I thought later of the Buddha's comment, "When I was enlightened, I found that everything was enlightened, too, even the rocks and grasses." To which he might have added, "I guess I never noticed that before." 2. Walking down the road earlier, the evening sun shone through a vast canopy of leaves, the whole scene made golden with its light. How often have I seen this? Yet I'm always struck anew by it. Beauty is never static. It constantly reveals something else. 3. Beauty is animate, alive in every expression and gesture. A photograph cannot capture it. 4. "People will start asking you your secrets," my colleague told me when I mentioned that today is the duration of my marriage. What would I tell them? I suppose the first secret is that a marriage should persist, and not be daunted by things that tradition frowns on. Tradition is generality, and marriage is all about the particulars.

5. Standing in the moonlight on the still-warm terrace—this is the image a letter sets down. Walking along the harbor, memories come pouring back. The senses are alive again with recollection. 6. The eve of the long weekend, the traditional gateway separating summer and fall. Earlier, I saw that many leaves have fallen. Many more are yellow with the late summer's heat. My whole life, I've regretted this progression into winter. Soon my grown children will marry and, if the gods favor them, children will follow—another gateway, one that marks the rise of a new generation. As that gate opens, a bell should sound. My parents were 31 when I was conceived, resettled outside New York City after the long separation of wartime. By the time I was six, I had circumnavigated the planet. We mostly traveled by ship, and my sense of geography was formed in real time by our progress from port to port, east to west. The world we passed through was shaking loose of the old colonial powers. All of this occurred decades ago. Sometimes I shock my colleagues by mentioning things from my childhood that happened two generations ago. A man's life spans three, roughly. Beyond that is borrowed time, as my father used to say. My mother's grandfather lived into his late 90s, gardening year-in and year-out, unfazed by the heat. Something about that life of purposeful toil pulled him along. 7. Not toil, but more like a steward's relationship to nature, whether it's the raising of children or the cultivation of a garden or a few acres. The work is cyclical rather than repetitive. Children grow; a garden or a small farm evolves from season to season. 8. Standing on our friends' deck last night, under the stars, I took in this place with its redwood columns and the river, a world all its own. I swam in it twice, that delicious feeling you only get from swimming amid small boats and the occasional bobbing head of another swimmer. The others sat on the small pier, tucked away between branches, hardly visible, the sun blazing to warm the water's surface. At dusk, the insects swarmed and the fish came up to eat them, their long, dark forms visible and the rings of water visible, too, wherever they emerged, ever so briefly, to feast on this or that flitting bug. Across the river there are tents pitched along the edge of a huge, rambling thicket that descends the bank. A heron flew at dusk just above the water, and then the crickets started in. This Sunday morning, the birds vie to be heard over the racket of the cars, already out in force. The others have gone to church, but I'm sitting here, writing this. 9. Too much wine distances me from myself. This could be a reason to go easy or a reason to change the guest list. 10. A marriage endures because while they're joined at the heart, they don't try to possess each other like property—no person can possibly be the property of another. 11. Marriage goes through many adjustments, which makes it necessary for each party to grant the other an independence that flouts the conventional view of marriage as hermetic and self-sufficient. Can it ever be those things? I have no idea. 12. "Can it ever be these things?" One hears tales of married couples with legendary devotion. Were they hermetic and self-sufficient, or were they just themselves?

13. "You've been here before," a friend said two years ago. Am I here again? I don't think so. 14. What I learned is that it's ego that suffers. Separation is terrible for ego. "Don't cut me off!" This gives voice to one of ego's specific fears. So, too, is anything that threatens to diminish one's sense of self or tamper with one's sense of one's world. Ego tries to possess. If it cannot, then it can become obsessed, depressed, incensed. 15, The notes to The Conference of the Birds say that the Sufis distinguished two souls, larger and smaller. The latter is called "the body of desire." 16. The first rain is always so welcome, even though it meant getting out of bed, throwing some clothes on, and rushing to the back to lean boards in front of those two still-open parts of the library wall. Luckily there are eaves to this small building, and I found it still dry. Welcome because at this time of year, everything is dry as a bone, and the risk of fire is always there. Everything a block east of here and up burned to ground in the 1920s. Once we toured a house at the next comer and were told that the original was designed by Bernard Maybeck, before that fire. All that remained were the chimneys, and a new house by someone else was built around them. 17. Marriage is a primary but not the only relationship. There are others, the I Ching says, "of personal inclination, that depend in the long run entirely on tactful reserve." It adds, "Fix your mind on an end that endures, and you will succeed in avoiding the reefs that confront the closer relationships." It notes, "Spontaneous affection is the all-inclusive principle of union." It arises in the moment, in other words. 18. When privacy isn't respected, secrecy follows by necessity. 19. A white cat with a bobbed tail and an odd gait, saunters by. Two others I see in the garden are, respectively, gray and slim, and yellow and bobcat-like. The latter could pass for a mountain lion at quarter scale. 20. A good marriage is more capacious than we realize. The privacy we afford ourselves is a recognition that our life together is made richer by the rest, and that what we owe each other, in the end, is to live well. We can put our trust in this and make it our vow. 21. An astonishingly beautiful day unfolds in the rain's wake, the sky as blue as blue can be. 22. The love of Eros is incompatible with suspicion, I read. 23. Only by experiencing life can you make sense of it. Mistakes of all kinds accompany this, but through exploration—I know no other word for it—you find out who you are, who others are in relation to you, what matters to you, and what's true for you. And you discover that these things have very little to do with what tradition or convention suggests that you or they should be.

24. Friendship with layers: marriage also has this possibility. 25. The I Ching gave me "Splitting Apart," with two moving lines that are the worst that hexagram has to offer. How to live through this? Look to the attributes, it said—the earth (devotion) and the mountain (stillness). 26. Time's arrow can be imperceptibly small and still find its mark, and still carry the thread. 27. A marriage has its priority. We share a life, and this brings its responsibilities. There's work involved, but not in the sense of sacrificing yourself to it. Like the Zen cook, there's a kind of liberation from ego in doing it well. 28. The irony is that every so-called transgression has proved in time to be otherwise. Life kneads us, I would say, and our nature provides the yeast. 29. If we're forced by others to tend a garden, as children often are, the chore of it can work against the pleasure. If we see another's love for it, we may approach it differently. We may eventually learn to love it for its own sake.

The Mother of the Arts I can't stand these people who design stuff. He forced himself to look again at the drawing on his table. It is an art. The force of his words. The room went silent. The man who made his lame remarks kept his same half slouch. Then they chimed in like monkeys, echoing his rebuff. It's so complete, my early work. No humility, no playing to the crown like Mr. PM with his apologies and nonchalance. The woman with her supposedly baiting remarks, her fall-flat erudition. Chattering like monkeys. He stopped his mind to look at the drawing again. To win, win again. Be part of this banal show. She was right about that—the music sucked. It is an art. The room silent until the monkey broke in. People who design stuff. Mr. PM with his pencil drawings of spaces he couldn't be bothered to build. Again, that stupid fucking argument about drawing and building. It is an art. I am an artist who builds. It is complete. It is the opposite of stuff. I draw therefore I build. Twenty-six awards. This banal ceremony, all this empty talk. How stupid, how completely stupid to have to say it again, watch the monkeys nod, see the faint smile cross the lips of Mr. PM with his fucking chairs, his fucking teapots. India has the bomb. Jakarta burns. Where will they flee? Which shop, which canyon will escape their torch? Flames lick the entire length of Sunset. White men stream to the Pacific. Sharks bask along the bars as they are driven towards them. I will not survive. My art will be a ruin when this is over. But no, perhaps they will mistake the rust and chaos for something that has happened. We immolate ourselves, become ash men, hid behind our stubble. He forced himself to look at the drawing on the table. I may not be spared, but my art will survive me. (Written in May 1998 after attending a panel of architect-academics in San Francisco.)

A Visit to Oslo's National Gallery

Whenever I stay with my cousins in their house on a peninsula not far from Oslo, I visit the National Gallery. Late one winter, I went there three days in a row. Previously, this pilgrimage was like a renewed friendship or revisiting the places of my childhood. This time, though, my sense of the paintings shifted. I came to see them more directly, and to think about them visually, without the usual intervention of words. Art often contributes to our tendency to put what we see into words. Some of the paintings in the National Gallery are almost pedagogical in their desire to convey lessons to the viewer. Others are more like jokes or gossip—Gerhard Munthe, for example, standing in his fur collared coat in a smoke-filled cafe, looks incongruously across the gallery toward his paintings of farm houses and other country scenes in the next room. Near him, a professor appears as a womanizer and bon vivant. They are something like character actors, these paintings—familiar not because we know the people they depict, but because we think we know their type. In separate rooms are studies of a woman named Tine and her children. I thought they were the wife and children of the artist, but no, he was married to another. Yet clearly, he was in love with Tine. How else to explain his feeling for her and her children, and the empathy he brings to her condition as a young mother, with its cares and burdens? The sleeping child has her mother's cleft chin. And so, we construct the artist's family, looking anxiously to see if the older child whose hair Tine combs is the younger one that she nurses through an illness so faithfully three rooms before. In the next room is the artist's actual wife, Oda Krohg, a modem woman with her hands on her hips. Two rooms beyond are her paintings, of a child cutting up a newspaper and a Japanese lantern in a blue nightscape. She takes on other names, that of her artist husband disappearing altogether, but it has been resurrected in the caption by some art historian. It is her husband's portrait of her that takes precedence, apparently, and gives her this official name that contradicts how she signed some other paintings, as Oda Lasson.

Walking back in time, we find a painter who pursues a family through two generations, tracking their rise in the 18th century from the provincial judiciary to the capital. The paintings improve, also, in step with their subjects. The passage of time frees them from a board-like stiffness, not unlike the evolution of photography a century later. This is one of the virtues of the National Gallery—that it shows, often in the same room, the evolution of a painter over several decades. One starts off making an academic portrait of a woman artist. Fifteen years later, in the 1920s, he paints a polychromatic, half-expressionist scene of a father reading under an umbrella, his house behind him, bathed in sunlight, and his daughter in shadow in a hammock. We used to see this transition in the work of Harriett Backer—her academic leave taking picture contrasting with her Vermeer-like blue room in Paris (above) and her impressionist look outward from a country church in Norway, the interior still rendered an older style. But now her older paintings are stored away; we encounter her first in Paris. They've moved her work to a bigger room dominated by Christian Krohg's monumental "Albe1tine," letting Munch have the small room at the corner, with its better light and sense of intimacy, where her paintings were gathered. Munch also has the large central room entirely to himself. His originality distinguishes his work of this period from that of his contemporaries, but a painting like "The Scream" has become so iconic that it can only be parodied or appropriated. Backer's "Blue Room" is one of my favorite paintings in the National Gallery. I respond to it like I respond to the cello—a felt response rather than a response in words (although here I am, using words to describe it). Its colors and the sense of "wholeness" of its composition are what remind me of Vermeer. (The plant by the window, however, reminds me of Balthus.) The woman who sits facing the window is preoccupied with her sewing. Across from her are chairs whose slender legs could all too easily take flight. The stillness of the room is momentary, her concentration on her work suspending all motion. Only the sound of a clock somewhere in the house or the dust drifting in the sunlight reminds us that time is passing. Other paintings convey a different sense of time. Summer night, a preoccupation of Northern painters, is always a captured moment, to be stored and savored later, when daylight is scarce. Near Harriett Backer's paintings are two others of lakes viewed in the summer twilight. Peering into the half-light, we can see men rowing. A column of smoke rises from a hidden and distant chimney. Elsewhere, this same quality of light is captured in Harald Sohlberg's panorama (below) that takes in a summer house's deck and the fjord and mountains to which it looks out. The sun, setting somewhere to our right, is reflected in the brightness of the windows. An evening meal, with its plates and vessels, the wood lapboard of the house, the French doors with their lights remind me of my own house in Berkeley. We make these associations, but we don't expect the diners to reappear, the sun to set, or the scene to change. The "Blue Room" holds out these possibilities. In the space of six or seven rooms, we see the work of three generations of painters. More accurately, we move a decade at a time from the 1880s to the 1930s. In the process, we see these painters begin to sever the tie to "storytelling" that predominates at mid-century and move toward what we might call "visual expression"— something "seen" and conveyed visually, without a story or subtext. Munch is the pivot-point of this transition, combining both impulses in ways that anticipate Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon. The others come down on one side or the other—and increasingly on one side only, the side of the purely visual. By the time we get to Karsten in the 1930s, realistic depiction has begun to drop away. Soon, it will disappear altogether. I was reminded of this progression by an incident in Berkeley shortly after the death of de Kooning. A man at Peet's, a local coffee house, waved a copy of his obitua1y and said loudly to the server that "My nine-year-old can paint better than this." De Kooning's obituary in the New York Times noted that his last work was shaped, so to speak, by his final illness, Alzheimer's disease, and therefore of questionable merit. Yet Oliver Sacks' accounts of people with neurological disorders suggest that creativity and the human impulse to create continue in the face of these deficits. We can see this by analogy in the late work of Duncan Grant. When the frailty of old age tied him to Charleston, the country house he'd shared with Vanessa Bell, he found inspiration enough in its bounded world to keep on painting. De Kooning did this too, despite his impairment, and it seems possible that losing track of life's narrative was actually liberating to his artistic vision and its expression. (Written in Berkeley on 23 March 1997, the same month as my Oslo visit.)

Temko's Ghost

In honor of Allan Temko and as a coda to their half-century of friendship, the New York City real estate magnate Dan Rose convened a panel on "Activist Criticism" in Manhattan one evening early in May—an event sponsored by the new Forum for Urban Design of which Rose is a founder and patron. Moderated by Robert Ivy, it brought together four critics—Robert Campbell, Paul Goldberger, John King, and Nicolai Ouroussoff. Those missing included Blair Kamin, a critic Temko admired; Michael Sorkin, an intellectual known for his fearlessness and political engagement; Ada Louise Huxtable, Temko's contemporary and the first architecture critic at the Times; Herbert Muschamp, Ouroussoff's immediate predecessor in that job; and Christopher Hawthorne, formerly of Slate, who succeeded Ouroussoff as the architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times. There's a transcript, but it doesn't convey the stifling heat of the room at Baruch College where the event was held. It's a tribute to the participants' stamina that they remained coherent and cheerful throughout. Drawing on the transcript, let me walk you through the evening's discussion and then comment on it. Active vs. reactive criticism "I don't think it's a meaningful distinction," Campbell said, setting the evening's premise aside. "You're only doing it so that you can generate and contribute to the conversation of what makes a good environment." One can also be an activist critic in the Lewis Mumford sense of "evaluating things in terms of their social implications," Goldberger added. "The public impression of what we do" argues for the distinction, Ouroussoff said. Unlike art, "we all have to live with architecture all the time. It's unavoidable. In that sense, I don't know many architecture critics who wouldn't feel there's something irresponsible about not getting engaged in the very beginning of the process." Yes, but "you're trying to affect the outcome not only of a particular situation, but of an attitude toward the environment in general," Campbell replied. In San Francisco, King said, with its "various zoning and special interest group overlays, part of the job of the activist critic is to make the case that the actual built object is important." Campbell concurred. "One evaluates the process as well as the product."

Temko's brand of activism Activist criticism "may have been a lot simpler" in 1961 when Temko started out, King said. It's also a question of temperament, said Campbell—Temko "had the joy of battle." He then told an anecdote in which Temko, roasting a building in Los Angeles, listed San Francisco firms to make the point that L.A. didn't have a monopoly on terrible architects. "I feel uncomfortable killing things," Ouroussoff said. "I always flinch when I hear that. What we want to do is get the dialogue going and give energy to that conversation. In terms of the list, you don't know where creativity is going to come from." Campbell added that part of the critic's role is to "find talent and help nurture it—help create the careers of young architects who are breaking out for the first time." Ivy quoted Kamin as writing that his role was "to keep ugly buildings from being built." "Ugly is the wrong word," Campbell said, but then Ouroussoff commented, "Part of what we do, if we're doing our job right, is to defend the right of certain ugly buildings to exist." He cited an interaction between Greg Lynn and someone in the audience during a lecture Lynn gave at Yale. "Why are your buildings so ugly?" he was asked. "Do you think they're all ugly?" Lynn replied. "I'm much happier that you think all of them are consistently ugly than just one." Campbell quoted Picasso's maxim, "Anything new is ugly." "There's a place for ugly," he said. A critic like Huxtable was a "100-percent proponent of classical modernism. It's impossible to have that view today. We live in a much more diverse and varied aesthetic culture. In fact, it's very difficult to write about whether a building is ugly or beautiful." Architecture and culture "Criticism has changed the nature of the discussion and the nature of the constituency for architecture," Goldberger said. "Over the last generation, architecture has become more central to public discourse." Yes," King said, but "it worries me if we focus just on the traditional center and just on the traditional high points." He cited his own reviews of an ordinary urbanism that he sought to pose as an alternative to mindless suburban sprawl. "Part of the job is to decide what's important, what's not, and why," Ouroussoff added. Campbell noted that Muschamp "believed that architecture was practiced by a group of 40 or 50 people around the world for an audience of five thousand. Architecture is something much broader and of much greater influence than that." Ouroussoff countered, saying that Muschamp "was trying to open up a way of enjoying architecture and a way of engaging it that he felt had been lost." He added that Muschamp's viewpoint reflected his era. "I don't know, Nicolai, if Herbert had been writing in a slightly different time, he would have written any differently," Goldberger responded. Returning to his point, Campbell asserted that Muschamp "helped create the world of starchitects that we all talk about today. He didn't only respond to that, he helped create it." Not so, Ourousoff replied. "He was part of it, yes, but he didn't create it on his own." Goldberger agreed. "That ascribes far too much power, but he certainly rode the trend." Yet this was like Anatole France, who "defined criticism as 'recording one's adventures among masterpieces.' Herbert was following in his somewhat adjusted footsteps." We live in a time when, thanks to blogs, "everybody's opinion counts," Ivy noted. Is there still a place for critics as mediators, imposing their opinions between themselves and the world? "So, The Gutter means more than any of us. Is that what you're saying?" Goldberger shot back, getting a laugh from the audience. While "the platform is in some ways becoming more unstable," Ouroussoff said, "the authority has to come from your understanding of the work and the arguments you bring to it rather than from the fact that you're connected to a particular institution, which is going to be less and less important over time." He added later that "we should talk about the bigger public conversation: the institutions, the museums, the journals—these institutions are not holding up their ends." Asked to elaborate, he added, "The quality of architecture shows in this country has become pretty appalling. The architecture journals are not as lively as they were. Maybe it has more to do with economics," he speculated. "Architects are building a lot, and when they're building, that's all they want to do. It means that other parts of the conversation are not as active." Architects' ideas and influence "Architecture is so much a part of the discourse in a way that it wasn't, yet there isn't a kind of larger, more serious thought about it," King said. "People are afraid to say that architecture isn't an intellectual discipline,"

Campbell added. "The intellectualization in the 1980s and early 1990s was warmed-over French deconstructionism, for the most part illiterate and unreadable." Goldberger: "A lot of that was in the 1970s, when there was very little built work because the economy was not supporting it, so the culture went toward a paper architecture." Then Ourousoff commented: When you look at Cedric Price, Archigram, and Superstudio, they were still working with the language of architecture. That's an important distinction. They weren't talking about things they knew nothing about, like Derrida. The freedom they had because they weren't building was actually really important, because they were able to do things and push ideas. Those projects and ideas have a real life-just because they weren't built doesn't mean they didn't have a mass influence on the profession.

How architecture is covered The writer Andrew Blum asked about reporting on architecture, as opposed to reviewing it. The Times has a full-time reporter, Ouroussoff said. "Architecture is also real estate, so there are plenty of people in the real estate pages covering it, but someone who covers it as architecture—that's something new and important." There are three art critics at the Times, he said, which "is amazing to me, when architecture is such a fundamental part of everyday life and is so popular now." Then he added, Editors know what an art critic or a film critic does, but it's not really clear what architecture critics do or why they're necessary. In a lot of people's minds, architecture belongs in the real estate section. Of course, architecture is about economics, business, and development, but to say that it's also about something else-social issues, aesthetic issues-that was a big shift.

"The newspapers believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are doomed economically," Campbell said. "The way they deal with it is to get younger readers, and so they dumb down the cultural sections and the serious criticism tends to shrink." King agreed: The Chronicle left Temko's post vacant for seven years because, having bought him out as part of a downsizing move, they weren't "really enthusiastic to find another one." The critic's range and methods "We all started out in newspapers and we're driven by the news." Ouroussoff said. "Also, being trained as architect, I have a desire to shift the scales, to look at someone very young who's struggling with very basic issues, and how you rebuild a city like New Orleans. Ideally, you're moving between them. That's the only way to learn anything." Then he added, "In a lot of ways, we just feed off of what the architects are doing. We don't have time, like Corb did, to map out a set of principles for rebuilding the world." "To the extent possible when you go to a place, you empty your head and immerse yourself in that experience as completely as you can. Only then do you strike out for the shores of some kind of formulation to make a larger point." Campbell said. Ouroussoff agreed. "You can't go into a building with a sense that you know what you're going to see. You go into it hoping to be surprised." Some comments of my own In his review of this same panel, John King wondered what Temko would have made of it. Termko's view of the current critical scene was pretty jaundiced, with the exception of Blair Kamin—someone that the panel also saw as exceptional. As King put it, "he's working in Chicago. Architecture is still central to that city's identity"—a comment that led Campbell to blurt out, "Which was true in San Francisco."1 Temko felt that most critics today lack his bona fides—a classical education, rounded out in Europe, and followed by on-the-job training with giants like Mies, Saarinen, Goldsmith, and T.Y. Lin: what he called (referring to Goldsmith) "the real permanent article." Although he clearly favored classical modernism, his love of the Gothic for its robust and heady blend of aesthetics and structure suggests that his biases about architecture went deeper. Asked what stood out in his three decades as the Chronicle's architecture critic, Temko left architecture behind to mention the National Seashore that stretches north and south of San Francisco, and the San Mateo Bridge, which he and Chronicle editor Scott Newhall managed to have redesigned by using all the political pressure their paper could muster.

This is another point, of course—that a newspaper like the Chronicle really mattered in the Pat Brown era. Temko had clout because of Newhall's backing, and Newhall had clout because the Chronicle could still sway public opinion. "I wrote the review and then I ghost-wrote the editorial," Temko said, with considerable satisfaction. Today, even at the Times, institutional backing of this kind no longer delivers a knockout punch. After Temko died, I worked on a memorial book2 that was given to his family and that of Myron Goldsmith. As part of that effort, I read excerpts of reports that Temko sent back to the editors of Architectural Forum, and was amazed to see how "in bed" he was with SOM—a relationship that would have been pilloried today— and how open he was about it. Yet it was also clear that this in no way affected his judgement. He extolled a scheme for Davis Hall at UC Berkeley, for example, and then wrote later that the intervention of William Wurster and the Regents had made a mess of it, and it was not worth publishing. A freelance critic who maintains a design practice told me that when he was asked by a well-known European architect to collaborate on a project in his U.S. city, the owners of his paper told him that taking this commission would preclude him from reviewing any of that architect's future work. Faced with this lifetime ban, he had to decline the offer, but he was taken aback. He was prepared, of course, not to review a project in which he was a direct participant, but to exclude the rest struck him as absurd, ethical reservations run wild. So, I can imagine the Times' public editor reacting in horror to reports like Temko's from the field. "What are you doing?" he or she would write. "How can you retain your objectivity when you're flying around with Nat Owings, currying favor with Bassett and Co.? Isn't it all just too unseemly?" Somewhere, Herbert Muschamp is smiling. That's life in the fast lane, baby, and Temko wasn't immune, either. Yet his critical sense did not desert him. Temko's interest in the marriage of aesthetics and structure made him sympathetic to buildings like SFO's International Terminal-and critical of what he termed "the Bay Bridge fiasco," regretting aloud that he and T.Y. Lin were unable to put a halt to it. I missed him when the Alcoa Building was tarnished, and earlier, when Goldsmith's masterwork, the Oakland Coliseum, was desecrated. I missed his sense of timing when recent mediocrities proposed for the Rincon area were green-lighted by the Supervisors. Late in life, Temko spoke warmly of his successor at the Chronicle, appreciating his exploration of housing as a building type, and noting that his timing was getting better. One pleasure of the Forum's panel was seeing John King present at the table. He may not be Temko's natural heir, but his own brand of activism is emerging, and it's good to see. And while he may not have Temko's cultural grounding (who does?), his background as a reporter has primed him to look beyond individual buildings, as Temko did, to consider the larger issues of the region. As Temko knew in spades, that's part of urbanity, too. Notes: 1. The only real contretemps that arose in the panel followed an anecdote that King told about Temko and the San Francisco Downtown Plan. "Allan did a great disservice to the city by misinterpreting it as mandating postmodernism," Campbell said, adding that Frank Gehry told him at the time that he would never design a building in San Francisco "because of the picture that Allan falsely painted of what was being demanded by the planners." To which King rejoined, "Well, he was painting a picture that a lot of planners believed in." 2. Dialogues on Structure: The Friendship of Allan Temko and Myron Goldsmith, with introductions by Walter Netsch and Craig Hartman, edited by Yosh Asato, Hartman, and John Parman, and produced by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, 2006. 3. Provided to Craig Hartman by Vassar Professor Nicholas Adams as background for Dialogues on Structure. Adams was writing a history of SOM.

(Written in May 2006, following the event, and originally published in _line, which now longer exists.)

Pleasure in Theory and in Practice

Taoism and Zen point to "no-action"—that is, action that's true to life as it is. Rooted in being, it takes its cues from a present that is both an effect of past causes and the cause of future effects—a basic law of life. While we can't know everything that the present holds, we can be within in it, aware and open. This contrasts with our tendency to project desires, to objectify, and to weigh the present against past or future and find it wanting. "No-action" also recognizes that the present is our only field of action. Transitory pleasures involve having and possessing. Hierarchy, scarcity, and exclusivity arise: "I have it, and you don't" and its corollary: "I had it, and now I don't." Such pleasures make a fetish of their object. Meaningful pleasures involve engagement, awareness, and perseverance. The journey and the destination are one and the same, an unfolding present that draws on the past and cultivates a future through that "productive friction" that has always brought a new world into being—a bit of us and a great (and unpredictable) amount of something else. How we experience ourselves, our work, and our surroundings benefits from such a practice. A practice rooted in being is not indifferent to outcome, but the outcome is considered innate with and as spontaneous as life itself. "Just sit" was a 12th-century Zen directive for practice. Five centuries later, another Zen reformer suggested that this might be more direction than you need. "Just live" should suffice. Dilemmas come with the territory "Mindful" is a Buddhist term used to describe an aware and open receptivity to life in all of its complexity and nuance, posing many more dilemmas than absolute choices. Dilemmas invite transcendence, an opportunity often squandered in false choices or unsatisfactory compromises. Dilemmas ask us to pirouette over their horns like Minoan acrobats and arrive somewhere new. A central dilemma for planners and designers lies in the inherent limits of their positive actions. Christopher Alexander (in The Nature of Order), Friedrich Hayek (in The Fatal Conceit), and Isaiah Berlin (in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) comment on this. Alexander argues for judging cities, buildings, and settings based on the "life" we find in them. Implicit in this is his confidence in life's richness and in the demotic nature of its creation. This relates to Hayek's argument that far from being designed, societies are self-organizing, evolving systems. (Horst Rittel's distinction between tame and wicked design problems relates to this.) Berlin asks for tolerance, recognizing (with Vico and Hayek) the time-bound, often tribal nature of our beliefs. John Hagel and John Seely Brown's notion of "productive friction" (in The Only Sustainable Edge) relates to this: It can shape learning as people with different backgrounds and skill sets engage each other on real problems. It is particularly valuable at boundaries because it exposes people to different ways of seeing problems and potential solutions." (Pgs. 4–5)

A dilemma asks us to engage and learn—to move beyond our set point of view, influenced by the dilemma itself. As Rittel notes, many of the problems we face are resolved temporarily rather than solved for good. Hayek adds that tradition reflects our efforts over long stretches of time to resolve them.) A theory of pleasure and its application Threading these different points together, we can construct a theory of pleasure grounded in life as it is (unfolding and unpredictable), in the "productive friction" that comes with its oxymoronic or dilemma-laden territory, and in the loose, intuitive/aware, open-ended "no action" that is its preferred way forward, accepting spontaneity and making room for the ephemeral and for new players within the larger frame of our lives. As Hagel and Brown point out, there's a shift from "push" models, emphasizing efficiency in the pursuit of large, clearly defined markets, to "pull" models, acknowledging the demotic, ephemeral, and unpredictable nature of demand. "Any color, as long as it's black," was only briefly a recipe for success, yet it resurfaced as reengineering, outsourcing, and offshoring—all of which sought to deliver a rigidly specified product or service at lower cost. But there are limits to "push." Even when you throw in mass customization, there's a yawning gap between production and demand. "Pull" is a leveling of the playing field that makes us participants, each with our own desires, skills, and interests. Sometimes we're making or creating, and sometimes we're consuming or partaking. Demand is a byproduct of these interactions, coming in demotic waves that business can surf to take them further. What has changed is that innovation is on both sides. Technology, for example, may reflect innovative genius, but it's also a reflection of unsanctioned, subversive, grassroots behavior: play, in short. This theory of pleasure can also be applied to cities. Consider the public realm, which can be viewed as a "zone of unfolding" that invites constant improvement from all comers. While this blurs the question of who owns it, it speaks to the shared nature of its creation and stewardship, drawing on those who take pleasure in it. The results are better, thanks to their collective participation. The settings that make up the public realm need to be worked and reworked, and not just by its owners. For this to happen, though, the context has to change. What emerges now is often locked into place by entitlements and covenants. Neglect can also be a problem if public stewardship is underfunded. Supporting active participation in the public realm's unfolding by leaving room for temporary buildings, gardening, and other local interventions would help return it to its users. (The proliferation of parklets along shopping streets keep cafés and restaurants open in the pandemic is an example.) These examples show how pleasure pervades our existence. Its practice—our ability to find meaning and happiness in our experience of life—is something to be learned and cultivated. What matters most now is our ability to engage with others for creative or productive ends that we share with them. Ownership of productive capacity and even of intellectual property is less and less important. The quality of human and organizational relationships across social networks is what makes it possible to create and produce. Instead of command and control, with the future boxed in and then bid out, the practice of pleasure looks for outcomes that reflect a loose collaboration whose starting points are, "I'd like something like this." Like play, the focus is on insight and discovery—a practice that is open-ended and cheerfully oxymoronic about life.

(A draft for an issue of _line on the theme of pleasure, circa 2006, edited from the original.)