2018-1

Correspondences

ContentsAuthors BiographiesCredits

Correspondences

All nature is a temple whose living pillars seem
At times to babble confused words, half understood;
Man journey’s there through an obscure symbolic wood,
Aware of eyes that peep with a familiar gleam.

All nature is a temple whose living pillars seem
At times to babble confused words, half understood;
Man journey’s there through an obscure symbolic wood,
Aware of eyes that peep with a familiar gleam.

All nature is a temple whose living pillars seem
At times to babble confused words, half understood;
Man journey’s there through an obscure symbolic wood,
Aware of eyes that peep with a familiar gleam.

All nature is a temple whose living pillars seem
At times to babble confused words, half understood;
Man journey’s there through an obscure symbolic wood,
Aware of eyes that peep with a familiar gleam.

Charles Baudelaire

Editor’s Foreword

Correspondences shape our perception of experience through reciprocal actions; they bridge distances as whispers and echoes, as spontaneous reactions and resonant associations processed through the agency of time. One corresponds with one’s self. Archaically, letters are written. We call, we send e-mails, texts, and truncated thoughts—tweets—delivered as digital shouts while impatiently we wait for plethoric responses, connectivity and agreement. Words and images entropically collapse upon each other; experience is distanced from reality by the architecture of virtual transmutations. Once cherished as a means for repose and reflection, time is reduced to an intrusive interloper, attacking the technologies of convenience.

A contemporaneous action is valuated by its perceived correspondence with analogues held within the interpretive frame of the past; a past action, event or artifact is valuated through its correspondence with the irrevocable presence—the politic—of becoming.  

Entwined within the intercourse of human correspondences is the less overt interface between temporal distances shaped by the artifacts of culture - things. Now, for better or for worse, the global matrix of information supporting once identifiable cultural signs upends traditional taxonomies and hierarchies. The correspondences between things—at times tacit, anarchic—are resonant documents of life lived within the ever-morphing world of our experiences.

Perhaps no one better foretold the manifesting schisms in classical analogs—correspondences—than Charles Baudelaire. In the first chapter of his luminous book, La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso interprets Baudelaire’s phrase the “natural obscurity of things” as the most common perception, and to “tackle” the “commonest” one must embrace analogy as the means “to access the knowledge ‘which sheds a magical and supernatural light on the natural obscurity of things’.” Calasso infers that for Baudelaire, analogy was a science, “perhaps even, the supreme science, if the imagination is the ‘queen of facilities’.” Quoting from a letter written by Baudelaire to Alphonse Toussenel, he continues “...the imagination is the most scientific of the facilities, because it is the only one to understand the universal analogy, or that which a mystical religion calls correspondence.” Baudelaire refers to one’s correspondence with the world: “...everything, form, movement, number, color, scent, be it in the spiritual world or the natural sphere, is meaningful, reciprocal, converted, and corresponding”; Calasso concludes: “This last is a revealing word. Analogy and correspondences are, for Baudelaire, equivalent terms.”

Before Baudelaire, analogy was defined via the classical “canons”, wherein correspondences were limited to regulated “systems” of interpretation. With Baudelaire these systems were jettisoned; the canonic rules were abandoned in favor of more anarchic, non-systematized, modes of correspondence. Baudelaire’s prophetic verse has yet to settle; our correspondences with the world continue to be shaped by the irrepressible pace of modernity. 

The editors of AR/Architecture Research 2018 have sought writings that engage the science of the imagination through a body of correspondences within the disciplines of architecture and art. Content ranges from neurophenomenolgy to the politics of sight, to the transferences between artist and architect and the inevitable influences of these entwinements within the academy. AR 2018’s conceptual core is bound by the exploration, nature and diversity of contemporary correspondences.


Paul O Robinson

2018-1

Correspondences

ContentsAuthors BiographiesCredits