Monday, March 20, 2006

Postmodernism and wacky architecture

In a recent Podcast entitled "If The Foundations Be Destroyed", Ravi Zacharias had this amazing quote:

"Some of you may have heard me tell of the time I was speaking at Ohio State University an on the way to the evening lecture the gentlemen who was driving me stopped outside a building called the Wexner Center for the Arts and he said to the me, "That is one of the newest buildings here on our campus" and he said to me, "that is considered one of America's first postmodernist buildings". I said, "What is a postmodernist building? I understand the term in logic and literature, what is it in architecture? What is a postmodernist building?" And I followed up his description of it in Newsweek which said exactly the same thing that he said to me, and it is this: The architect designed the building with no particular pupose or desing in mind. There were stairways that went no where. There were pillars that joined no surfaces. It was just randomly put together and the reasoning the architect gave was that life itself is capricious, and why should our buildings have any meaning and purpose if life itself has not meaning and purpose? So I looked at the gentlemen describing this so boldly and I said to him, "Did he do the same with the foundation? Did the foundation have any purpose and design and certain boundaries that is had to honor, certain laws that it had to keep?" The man started laughing. You see, we can fool each other on the infastructure level. We cannot fool with reality on the foundational level because the foundation will very quickly show you whether it can withstand the elements when they quickly come and invade upon the foundation."

No comments: