Captain PMS, Jencks

Captain’s Blog Stardate 8/28

I lived in New York once. It was over a decade and several dreams ago but I lived there nonetheless. For a small town girl the city was an overload to the senses. I ate foods I had never heard of, saw shows that never make it here, and walked myself into a size two. I loved New York and when I left I felt like I had really made the most of my experience there, but after reading Jencks it occurs to me that in a lot of ways I saw nothing.
New York has some great architecture, which at nineteen, meant nothing to me. The eleven canons of post-modernism that Jencks describes reveal themselves a thousand times over in the city. I cannot tell you which buildings best illustrate dissonant beauty only that I’m certain there are many. I don’t know which neighborhoods combine history and modernism but in my memory it seems like most function in a state of urbane urbanism. What I do remember is this office building across from my apartment that had a decorative circle on the ground in front of it. The circle was surrounded by marble benches and columns, a sort of gazebo without the roof. I sat on those benches most afternoons, eating vendor food and reading. That circle was of great comfort to me on some of my loneliest days.
The eleventh canon that Jencks discusses is the “return to the absent centre.” He describes this return as a “paradox,” a “desire for communal space… and then the admission that there is nothing quite adequate to fill it.” Looking back I think I can see what the architect imagined when he or she designed the building. I think they pictured tired office workers out for a breath of fresh air or maybe just a break and a snack. I think they pictured them talking and laughing together. I’m sure they thought it was a nice balance between art and functionalism, this gazebo with no roof, this strange design on the ground in marble where a fountain should have been. The truth is, however, that in the two years I lived there the only person I ever met in this absent centre was myself.
Perhaps post-modernism, as Jencks suggests, is “schizophrenic” about the past. I believe the architect who built the circle saw it as the next big thing but also loved that it looked like something straight out of Rome. They probably thought they were brilliant and that soon roofless gazebos would sweep the nation. Instead the place was filled with too much sunlight and bird crap. But, to a nineteen year old girl alone in the city, it offered solace and rested her mind when there was nothing adequate to fill it.