All that is solid melts into air

What does All that is solid melts into air mean to us? Reading Berman for the first time this week, I was stunned by his opinions and how counterculture they were. So my question is, "All that is solid melts into the air," Marx wrote famously in The Communist Manifesto, was his prophecy as prescient as ever?

One word we can see it this coming from the story of Goesther’s Faust. If a person who will pay the greatest price in order to exchange for his greatest wish to come true, then what can this greatest wish be? For some people that would be to married to their love one, for others may be the procession of wealth or even the outmost power to some group of people. But for Faust legend of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he is already a doctor, lawer a highly successful scholar but one dissatisfied with his life who therefore decided to call on the Devil for further knowledge and magic powers with which to indulge all the pleasure and knowledge of the world. For a Christian who sold his soul  to the devil this indeed is the greatest price to pay but for what greatest wish?

The story concerns the fate of Faust in his quest for the true essence of life. Frustrated with learning and the limits to his knowledge, power, and enjoyment of life, he attracts the attention of the Devil (represented by Mephistopheles), who agrees to serve Faust until the moment he attains the zenith of human happiness, such that he cries out to that moment to "stay, thou art so beautiful!" (Faust, I, l.1700) — at which point Mephistopheles may take his soul. Faust is pleased with the deal, as he believes this happy zenith will never come. But he did in the later stage progresses into allegorical poetry. Faust and his Devil pass through and manipulate the world of politics and the world of the classical gods, and meet with Helen of Troy(the personification of beauty). Finally, having succeeded in taming the very forces of war and nature, Faust experiences a singular moment of happiness.

Mephistopheles tries to seize Faust's soul when he dies after this moment of happiness, but is frustrated and enraged when angels intervene due to God's grace. Though this grace is truly 'gratuitous' and does not condone Faust's frequent errors perpetrated with Mephistopheles, the angels state that this grace can only occur because of Faust's unending striving and due to the intercession of the forgiving Gretchen. The final scene has Faust's soul carried to heaven in the presence of God as the "Holy Virgin, Mother, Queen, Goddess...The Eternal Feminine." The Goddess is thus victorious over Mephistopheles, who had insisted at Faust's death that he would be consigned to "The Eternal Empty."

In the 60s, there was a think tank in America which predicted people in the future would have lots more of free time to enjoy their life as most of their work will be done by robots and Artificial intelligence due to the development of advanced technology. But in fact, people living in todays’ world are working harder, longer and living in a much faster pace. It is widely acknowledged that our conceptions and experiences of space have changed considerably in recent times. They have been transformed by the development of new or more sophisticated technologies, such as the Internet, the jet plane, and the mobile phone, which bring things and people that were once distant closer, while simultaneously rendering others further away. An electronic version of an academic journal article available on the Internet and accessible on one's computer screen is far closer than the hard copy resting on the shelves of the university library, even though the source of the former might be many thousands of miles away.

A whole host of phenomena, ranging from the weakening and absorbency of territorial boundaries of countries, the actual and potential "globalization of contingency" in the form of global pandemics and the spectre of environmental catastrophe, to the backlash of increasing territorialization as new forms of imperialism, international isolationism, political fundamentalism, ethnonationalist particularism, or projects for a "Fortress Europe"--seek to reverse these trends, point to the increasing salience of changing conceptions of space and time in our globalizing world.

The Global economy system is by its nature is constantly expanding and therefore needs to constantly revolutionize itself in order to create new markets, leaving nothing solid or permanent in its wake, both destroying and conjuring into existence everything from cities to human populations along the way. They were also speaking of the way that capitalism reduces everything to the shadowy abstraction known as money. Both of these processes have accelerated and transformed themselves in the twentieth century. New technologies have greatly expanded the human capacity for both creation and destruction, and the universality of money as a standard of value above all others has been supplemented by the (much discussed) process through which everything, if it is to be felt to exist at all.

Faust paid a great price to pursuit the true value and meaning of life. And we are paying a great price for what? Is it to co-exist in this system? To stay in a terrain and struggle for control?

The whole discussion questions Global economy system and power in this era, the manner of how we merge our life with technology and that we need to understand that we must take responsibility for our choice and actions.

Faust was persistence in pursuit of the true essence of life and he was given salvation. So, we must question where our true value of life lies. As the final stage of Faust story will tell us as he descends into his inner mind, he is blinded by the witch, Care, who then tells him he has always been blind. He was blinded by his ambition and failed to see what he was really doing to the world.

Revisit Colin Rowe at La Tourette

There is kind of a novelty attached reading Rowe's essay on La Tourette describe the architecture in a form of critique that emerges out of a close examination of the building itself, and providing at once an experiential analysis and also a way of viewing the object that situates the reader spatially and visually. And yet Rowe can talk about the building in such abstract intellectually  as well as highly particularized statement.

When you talk about Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, you must examine his ideas on architecture to see that the genius of the form meets the theoretical standard (The Modulor measurements). In Rowe’s article, Nor the Five points of architecture or even six in this case was mentioned. How about the modulor merged with the musical compositions which dictated the language of the pans de verre ondulatoires, the pinwheel fenestrations and other proportions of the monastery.

La Tourette is not just the beauty of pure forms or the genius of Le Corbusier’s geo metric rule. The building encompasses the underlying forms of prismatic solids that fascinate us. There is also his profound understanding of the monastic lifestyle of ‘ indissoluble binomial of individual-collective’ through a series of dualities, his own dialectic; individual – collective; light – dark; secular – religious; licid – obsure; incremental – continuous. These dualities combined with his understanding of monks daily life style generate a series of forms in an almost harsh contrast to one another that expressed his notion of pure and beautiful geometries.

In his conclusion, Rowe wrote ‘To a block one attributes a structural continuity, Iinking textural consistency of space and a homogeneity of spatial grain or layering. While recognizing it to be a hollow and to be empty, one still conceives its emptiness as, in some way, the metaphor for a block of stone or a block of wood. It is exploitable only on the condition of collaborating with the nature which it has been assumed to possess. Or so it might have been thought. But at La Tourette, these precepts which one may often believe Le Corbusier himself to have taught and which one has sometimes felt to be a norm of procedure, are conspicuously breached, and breached with a sophistication so covert that only retrospectively does one become conscious of this means by which he has been able to charge depth with surface, to condense spatial concavities into plane and to drag to its most eloquent pitch the dichotomy between the rotund and the flat. By violating a unity at conception, by jamming two discrete elements within the same block, Le Corbusier has been able to instigate both tension and compression, sensations of both openness and density and he has guaranteed a stimulus so acute that the visitor is not aware of the abnormality of his experience.’

To me, Colin Rowe’s critique on La Tourette is more about his experiential perspective of a casual journey, he moved easily among all these areas sustained by an extraordinary faculty of visual memory that allowed the recall of any space, plan, facade, or image he had ever encountered. He uses these to influence us with his series of abstract intellectual images. By visualising his images is like being in a story, by being in a story, we become part of that emulsion reality, of time and space. As in a love affair, as in an accident.