It's easy, too easy, to get distracted by the wizardry of gadgetry. Computers that have a zillion jigabytes of this and a petabyte of that. This one has more pixels than that one. That one has Linux. The one over there can video conference in HD with China while automatically ordering your daily soy latte and making reservations at that sushi place you were just thinking of. Tomorrow or maybe next month there'll probably be one that is simply an elegantly thin, nine inch wide smooth glass touch screen that is promised to "revolutionize the world in insanely great ways we can't begin to imagine". Wizardry and gadgetry whose very existence hangs in a sort of Mobius loop of self importance and grandiose gravitas. It's enough to underwhelm and hyper stimulate, quashing the artist in all of us as we run on our plastic squeaky wheels of consumerism.
Every now and then, however, there's a break in the fog and endless noise and cloud cover of technohype. Every now and then a beam of light appears and we realize for a brief moment of clarity that these things, these techno toys have little intrinsic value of their own. We realize that at the end of the day they're simply a tool. A hammer, a paint brush, a violin, an engineer's pencil and blueprint paper, a typewriter, a camera. They're a crude and raw tool that -- in the right hands and controlled by an open, artistic mind -- can create something beautiful.
The twelve minute, twenty eight second video below is an ethereal, for me almost spiritual example of precisely this point. The film captures the high art of true architecture, represented through light, music, and motion. True architects, from the greats of our past to the relatively unknown we pass by in the street every day "get" that people experience architecture through movement, movement of light, movement of occupant, movement of traffic, nature, clouds, seasons. The visionaries that create real architecture have this vision, this passion, and they harness that to create life in the structures and buildings that emerge from their souls. I've always been jealous of that, of their passion, their vision. I see beautiful architecture and it often makes me smile, but it hasn't moved me. It's like a story someone is trying to tell me that I don't really "get". Until now.
Watch the video. Technology is the tool that was used to create this work of art. Not only was it created by a cornucopia of software and hardware tools the likes of which I will doubtfully ever touch or come within a hundred miles of, not only is it being hosted on a big, jigabyte server online somewhere and being watched at your end on a cool, affordable computer that's connected to the big server through a bunch of complex hypertext markup language and buckets of javascript that spans the world wide web, but - and most importantly - the video is completely computer generated. Every frame, every image. Literally breathtaking, spellbinding, and for the first time in my life, I "get" architecture. I felt for the briefest of moments a beam of sunlight on my face that helped me better understand and connect with the flowing beauty and delicate symmetry that is architecture, design; art.
Please watch this in full screen, "four arrows" button on the bottom right. And turn up the sound.
thirdseventh.com
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