THE ICON - Part 1
Pure Forms, Transience, and a Catalog of Tombs
I decided to begin with this image
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from Airstream: the History of the Land Yacht. |
PURE FORMS
I found this image mesmerizing. It captures the final stop in the 1965 Capetown to Cairo Airstream caravan. The story behind this 13,000-mile journey is quite remarkable, and Wally Byam’s airstream caravan adventures and ideology are integral parts of the Airstream icon, however these were not what attracted me most to this image. I knew my fascination had something to do with simple geometric forms, so I made this image.
I was unclear exactly what this image implied, but I knew it was on the right track. So I started looking into pure forms. Architecture theorist Lebbeus Woods wrote a thoughtful summary of their significance. Here is an excerpt:
“What me might call ‘pure forms’ are some of the most hard-won achievements of the human mind, in philosophy and mathematics. We may rightly speak of Euclid, in his books comprising The Elements, and his Greek precursors as the inventors of the pure volumes—cubes, cones, cylinders, pyramids—because we still follow the mathematical rules they established, but we also recognize that, long before, the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians understood them and were attracted, for religious as well as practical reasons, to their eternal, immutable nature—indeed their irreducibility.”
The airstream is certainly not a pure form, yet it seems quite comfortable next to them. Still, the image I made only describes these forms in their perfect, theoretical state. Once they are built and brought into reality, they inherit the associations of their material, origin, culture, etc. The forms captured in the photo have been thoroughly brought to life, and done so on a magnificent scale.
So what does this photo describe?
I see the pilgrimage of an iconic 20th century form to the heart of the Pure Form Holy Land - A 4,571-year-old, 480 ft, 5.9 million ton right-angle pyramid, constructed to near perfection with an average error of mearly 58 mm in length. To be received into the sacred cannon of forms, we see these pilgrims ceremoniously arrange themselves into a circle… and hold an Airstream rally.
Airstream-Meets-Pyramid is a loaded topic...
TRANSIENCE
While the Airstream and the Egyptian Pyramids are both highly refined forms, the motives behind their refinement are opposing.
For the Pyramids' designers, the goal was to create a monument so stable and massive that it could ensure a Pharaoh's luxurious afterlife for all of eternity
For the Airstream's designers, the goal was to create a structure so light and aerodynamic that it could provide the suburban model home with the highest degree of mobility and give the modern American lifestyle an unparalleled degree of transience.
In both cases, the designers were extremely calculating in the selection, proportioning and construction of their respective forms, however each structure ultimately falls short of its designers' goals.
The Egyptians approached the limits of ancient (or for that matter even modern) construction, yet they could not account for pillaging by later kingdoms that stripped the Pyramids' of their limestone cladding and thus rapidly increased the rate of deterioration. The Pyramids will last a very long time - perhaps through the rise and fall of human civilization - but not forever. Within their frame of reference (eternity) the Pyramids are transient objects on this earth.
The Airstream is a hyper-engineered object and has been in a state of refinement for the past 70 years, yet light-weight materials and complex infrastructural systems are, by nature, prone to degradation. The Airstream comes with a lifetime guarantee, however this applies to the life of the occupant, not the Airstream, and this does not account for loss of interest. Even within a single occupant's life, the Airstream very often ends up resting on blocks in someone's back yard (see the rest of this blog site...) Within its frame of reference (the life of a typical house) the Airstream is doomed to eventual stable immobility.
