BOOKS
Cochrane, Eric & Taylor, Anya
nent place in American culture." The resulting essays are as fascinating as their subjects are various. One learns for example the ritual con, tent of a sunrise service of...
...He therefore experimented with organization by building materials (wood, stone), then by location (Rome, France), and finally by successive chronological ages (Romanesque, Gothic) in accordance with the traditional art-history textbook format...
...COMMONWEAl., 2~ Madison Ave...
...I should add that my article was written several months before Lacouturr review, which appeared as the April 1 Commonweal was on the press, but it profited from Father Ponchaud's earlier research, which had appeared in Le Monde and in Mondea Asia~uea...
...4~14...
...Hence, it now serves only one purpose: that of enabling the student, with a TCI guidebook in hand and with Burchard's practical advice in his head, to escape momentarily from the unrelieved drabhess to which he has been condenmed and to refresh his eyes with the sight of the monuments of happier ages in the past when Bernlni was still alive...
...Ammm For _9 new misslot In North India Sehnlaes are building a ~11 pirilh church, rite only one wltbiu two thousand square miles...
...The reader is never told what drama has to do with architecture, what buildings are supposed to convince him of, why mannerism (rather than Mannerism...
...Doaetions should be sent to Ray...
...o~ 1 ~0.60 (, ~ sro) t-o~ a-ono-yoer 8UO Ir 8 ~tlng with ~ currcmt issue...
...Much of what he says about ancient Rome is taken from William MacDonald's Architecture o f the Roman Empire, rather than from the many relevant specialized studies now available...
...University Mk:rofikns International Dept...
...But his occasional excursions into history invariably involve him in misrepresentation or error...
...Exotic as some of the beliefs and practices are, the authors observe a careful objectivity of tone and judgment, restraints which confer a sometimes unexpected dignity on their subjects...
...The Hare Krishna may well be marginal to American society, but to return to Marty's metaphor, all represent cracks and fissures in the surface that betoken powerful subterranean upheavals...
...Much of what he says about Renaissance Italy comes from Geoffrey Scott's Architecture o f Humanism (1914...
...However convenient to the control aspects of the survey, I am not persuaded that California is the cradle of future American civilization...
...he laments, we now have "tasteless moneylenders and politicians of the stamp of Robert Moses and Mayor Daley" (p...
...Additional chapters assess the effect of the new religions on mainline churches and on the general society...
...337...
...Unfortunately, Burchard seems to have encountered a number of serious difficulties as soon as he began to write...
...Stranger still, the some 250 years of European architecture between NeoClassicism and Art Nouveau is simply omitted, with the rather dubious excuse that they constitute an "overlong and architecturally unhappy .age...
...Both of these books argue that we not only have a great deal to learn about that feverish decade, but that R has left a permanent mark on the religious character of this society...
...DAVID CHANDLER J lf Vou ton you II Iove...Vk'lql [ATlm, The L ~ (~Nt~_9 des lug wnn _9 u u l x c18 o limgmKle, $4:( 0 ~.S...
...June I9-24...
...M. Ahem, RIc~rd Clifford, Robert ICarris...
...As a lifelong midwesterner, I am perhaps least sympathetic with the regional exclusiveness of the study...
...Beilah's essay is particularly moving, as he draws on his considerable learning to fashion an interpretation of the principal intellectual and religious currents of the past 300 years, currents converging on the present with a force sufficient to produce permanent alterations in the way we perceive reality...
...i n l l ~ t 7 DIGNITY, an organization of gay end Catholics, working for a mo~ Informed theology and pastoral approach to mxuallty...
...Thus the study of architecture can no longer expect any help from those who are paid to direct it...
...he therefore misses such provocative new hypotheses as that of H. P. l'Orange about the architectural revolution of the age of Diocletian...
...Roman bureaucrats embraced Christianity, it seems, because that was "the 'in' thing to do" (p...
...alto r service...
...At one moment he prefers to admire ancient buildings in their present state, since ruins axe "magnificent...
...All preColumbian Exposition and postPrudential Building Chicago is resolved into the Tribune Tower and 860 Lake Shore Drive...
...269...
...MSI6...
...593...
...And /he final two chapters, the work of the two editors, give a vital philosophical depth to the entire project...
...For the past few years, conventional wisdom has come to view the '60s as an interlude, a brief cultural hiatus that took on an appearance of magnitude and consequentiality far in excess of its real character...
...The Roman Empire after "the Byzantine" Justinian "fell apart rather suddenly and thereafter suffered its ups and downs until the final conquest of Constantinople" (p...
...All that is left of his pretensions to universality, then, are a number of Rabelaisian lists, in which the elements are frequently inconsistent and sometimes even erroneous: _9 . . the slave-driving necrology of Egypt, the pagan sacrifices of the Greeks, the sybaritic lives of the Persians, the blood-thirsty Moors, the obscene sculpture of the Hindus, the acquisitive Christian crusaders, the worldly ambitions of men like Abbot Suger, the venal men of the Renaissance . . . . to say nothing of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas, the samurai, the shoguns and the mandarins, and the principal clients of today (p...
...x ,,v~ . ~ , POSTOFFICE BOX ISTCX yoe:!l love VEIqOATIM, The .l.a~OUage Oua~x oammg wlth afi ml~$ of I ~ , $4.00 ~,S...
...That essay alone is worth the price of the book, undergirding the entire project with a combination of intellectual depth and moral earnestness that are the hallmarks of prophecy...
...This book is for all who worry about how to ~ the truths of the spirit in the face of a seemingly indisputable materialism...
...Berth explains that the symbolism of that age as it continues into ours "is always at least the sacrament of the human experience, including man's experience of the numinous...
...Sic, thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...Still others "have their nostrils well turned toward the bakery" (p...
...ANYA TAYLOR OOOOOOOOO CORRESPOHDENCE (Continued/ram page 323) happened in Cambodia since 1975 is more chilling, really, than our own bombing of the country between 1969 and 1973...
...and bored by his abridged English translation of Vasari...
...Many of them "abandon architecture to build bungling cabins in the woods...
...Somerset Maugham, soon dissolved into a series of streamof-consciousness associations: Trajan's column reminded him of what Aristotle said about Athens, which reminded him of Kyoto...
...This request may still be crucial...
...Brown, Ca)llin~ MacKeezia...
...PALS, Rex 841-K, Winone, MN 1~II7...
...111016...
...576...
...Send $i.00 to Vallmor's, los 32SO, West Haven, Conn...
...whatever you wish to call it" (p...
...He has presided over eminent departments, colleges, and professional associations...
...I f it is not always the sacramental encounter with the mystery of the infinite, it is at least sacramental encounter with the mystery of one's deepest self, where, Coleridge might add, God also dwells (120-121)..It was Coleridge who formulated the need for a way of thinking where two realiti~ ".he seen and the unseen, the verifiable and the mysterious--could exist simultaneously, and where we cotdd ~limpse even in the clarity'of the sensed reality a glimmering presence, religious, literary, and personal...
...S4c, seven times...
...Poaddoms Open TEACHER OPENINGS, all fields, levels, Iocaflena...
...Wrifp Sister Merinene, COLLEGE MISERICORDIA...
...or 14.60 ( m } f"~ a-ono-y~r mJ~ll~lon, ~Ing with the curr~t issue...
...Coleridge, that shipwrecked man who thought at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, science, and art, asked us to befriend the mysteries in and through the symbols that embody them...
...xviii, 12...
...Writ*: NCPS, ]34 W. kerdsley Ave., r-ikhort, Ind...
...But at another he insists that ruins are merely the first step in a process of "recortstructive imagination...
...C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 10c a word, one time...
...Post-Columbian Latin America is limited to one or two asides...
...Another essay offers important historical perspective through a summary of that part of the American past most like the present, the religious awakenings of the nineteenth century...
...More serious still, Burchard lacks a coherent system of aesthetic principles...
...While the reader might wish for more precise and original explanations of individual poems and more' ample citing of primary as opposed to secondary sources, the book hits its stride half way through and ~elis u s where we are, as inheritors of the late eighteenth century endeavor to keep the "numinous" in suspension behind or within the phenomenal...
...He has been honored by academies, foundations, and even governments...
...Berth sets the symbolism in literary Romanticism into the wider context of Christian sacrament...
...7c, three times...
...589...
...But the book is more than the surveys and that 'more' is the authenticating element...
...It can no longer hope to have any effect upon what is actually built...
...For box numbers add S0c Per InsorlloL Classified payable wltk order...
...B e r H i l ! I s Dead...
...Buaper Sdeker "lt's lawful to kill au umbore child FOR CONYENIEHCE...
...After all, Las Vegas motel strips and chairmen of corporate boards are always good for a laugh...
...Dallas, PanesylvNia 11~12...
...Thus all that remains of an aesthetic theory is a certain number of qualitative adjectives - - "dramatic," "remarkable," "delightful," "convincing"Dand an occasional enigmatic noun cluster: "corruption, mannerism, Baroqueism" (sic...
...They plan agricultural end educational prolech foe the Interior villages end ere starting a mobile medjcul unit "to aid the suffering, especially the lepcws...
...The cumulative effect of these surveys is to persuade the reader that something indeed is happening in our society that cannot simply be written off as variations on the ageless rites of passage...
...And perhaps most import, ant, the collective data, however ephemeral individually, reflect a profound division between the needs of literally millions of our youth and the norms and values of middle-class America...
...commonweal Volumes I to 104--1924-1977 is Available in MIC RM For Complete Information WRITE : Oept...
...In the place of "Teutonic princelings and French Gran Monarques" (sic...
...Rays...
...Third, after having spent so much time mastering such recondite subjects as Japanese temple nomenclature and Cameroonese village structure, he was forced to rely, even for many of the buildings he insists are important, on one or two standard, and not always current, surveys...
...501...
...Some of them are well enough expressed to amuse the lay reader as well...
...Had I read Cnmbodge: nnnde zdvo beforehand, I would certRinly have altered the paragraph in my article that runs from page 209 to page 210...
...300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor MI 4810~ U.S.A...
...Modern architects, he proclaims, are "a fairly feline lot, with all the sensitiveness that Montaigne attributed to cats" (p...
...Ten centuries of Byzantine buildings are confined to a few fleeting pages...
...At one moment he tries ~o make function the servant of form...
...As a result, many of his more interesting reflections have been lost in what amounts to no organization at all...
...He has met all the famous architects and art historians of his generation...
...Rococo is tacked on as an afterthought to Baroque...
...is corrupt, why he should prefer Mies van Rohe to Buckminster Fuller and a Roman bridge in Spain to the Guggenheim Museum...
...But unfortunately most of these proclamations turn out to be expressions merely of a profound contempt for the profession of which the author has long been a leading member and of an unmitigated hostility toward the age he lives in...
...He is, or has been, "a giant figure in American architecture," as the publisher's press release points out...
...First, the genre he had originally selevted, travel literature in the tradition of Ruskin and...
...For the first time in our history, and especially in 1973~ we set about to destroy, systematically (using grid coordinates) a country whose people had never fired a shot at us...
...The Athenians "indulged in 'hubris . . . and praised aretd without always seeking it" (p...
...n F o r r A Gift Subscription t o Commonweal Commonweal: 351...
...F r l e , , d l 7 Mmd~dlmn FRIENDLY MUTUALISM--.lu ICropofkle's spirit...
...But at another he condemns Bostonians for letting an imitation of Palazzo Farnese determine where they shelve their books...
...If their experience has been particularly broad, if their professional commit3~lyts have brought them into contact with the great monuments of the past and the great men of the present, and if their observations have been enriched by extensive reading, then their reflections can be of interest even to the layman, particularly if their field of specialization happens to be one like art history, which enjoys a considerable popular following...
...18 Bedford Row London, WC1R 4EJ England Commonweal: 349 leisure, and comfortable quarters in the Rockefeller Foundation's villa at Lake Como "in order more easily to put his reflection into writing...
...Certainly John Burchard has all the credentials for membership in this category...
...New York, N.Y...
...mo~hly iu advance for more than tkme times...
...NITY, 7SS Boylsto~ St., Room 413, Boston, Mass...
...14k)l~y bllck If I ~ pilINr Allow6w~mks...
...The sec27 May ]977:350 and has been destroyed by the emergence of a new kind of patron...
...Th6 first, it seems, has been wrecked by "our unholy system of graduate education," which had made its victims "quite incapable of any sensuous reaction" and which has turned scholarship into a mass of "trivia . . . damnably dull even to professionals" (pp...
...v IM...
...all the observations were conducted in the San Francisco Bay area...
...02116...
...He has written authoritively on modem German and American architecture...
...Write: DliF...
...To be sure, even Burchard's purely subjective likes and dislikes will be of interest to his disciples and colleagues...
...And for many of those who once identified their hopes for social renewal with the civil rights and anti-war movements, the luxury of a return to even superficial tranquillity neutralizes any feeling of personal betrayal...
...ldtu~am SACRED" SCRIPTURE: Ninth AMuai Institute, August 7-I2, 11ff7...
...Heflong P.O, 7NI9, N. Gechar DR., Auxin, India (Airmail 31r or c/o Seleden Idiuiom0 144 ~vllin Shlalt, New Eacl~lle, New York Ira01...
...and he accordingly spends most of a chapter ridding Pericles' Acropolis of its Roman and Byzantine accretions_9 Similarly, he .proclaims buildings to be unintelligible apart from the historical circumstances in which they arose and flourished...
...O O O O O O O O 0 IN BRIEF THE SYMBOLIC IMAGINATION: COL~x~e A~D THE ROZ~SCTIC 'I3tA~mO~, by J. Robert Berth, SJ., Princeton University Press, $I0...
...According to several accounts, this mindless bombing stiffened the will of the radicals in the revolutionary movement, snulted out the possibility of a cease-fire (which was never great), and gave our own form of government as bad a name as the present regime in Cambodia gives to socialism, according to Jean Lacouture...
...One learns for example the ritual con, tent of a sunrise service of the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization, of the appropriation of radical leftist rhetoric by the Christian World Liberation Front, or of the intense concern of the Church of Satan to create a public image acceptable to the larger society...
...After a lifetime of piling up monographs, pouring over texts, preparing lectures, cajoling colleagues, and supervising graduate assistants, they can at last stop to reflect...
...Second, his knowledge even of architecture turned out to be somewhat less than universal...
...and while no one can safely predict the durability and impact of any one sect beyond the next twenty-four hours, all have progressed beyond the stage of media events, most have evolved an institutional character, and some have "succeeded" to the point of having their features absorbed into the life of the established churches...
...BIBLICAL iNSTITUll, TrinEIy Colle~le, krihial~NI, Vermont OS401...
...And that may be why he is "repelled" by Palladio, "unexcited" by "LeonBaptiste" Alberfi and the church of "San Spirito" (sic...
...Allow e weeks...
...A r c h | t e c t t l r e asul t h e 8meilal Purpose IOHN BURCHARD McGraw-HiU, $25 ERIC ~.OCx~ &NE For some distinguished scholars, retirement can bring notable rewards...
...And he will find little help in his quest from the collection of well-known views of wellknown structures reproducedmnot too clearlyDin the appendix...
...He has inspected stones of aesthetic value from Brasilia and Tokyo to Collegeville, Minnesota...
...Pro*registration necesMry...
...By not bothering to correct such statements, he gives the impression that history is, after all, irrelevant to the .appreciation of architecture...
...Free literature...
...Money ~ not peli4Nd...
...Instead of seeing the Romantics as the first orphans after the death of God, as J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, and M. H. Abrams have seen them casting old religious experience into new psychological terms, Barth believes that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake and Carlyle should be seen seeking to recapture the unified sensibility of traditional Christianity, before the dissociation of sensibility set in and material philosophy obliterated the mysteries of the spiritual life...
...Write: Diructor...
...Perhaps the problem is that our horrors, inflicted from miles above the earth, are h~der for us to visualize, and easier to live with than the concept of thousands of murders, face-to-face...
...Mowry, Prih:herd...
...P. Elanchl, S.D.I., Gatholir Church...
...Better yet, be has been provided with money, Librm-im s: Save Shelf Space...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
