How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

in Art, History | August 26th, 2024

Mar­cel Duchamp did­n’t sign his name on a uri­nal for lack of abil­i­ty to cre­ate “real” art. In fact, as explained by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Ducham­p’s grand­fa­ther was an artist, as were three of his sib­lings; he him­self attained impres­sive tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy in paint­ing by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twen­ties, he could tran­scend con­ven­tion thor­ough­ly enough to bewil­der and even enrage the pub­lic by paint­ing Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, which also drew crit­i­cisms from his fel­low Cubists for being “too Futur­ist.” From then on, his inde­pen­dent (and not entire­ly un-mis­chie­vous) streak became his entire way of life and art.

That same year, Duchamp, Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși, and Fer­di­nand Léger went to the Paris Avi­a­tion Salon. Behold­ing a pro­peller, Duchamp declared paint­ing “washed up”; what artist could out­do the appar­ent per­fec­tion of the form before him? Get­ting a job as a librar­i­an, he indulged in a stretch of read­ing about math­e­mat­ics and physics.

This got him think­ing of the pow­er of chance, one of the forces that moved him to put a bicy­cle wheel in his stu­dio and spin it around when­ev­er the spir­it moved him. This he would lat­er con­sid­er his first “ready­made” piece, delib­er­ate­ly cho­sen for being “a func­tion­al, every­day item with a total absence of good or bad taste” that “defied the notion that art must be beau­ti­ful.”

The famous uri­nal, enti­tled Foun­tain, would come lat­er, in 1917, after he had relo­cat­ed from Paris to New York. Tech­ni­cal­ly, he did­n’t sign his name on it at all, but rather “R. MUTT,” for Richard Mutt, a name par­tial­ly “inspired by the com­ic strip Mutt and Jeff, which Duchamp loved. And Richard is French slang for a rich showoff, or a mon­ey­bags.” Sub­mit­ted by a “female friend” and hid­den behind a cur­tain at the show at which it made its debut, the orig­i­nal signed uri­nal would nev­er be seen again. But it pro­voked a suf­fi­cient­ly endur­ing curios­i­ty that, near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a mar­ket had emerged for care­ful­ly craft­ed sculp­tur­al repli­cas for Foun­tain and the oth­er ready­mades. The irony could hard­ly have been lost on any­one with a sense of humor — or a will­ing­ness to ques­tion the nature of art itself — like Ducham­p’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

What Made Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal Art–and an Inven­tive Prank

The Mar­cel Duchamp Research Por­tal Opens, Mak­ing Avail­able 18,000 Doc­u­ments and 50,000 Images Relat­ed to the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist

Hear the Rad­i­cal Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions of Mar­cel Duchamp (1912–1915)

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

in History, Language | August 23rd, 2024

Read a nov­el by Charles Dick­ens, and you’ll still today feel trans­port­ed back to the Lon­don of the eigh­teen-twen­ties. Some of that expe­ri­ence owes to his lav­ish­ly repor­to­r­i­al descrip­tive skills, but even more to his way with dia­logue. Dick­ens faith­ful­ly cap­tured the vocab­u­lary of the times and places in which he set his sto­ries, and for some par­tic­u­lar­ly col­or­ful char­ac­ters, went as far as to ren­der their dis­tinc­tive accents pho­net­i­cal­ly: that of The Pick­wick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swap­ping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly over­took the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Lon­don­er of that time, and quite anoth­er to hear it.

No audio record­ings exist of Dick­en­sian Lon­don, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtu­ber Simon Rop­er — and specif­i­cal­ly the sec­tion that begins at about 11:30, when he per­forms the accent of a Lon­don­er in the year 1826. Most every­thing he says should sound quite intel­li­gi­ble to any Eng­lish-speak­er today, though few, if any, will ever have encoun­tered some­one who speaks in quite the same way in real life.

In this era, Rop­er adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glot­tal rein­force­ment, where a glot­tal stop is insert­ed between a vow­el and a plo­sive con­so­nant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhotic­i­ty (r‑loss in most posi­tions) has caused vow­els that were orig­i­nal­ly fol­lowed by ‘r’ to become cen­ter­ing diph­thongs.”

Seri­ous stuff, for a man who describes him­self as “not a lin­guist.” Nev­er­the­less, Rop­er has in this video assem­bled an impres­sive tour of Lon­don accents over 660 years, with “twelve record­ings, all of men with sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar voic­es, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grand­son of the pre­vi­ous one.” (When the video went viral, the New States­man pro­filed him for his achieve­ment.) The ear­li­est, set in 1346, will sound more famil­iar in cadence than in con­tent, at least to those who haven’t stud­ied Mid­dle Eng­lish. Com­pre­hen­sion does­n’t become a much sim­pler mat­ter for most of us mod­erns until about 1586, but Rop­er’s accent comes to sound ver­i­ta­bly transat­lantic by 1766. Per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, that was just before the Amer­i­cans broke off deci­sive­ly from the moth­er­land to do things their own way — but also to pre­serve a few of the old ways, includ­ing ways of speech.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

One Woman, 17 British Accents

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

A Tour of U.S. Accents: Boston­ian, Philadelph­ese, Gul­lah Cre­ole & Oth­er Intrigu­ing Dialects

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

in History, Literature | August 22nd, 2024

Christo­pher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — impe­ri­al­ism, fas­cism, and Stal­in­ism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them.

Orwell dis­plays his remark­able fore­sight in a fas­ci­nat­ing book review, pub­lished in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s noto­ri­ous auto­bi­og­ra­phy Mein Kampf. In the review, the author deft­ly cuts to the root of Hitler’s tox­ic charis­ma, and, along the way, antic­i­pates themes to appear in his future mas­ter­pieces, Ani­mal Farm and 1984.

The fact is that there is some­thing deeply appeal­ing about him. […] Hitler … knows that human beings don’t only want com­fort, safe­ty, short work­ing-hours, hygiene, birth-con­trol and, in gen­er­al, com­mon sense; they also, at least inter­mit­tent­ly, want strug­gle and self-sac­ri­fice, not to men­tion drums, flags and loy­al­ty-parades. How­ev­er they may be as eco­nom­ic the­o­ries, Fas­cism and Nazism are psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly far sounder than any hedo­nis­tic con­cep­tion of life.

Yet Orwell was cer­tain­ly no fan of Hitler. At one point in the review, he imag­ines what a world where the Third Reich suc­ceeds might look like:

What [Hitler] envis­ages, a hun­dred years hence, is a con­tin­u­ous state of 250 mil­lion Ger­mans with plen­ty of “liv­ing room” (i.e. stretch­ing to Afghanistan or there- abouts), a hor­ri­ble brain­less empire in which, essen­tial­ly, noth­ing ever hap­pens except the train­ing of young men for war and the end­less breed­ing of fresh can­non-fod­der.

The arti­cle was writ­ten at a moment when, as Orwell notes, the upper class was backpedal­ing hard against their pre­vi­ous sup­port of the Third Reich. In fact, a pre­vi­ous edi­tion of Mein Kampf — pub­lished in 1939 in Eng­land — had a dis­tinct­ly favor­able view of the Führer.

“The obvi­ous inten­tion of the translator’s pref­ace and notes [was] to tone down the book’s feroc­i­ty and present Hitler in as kind­ly a light as pos­si­ble. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the Ger­man labour move­ment, and for that the prop­er­ty-own­ing class­es were will­ing to for­give him almost any­thing. Then sud­den­ly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all.”

By March 1940, every­thing had changed, and a new edi­tion of Mein Kampf, reflect­ing chang­ing views of Hitler, was pub­lished in Eng­land. Britain and France had declared war on Ger­many after its inva­sion of Poland but real fight­ing had yet to start in West­ern Europe. With­in months, France would fall and Britain would teeter on the brink. But, in the ear­ly spring of that year, all was pret­ty qui­et. The world was col­lec­tive­ly hold­ing its breath. And in this moment of ter­ri­fy­ing sus­pense, Orwell pre­dicts much of the future war.

When one com­pares his utter­ances of a year or so ago with those made fif­teen years ear­li­er, a thing that strikes one is the rigid­i­ty of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t devel­op. It is the fixed vision of a mono­ma­ni­ac and not like­ly to be much affect­ed by the tem­po­rary manoeu­vres of pow­er pol­i­tics. Prob­a­bly, in Hitler’s own mind, the Rus­so-Ger­man Pact rep­re­sents no more than an alter­ation of timetable. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Rus­sia first, with the implied inten­tion of smash­ing Eng­land after­wards. Now, as it has turned out, Eng­land has got to be dealt with first, because Rus­sia was the more eas­i­ly bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when Eng­land is out of the pic­ture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a dif­fer­ent ques­tion.

In June of 1941, Hitler invad­ed Rus­sia, in one of the great­est strate­gic blun­ders in the his­to­ry of mod­ern war­fare. Stal­in was com­plete­ly blind­sided by the inva­sion and news of Hitler’s betray­al report­ed­ly caused Stal­in to have a ner­vous break­down. Clear­ly, he didn’t read Mein Kampf as close­ly as Orwell had.

You can read Orwell’s full book review here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s Polit­i­cal Views, Explained in His Own Words

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. 

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How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

in Business, History | August 22nd, 2024

Image from New York Pub­lic Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you vis­it Osa­ka, you’ll be urged to see two old build­ings in par­tic­u­lar: Osa­ka Cas­tle and Shiten­nō-ji (above), Japan’s first Bud­dhist tem­ple. In behold­ing both, you’ll behold the work of con­struc­tion firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly run com­pa­ny in the world. It was with the build­ing of Shiten­nō-ji, com­mis­sioned by Prince Shō­toku Taishi in the year 578, that brought it into exis­tence in the first place. Back then, “Japan was pre­dom­i­nant­ly Shin­to and had no miyadaiku (car­pen­ters trained in the art of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples),” writes Irene Her­rera at Works that Work, “so the prince hired three skilled men from Baek­je, a Bud­dhist state in what is now Korea,” among them a cer­tain Kongō Shiget­su.

There­after, Kongō Gumi con­tin­ued to oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly for more than 1,400 years, run by 40 gen­er­a­tions of Kongō Shiget­su’s descen­dants. By the time Toy­oto­mi Hideyoshi had the com­pa­ny build Osa­ka Cas­tle in 1583, it had been estab­lished for near­ly a mil­len­ni­um. In the cen­turies since, “the cas­tle has been destroyed repeat­ed­ly by fire and light­ning,” Her­rera writes. “Kongō Gumi pros­pered because of these major recon­struc­tions, which pro­vid­ed them with plen­ty of work.” Through­out most of its long his­to­ry, an even stead­ier busi­ness came from their spe­cial­ty of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples, at least until seri­ous chal­lenges to that busi­ness mod­el arose in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

“World War II brought sig­nif­i­cant changes to Japan, and the demand for tem­ple con­struc­tion waned,” says the tourism com­pa­ny Toki. “Sens­ing the shift­ing tides of the time, the com­pa­ny made a strate­gic deci­sion to piv­ot its exper­tise towards a new endeav­or: the craft­ing of coffins.” Gov­ern­men­tal per­mis­sion was arranged by the wid­ow of Kongō Haruichi, Kongō Gumi’s 37th leader, who’d tak­en his own life out of finan­cial despair inflict­ed by the Shōwa Depres­sion of the nine­teen-twen­ties. Here time at the head of the com­pa­ny illus­trates its long-held will­ing­ness to grant lead­er­ship duties not just to first sons, but to fam­i­ly mem­bers best suit­ed to do the job; for that rea­son, the his­to­ry of the Kongō clan involves many sons-in-law delib­er­ate­ly sought out for that pur­pose.

The com­bined forces of the decline of Bud­dhism and the pop­ping of Japan’s real-estate bub­ble in the nineties even­tu­al­ly forced Kongō Gumi to become a sub­sidiary of Taka­mat­su Con­struc­tion Group in Jan­u­ary 2006. “The cur­rent Kongō Gumi work­force has only one mem­ber of the Kongō fam­i­ly,” the Nikkei Asia report­ed in 2020, “a daugh­ter of the 40th head of the fam­i­ly” who “now serves as the 41st head.” But its miyadaiku — dis­tinc­tive­ly orga­nized into eight inde­pen­dent kumi, or groups — con­tin­ue to do the work they always have, with ever-more-refined ver­sions of the tra­di­tion­al tools and tech­niques they’ve been using for near­ly a mil­len­ni­um and a half. Kongō Gumi con­tin­ues to receive inter­na­tion­al atten­tion for main­tain­ing its high lev­el of crafts­man­ship, but view­ers of Amer­i­can TV dra­ma in recent years will also appre­ci­ate its hav­ing solved the prob­lem of suc­ces­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Japan Has the Old­est Busi­ness­es in the World?: Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

Build­ing With­out Nails: The Genius of Japan­ese Car­pen­try

Hōshi: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

A Vis­it to the World’s Old­est Hotel, Japan’s Nisiya­ma Onsen Keiunkan, Estab­lished in 705 AD

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How an Ancient Roman Shipwreck Could Explain the Universe

in History, Physics | August 21st, 2024

In a 1956 New States­man piece, the British sci­en­tist-nov­el­ist C. P. Snow first sound­ed the alarm about the increas­ing­ly chasm-like divide between what he called the “sci­en­tif­ic” and “tra­di­tion­al” cul­tures. We would today refer to them as the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, while still wring­ing our hands over the inabil­i­ty of each side to learn from (or even coher­ent­ly com­mu­ni­cate with) the oth­er. Nev­er­the­less, recent his­to­ry pro­vides the occa­sion­al heart­en­ing exam­ple of sci­ences-human­i­ties col­lab­o­ra­tion, few of them as dra­mat­ic as the sto­ry told in the SciShow video above, “An Ancient Roman Ship­wreck May Explain the Uni­verse.”

The ship­wreck in ques­tion occurred two mil­len­nia ago, off the west­ern coast of Sar­dinia. Hav­ing set sail from the min­ing cen­ter of Carte­ge­na, Spain, it was car­ry­ing more than 30 met­ric tons of lead, processed into a thou­sand ingots. An impor­tant met­al in the ancient Roman Empire, lead was used to make pipes (like the ones installed in aque­ducts), water tanks, roofs, and weapons of war. While our civ­i­liza­tion has grown jus­ti­fi­ably wary of putting water through lead pipes (and has at its com­mand much stronger met­als in any case), it still has plen­ty of use for the stuff, espe­cial­ly in shields against X‑rays and oth­er forms of activ­i­ty.

No mat­ter how lit­tle con­tact you have with the sci­en­tif­ic cul­ture, you can sure­ly appre­ci­ate how researchers in need of radioac­tiv­i­ty shields must have felt when this lead ingot-filled ship­wreck was dis­cov­ered in 1988. Hav­ing spent a cou­ple thou­sand years at the bot­tom of the ocean, the Roman lead aboard had lost most of its radioac­tiv­i­ty, mak­ing it ide­al for use in the shield of the Cryo­genic Under­ground Obser­va­to­ry for Rare Events (CUORE) at the Gran Sas­so Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Italy. Engi­neered for research into the mass of neu­tri­nos, sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles long thought to have no mass at all, CUORE held out the promise of data that could lead to insights into the ori­gin of the uni­verse.

Ulti­mate­ly, the physi­cists and archae­ol­o­gists struck a deal, allow­ing the for­mer to melt down the least-well pre­served ingots from the ship­wreck (after first remov­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly valu­able inscrip­tions from its man­u­fac­tur­er) and use it to shield the high­ly sen­si­tive CUORE from out­side radi­a­tion. The design worked, but as of last year, none of the exper­i­ments have pro­duced con­clu­sive results about the role of neu­tri­nos in the emer­gence of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. Prob­ing that ques­tion fur­ther will be a job for CUORE’s suc­ces­sor CUPID (CUORE Upgrade with Par­ti­cle Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion), sched­uled to come online lat­er this year. Though C. P. Snow nev­er lived to see these projects, he sure­ly would­n’t be sur­prised that, to find con­ver­gence between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, you’ve got to dive deep.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

“The Val­ue of Cul­ture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

in History, Language, Writing | August 20th, 2024

Think back, if you will, to the cli­mac­tic scenes of Indi­ana Jones and the Last Cru­sade, which take place in the hid­den tem­ple that con­tains the Holy Grail. His father hav­ing been shot by the das­tard­ly Nazi-sym­pa­thiz­ing immor­tal­i­ty-seek­er Wal­ter Dono­van, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the leg­endary cup to make use of its reput­ed heal­ing pow­ers. This entails pass­ing through three dead­ly cham­bers, one of which has a floor cov­ered in stones, each one labeled with a let­ter of the alpha­bet. The way through, accord­ing to Jones père’s research, is the name of God. But when Indy steps on “J” for Jeho­vah, it crum­bles away, and he near­ly plunges into the enor­mous pit below.

Of course, true fans will have already quot­ed the rel­e­vant line: “But in the Latin alpha­bet, Jeho­va begins with an I!” Those of us who first watched the movie as kids — and, for that mat­ter, many of us who first watched it as adults — sim­ply took that fact as giv­en. But if we watch the Rob­Words video above, we can learn how and when that “I” became a “J”.

To the ancient Romans, explains host Rob Watts, these let­ters were one and the same, serv­ing both vow­el and con­so­nant duty depend­ing on the con­text (as in “Iulius” Cae­sar). Both of them date back to a “rather more com­pli­cat­ed char­ac­ter” that looks like a bad­ly con­tort­ed F, and which orig­i­nat­ed as a pic­togram rep­re­sent­ing a human hand and fore­arm.

The let­ter J only emerged lat­er, “when scribes want­ed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between these two usages.” (As we’ve seen, it also offered the descen­dants of the Knights Tem­plar a way to trick inter­lop­ers in their cav­erns.) Through­out the course of the video, Watts cov­ers this and oth­er curi­ous steps in the evo­lu­tion of the alpha­bet we use to write Eng­lish and many oth­er lan­guages today. These pro­duced such fea­tures as the plur­al of knife and wolf being knives and wolves, the seem­ing super­fluity of Q, and — for an Eng­lish­man like Watts, an unig­nor­able sub­ject — the transat­lantic “zed”/“zee” divid­ing line. Exam­ined close­ly, the forms of our let­ters tells a mil­len­nia-span­ning sto­ry whose cast includes Egyp­tians, Phoeni­cians, Canaan­ites, Etr­uscans, Greeks, Romans, and oth­ers besides. And as the expe­ri­ence of Indi­ana Jones illus­trates, you nev­er know when you’ll need its lessons.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of College Campus

in Architecture, History | August 19th, 2024

Every now and again on social media, the obser­va­tion cir­cu­lates that Amer­i­cans look back so fond­ly on their col­lege years because nev­er again do they get to live in a well-designed walk­a­ble com­mu­ni­ty. The orga­ni­za­tion of col­lege cam­pus­es does much to shape that expe­ri­ence, but so do the build­ings them­selves. “Peo­ple often say that col­lege is the best four years of your life,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, “but it was also like­ly that it was some of the best archi­tec­ture you’ve been around as well.” He goes on to iden­ti­fy, explain, and con­tex­tu­al­ize the five build­ing styles most com­mon­ly seen on Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus­es: colo­nial, Col­le­giate Goth­ic, mod­ernism, bru­tal­ism, and post­mod­ernism.

For exam­ples of colo­nial cam­pus archi­tec­ture, look no fur­ther than the Ivy League, only one of whose schools was built after the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence — whose author, Thomas Jef­fer­son, lat­er designed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, draw­ing much inspi­ra­tion (if not always first-hand) from ancient Greece and Rome. “Iron­i­cal­ly, after the US declared inde­pen­dence, new­er schools want­ed to look old­er,” says Wyet­zn­er, a desire that spawned the endur­ing Col­le­giate Goth­ic style. Con­struct­ed out of mason­ry and brick, its ear­li­est build­ings tend to pick and choose fea­tures of gen­uine Goth­ic archi­tec­ture while mix­ing and match­ing them with the design lan­guages of oth­er times and places. More recent exam­ples have been stren­u­ous­ly faith­ful by com­par­i­son, incor­po­rat­ing gar­goyles and all.

When they arise, archi­tec­tur­al styles tend to align them­selves with the old or the new, and it was the lat­ter that over­took col­lege cam­pus­es after the Sec­ond World War. Take the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, which was designed whole by no less a Bauhaus-cre­den­tialed mod­ernist than Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe. Mod­u­lar, flat-roofed, and built with plen­ty of exposed brick, glass, and steel, its build­ings proved influ­en­tial enough that “near­ly every high school in the Unit­ed States that was built in the fifties and six­ties” was designed in more or less the same way — albeit with­out the ear­ly utopi­an mod­ernist spir­it, which by that point had devolved into an indus­tri­al empha­sis on “ratio­nal­ism, func­tion­al­i­ty, and hygiene.”

After mod­ernism came bru­tal­ism, the style of the least-beloved build­ings on many a cam­pus today. Coined by Le Cor­busier, the style’s name comes from béton brut, or raw con­crete, vast quan­ti­ties of which were used to shape its hulk­ing and, depend­ing on how you feel about them, either drea­ry or awe-inspir­ing struc­tures. The aes­thet­i­cal­ly promis­cu­ous post­mod­ernist build­ings that began appear­ing in the six­ties and mul­ti­plied in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies were more play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware — or all too play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware, as their detrac­tors would put it. If you think back to your own col­lege days, you can prob­a­bly remem­ber spend­ing time in, or around, at least one exam­ple of each of these styles, because large US col­lege cam­pus­es have, over time, become rich antholo­gies of archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ry. Would that most Amer­i­cans could say the same about the places they live after grad­u­a­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Peo­ple Hate Bru­tal­ist Build­ings on Amer­i­can Col­lege Cam­pus­es

Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design Of Four Icon­ic New York City Muse­ums: the Met, MoMA, Guggen­heim & Frick

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What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

in History, Music, Technology, Television | August 15th, 2024

Sur­vey the British pub­lic about the most impor­tant insti­tu­tion to arise in their coun­try after World War II, and a lot of respon­dents are going to say the Nation­al Health Ser­vice. But keep ask­ing around, and you’ll soon­er or lat­er encounter a few seri­ous elec­tron­ic-music enthu­si­asts who name the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. Estab­lished in 1958 to pro­vide music and sound effects for the Bee­b’s radio pro­duc­tions — not least the doc­u­men­taries and dra­mas of the artis­ti­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly ambi­tious Third Pro­gramme — the unit’s work even­tu­al­ly expand­ed to work on tele­vi­sion shows as well. One could scarce­ly imag­ine Doc­tor Who, which debuted in 1963, with­out the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s son­ic aes­thet­ic.

By the end of the nine­teen-six­ties, the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop had been cre­at­ing elec­tron­ic music and inject­ing it into the lives of ordi­nary lis­ten­ers and view­ers for more than a decade. Even so, that same pub­lic did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly pos­sess a clear under­stand­ing of what, exact­ly, elec­tron­ic music was. Hence this explana­to­ry BBC tele­vi­sion clip from 1969, which brings on Radio­phon­ic Work­shop head Desmond Briscoe as well as com­posers John Bak­er, David Cain, and Daphne Oram (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture).

Hav­ing long since built her own stu­dio, Oram also demon­strates her own tech­niques for cre­at­ing and manip­u­lat­ing sound, few of which will look famil­iar to fans of elec­tron­ic music in our dig­i­tal cul­ture today.

Even in 1969, none of Oram’s tools were dig­i­tal in the way we now under­stand the term. In fact, the work­ing process shown in this clip was so thor­ough­ly ana­log as to involve paint­ing the forms of sound waves direct­ly onto slides and strips of film. She craft­ed sounds by hand in this way not pure­ly due to tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, but because exten­sive expe­ri­ence had shown her that it pro­duced more inter­est­ing results: “if one does it by pure­ly elec­tron­ic means, one tends to get fixed on one vibra­tion, one fre­quen­cy of vibra­to, which becomes dull.” Believ­ing that “music should be a pro­jec­tion of a thought process in the mind of a human being,” Oram expressed reser­va­tions about a future in which com­put­ers pump out “music by the yard”: a future that, these 55 years lat­er, seems to have arrived.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Daphne Oram Cre­at­ed the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Elec­tron­ic Music (1957)

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear Elec­tron­ic Lady­land, a Mix­tape Fea­tur­ing 55 Tracks from 35 Pio­neer­ing Women in Elec­tron­ic Music

New Doc­u­men­tary Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors Tells the Sto­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music’s Female Pio­neers

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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