Editorial

 
Visiting the Palm House at Kew Gardens gave me the clues needed for the theme 'Emulation'. The cover photo of the arching beam is taken in early June. If architecture were a type of 'language', that is, a system of communication, then it would be more akin to an ideogram rather than the alphabet. The meaning is in the sound. A word's unique visual assembly is the sequence of its sounds. The Chinese writing is similar to ancient Egyptian in being otherwise. However the Egyptian system employs living things for symbols whereas a single Chinese word is an elaborate graphic of chops and slashes used to mean a monosyllabic sound. Its combination with other meaning units creates a system of further verbal meaning. I believe it dispenses with prepositions and definite articles generally as givens. I mean "I go airport' is clear enough without the 'to the'. There is a distinct similarity in perception in the unknowingness when confronted by a Chinese character with the illegibility of architectural symbolisms. Not that architectural expression has to mean something other than itself yet the way of structural composition is similar to that of ideograms in its requisite for the learned ignorance* of comprehension, more or less as a way of differentiating between one building and the next. Being that the illusions this system creates is kind of magical, it is very difficult to recall the actual composite whole, unless one has trained oneself to utilise some formal architectonic knowledge that allows a systematic memorising of what one sees and by means of recollecting the three dimensional juxtapositions of the compositional elements, recall the overall building like a clear imagination in the mind's eye.

'Emulation' comes from the wish to conserve the beautiful which is a slightly different thing from being a 'conservative' as such. Yet as 'socialism' has come to mean rule by the boors, it is not useful to confuse meaning with intent in the use of words but in defending the idea of emulation in art being no different than in sports, I may have a perennial complaint. Why is it, that such fundamentally irreducible things as the classical orders are not given some global recognition, you know, an induction into some great halls of fame, an academy award or at least a Nobel Prize? Surely the underlying ideas are what archaeology ought to rediscover and preserve in the newly surfacing artefacts of antiquity.