www.quondam.com/77/7606.htm

The Idea of History, etc.

8/10

But this example of musical history illustrates another and an important point. No architect of music deserves the name unless he has studied for himself the old music whose growth and development he is trying to describe. He must have listened to Bach and Mozart, Palestrina and Lasso, and possess personal acquaintance with their works. This means that he must have been present at actual performances of these works either physically or in imagination; and in the latter case the imaginative power is acquired only by actually hearing similar things performed--e.g. a man who had never heard an orchestra of the Beethoven period could not read a symphony of Beethoven in score with any chance of obtaining a good imaginative hearing of it. We may therefore boldly say that the sine qua non [the one thing that is absolutely essential] of writing the history of past music is to have this past music re-enacted in the present. Just the same thing is true of other arts: e.g. we must read old poetry for ourselves, see old pictures for ourselves with the dirt of age actually or in imagination removed and the colors restored to their old values. Similarly, to write the history of a battle, we must re-think the thoughts which determined its various tactical phases: we must see the ground of the battlefield as the opposing commanders saw it, and draw from the topography the conclusions that they drew: and so forth. The past event, ideal though it is, must be actual in the architect's re-enactment of it.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 441.

teaching at its best
2000.03.23 12:30

I said what I said because I saw some serious ignoring of intentions going on.

And because of ad hominums, it appears other flaws will also be ignored.

The notion of reenactment within architecture is indeed central to architectural aesthetics, especially in our time. With reenactment comes a clearer understanding of authenticity versus inauthenticity. Because of reenactment, what is most often deemed inauthentic, is more correctly an inversion of the authentic, and here Duchamp's urinal redux is a perfect example.

Even though Disney Land/World are enormous commercial/tourist successes, they nonetheless remain aesthetic quandaries, but they really should be understood aesthetically. Again, because of reenactment, I not only see answers to Disneyfication in the architecture of Ludwig II, but I also see in the architecture of Ludwig II the opportunity to study the "architecture of reenactment" at a scale and magnitude (and accessibility) quite uncommon. I want nothing more than to discuss architectural reenactment in a scholarly manner.

Stephen Lauf

left: Eduard Reidel, Georg Dollmann and Julius Hofmann, Neuschwanstein, 1869-86, Bavaria.
center: Georg Dollmann, Linderhof, 1870-79, Bavaria.
right: Georg Dollmann, Julius Hoffmann and Franz Paul Stulberger, Herrinchimsee, 1874-86, Bavaria.

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