Category: Approximate Thinking

Excess, Cultural Accumulation, Creative Intensity, and the Legacy of Colonial Wealth

Cultural Resource Sets, the Reservoir, and the Ruin

I was walking through Brussels, following an Art Nouveau tour (Voicemap, by Derek Blyth), listening – surprised – to the fact that Brussels had 19 communes, as I crossed from one to the next, each with relative administrative freedoms (something very relevant to what I’ll discuss here) when I found myself lost in the meanings behind the elaborate, somehow rebellious, buildings…

The unnecessary detail and exuberant elements, rising against similitude and economy, suddenly looked like evidence of sorts. Someone could afford that curve or that material that needed extra care, and that – sometimes – was the only reason they got them…

It was the same story, all over again. Beautiful, but not completely innocent. I remember feeling the same looking at the marble columns in Rome and the gilded churches in Spain.

That excess… Grand sometimes, symbolic sometimes…