Is there a poetry in architecture?

For full subject, see the link

http://www.online-literature.com/for...n-architecture



I was deeply impressed by this subject written by Jonathan Glancey because it has a lot to do with numerical prosody.

There is no architecture without mathematical ratios. There is no mathematics without numbers.
Rhythm is the most common factor between both. Audio rhythm in poetry and visual rhythm in architecture. Only numerical metering can be common between them and enable comparison in this regard.

I felt the writer has the right sensation but he lacks the proper tools. This lack of mathematical tools in reprepresenting verse rhythm is common everywhere. Needless to say that there are other aspects of similarity besides rhythm. The writer mentioned : structure and balance as well. I add rhyme sometimes.

I will elaborate on this topic from time to time hoping it will attract some attention .

I hope Iam not violating any publishing rights. If there is any violation, I request to keep the link and to omit the rest.

link not permitted unfortunately

I s there a connection between poetry and architecture? I remember talking on this subject some while back at an Arts Council-sponsored evening at Somerset House. In preparation, I'd spent the best part of a fortnight walking through parts of London I'm particularly fond of and photographing buildings and places that seemed, to me at least, somehow poetic. I learned, by heart, a number of poems that seemed relevant to what I wanted to say. To me there was, and is, something in the structure, rhythm, balance, and the very language of architecture corresponding in certain ways with those of sonnets, odes and epics.
I didn't have an academically approved theory to back up my sentiments, yet I felt that what I had to say was in the spirit of architects, of all eras, with poetry in their souls and with the spirits, too, of poets like Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, among many others, who have truly seen poetry in architecture.

Yet, when I had said my piece, I was torn apart by the poet Denise Riley and the author Iain Sinclair. This unyielding twosome demolished not just the decorative superstructure, but the very foundations of my argument. Piffle! Nonsense! Poppycock! This was the most stupid, most utterly inane talk they had ever heard in their lives. There has never, ever been a connection between the two, they thundered. I crept out of Somerset House like a church mouse that had been spat out by cats. My pet theory was far more ruinous than Tintern Abbey.
In foolhardy fashion, but without making a speech, I raised the point afresh last night at an event held by the literary charity, Poet in the City, in the concert hall of Kings Place, the Guardian's soon-to-be home in King's Cross close to where the young Thomas Hardy once worked as an architect, for Arthur Blomfield, before turning full-time to poetry and novels. Close, too, of course to St Pancras station and the Midland Grand hotel, an intrinsically linked pair of haunting Victorian buildings saved thanks to John Betjeman, a much loved popular poet and architectural writer greatly influenced by Hardy.
The poets who spoke last night weren't necessarily ready to agree that there is a connection between their art and architecture. Simon Barraclough, who had written poems inspired by King's Place for the occasion (the one below is a particular celebration of the concert hall we spoke in), made it clear there isn't a connection, yet did say that there is an affinity between the two.
Jacob Sam-La Rose agreed, making the point with a poem he read about a building in Lewisham he and his childhood friends took to be haunted; the building was nothing to write home about from a strictly architectural point of view, but it became the stuff of poetry when infused with the fantasies of young Londoners.
Paul Farley who was brought up in a brutalist council estate in Liverpool, yet steadfastly refuses to blame Le Corbusier (who wrote A Poem to the Right Angle, as only a truly Modern architect could) for any influence he might unwittingly have had on such terrifying forms of post-war English housing, has been inspired by architecture, but again made the point that the two arts might inform one another while being different beasts.
I'm left, slightly unsatisfied, sensing that there has been and can be a more than associative connection between the two arts, but I'd need to make a proper study of this. I'd welcome your views. There is, though, no doubt that architecture, and a keen sense of place, has been good to poetry. Think of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Wordsworth's Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge, whole poems by Larkin, snatches of TS Eliot, lots from Hardy, masses by Betjeman. Equally, there have been several architects or architectural enthusiasts who have been fine poets, from Michelangelo to Hardy. And, there have been, too, architects whose work surely deserves the name poetry – in stone – whether Hawksmoor, Borromini, Palladio and, yes, Le Corbusier.
The subject is potentially as long as something by Tennyson, as complex as the Four Quartets (which feature quite a bit of architecture; Eliot was good on the subject), and as rich as The Divine Comedy. Neither Sinclair or Riley will forgive me for raising the subject again, yet I can't help wondering if there's something new we could be learning here; a way, at the very least least, of imbuing contemporary architecture with a poetic vision.
Bounded in a Nutshell by Simon Barraclough
Five centuries ago, a German acorn sweetened on the branch
until it reached its crucial mass
and blew the bolts to give itself to gravity.
Then all it had to do was dodge the jay's keen beak,
the hedgehog's truffling snout, shrug off the weevil's drill.
This lucky nut was squirreled away,
a hedge fund for a hungrier day
that never came and, planted in the soil, the work began:
the cylinder of shell unscrewed, a taproot dropped,
a pale shoot periscoped towards the light,
extended leaves and rippled out its rings,
trunk thickening as history hurtled by.
Six thousand moons the shadow of the branches flew
around its base through midnight, noon, until the day
that brought the saw that bit into the bark
and turned the tree into an acre of veneer
to line this room, this snug nutshell, replanted in the earth
in which we sit and feel the taproot of the bass notes shift,
hear sonic tendrils lift.
To be continued.

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URL not allowed.

Charles O. Harman in his book : Verse an introduction to prosody - page 87 :



Numerical ! we can't go numerical without using numbers.

How about using 1 for unstressed syllable and 2 for stressed sylalble?

Is it convenient ? Let us try and see what we get:



If you start from (FENCE) then you have iambic pentameter.

I found this shape as an example.



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Architecture, poetry meter , music , biological rhythm , economy and all types of visual ,oral and unexpected rhythms have one common denominator which is mathematics. Mathematics is the abstract common language that enables us to represent almost all types in the same way. This makes comparison feasible between seemingly two faraway fields of rhythm.

Photo references :
2- https://www.pinterest.com/pin/330029478919884078/
3- http://www2.le.ac.uk/research/festiv...n/sudden-death
4- http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/17/2950
5- http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...s/cycles09.htm

I sent the original link to Mr. Colin Holcombe . Following is his email in response:



Dear Kashan,

I’ve read the interesting blog posts, the Guardian article and checked a little on the internet. I don’t have the time, unfortunately, or the knowledge, to add much more than broadly agree with desiresjab’s remarks. It all depends on what you mean by poetry, or what you think is most important about the art form. If it’s the aesthetic sense that’s emphasized, then all architecture is poetry of some sort. It has to be if the building is not to be a complete eyesore. Medieval religious buildings, east and west, went further and incorporated a ‘sacred geometry’ which governed proportions of height, width, length, arch span and so on right down to geometric patterns in tilework and stained glass. There’s a large literature on that.

Traditional poetry is also governed in part by aesthetics: patterns of stress or syllable length, stanza patterns, balance of argument, and much more. Poetry had to be moving, beautiful and express something worth saying. Contemporary poetry has somewhat forgotten all that, and can end up being only tiresomely clever. (That would be my assessment of the Simon Barraclough piece, incidentally: The Guardian does sterling service in bringing contemporary poetry to public notice, but the taste of reviewers can be alarmingly uncertain.) Medieval poetry, certainly in the west, but I’d imagine in the Muslim world too, often embodied numbers that had symbolic importance. Chinese poetry also has complicated rules governing tone, line and stanza lengths, which again go back to numbers, though the prescriptions are probably not overtly symbolic. Musical notes also have a number base in their pitch and harmonics. And so on. Whether your extensive analogies help in the appreciation of poetry, I wouldn’t know, but rather doubt it. Poets keep patterns in their heads that help them select the words appropriate to what they want to say, but they’re held unconsciously there, with the selection being a coming together of many requirements. On meter I’d only add that prosody is a fascinating but contentious field, though of course I’ve written about it in my free guide to verse writing at

http://www.ocasopress.com/verse-writing-a-practical-guide.html

(if of any interest).

Please excuse this very brief contribution -- my time for correspondence is very limited-- but many thanks for alerting me to the many enlightening posts on arood.com.

With all good wishes,

Colin
Colin

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