Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age by Brent Hull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this book very much, and learned quite a bit from it. I had previously read The Old Way of Seeing, which was similar, and am fascinated at what makes so many modern residential homes so mud fence ugly. Reading this book together with Old Way will go a long way to answering those questions. A lot of great detail in here.
I do have one minor criticism, and this comes up whenever our culture is being compared to previous generations. All our crappy stuff gets compared to all the timeless stuff that is still standing from the olden days. But what about all their crappy stuff, as in the stuff that didn’t make it down to our time in order to be compared to anything? An ancient Roman insula, a tenement house, had to be horrendous compared to a modern trailer park. But it is easy for us to sniff at the trailer park, imagining that the ancients had togas that were automatically bleached clean and white so that they could all appear mysteriously at the Coliseum before they disappear again, out of our imaginations. In other words, while I agreed with much of what Hull says here about production houses, and how they could be a lot better, I never want to forget that we are taking good care of a lot of people in architectural ways that previous generations never dreamed of. In other words, what are we comparing “this” to, and why?
I have heard the same about hymns. Some complain about modern Christian music in comparison to the excellent hymns. But we only still sing the excellent hymns, not the suboptimal ones. And amongst the modern choruses there is some good stuff.
This is not to say that moderns are as good (I don’t know, though we seem less knowledgeable with Scripture), just that we may not be as bad as sometimes claimed.
There has certainly been a winnowing over time, with the larger part of the old hymns being lost from modern view – usually for good reason. I remember adopting a hymnal in my former church about three decades ago, and there were about 40 hymns by the Gaithers there. I expect the current edition has fewer than half a dozen, and in 50 more years there will be one or two (maybe).
I think we have that hymnal still. I will say no more out of charity …
That’s a great point.
Spurgeon, BTW, seems to quote many songs that didn’t make it to today’s hymn hit parade. Unless he is just making up doggerel?
Classics don’t become classic until they actually are. Popular stuff is usually cheap, which means everybody has one, which makes it popular, which drives down the costs to produce and makes it cheap…rinse, repeat. Most of this stuff never lasts. Stuff that lasts was made to last in the first place, whether architecture or art. It requires time, patience, study, attention to detail, and great skill to make it. And then it lasts. Weird, huh? Likely, 100 years from now we’ll still be singing “Amazing Grace” but probably not most of what Paul Baloche wrote, even though he writes reasonably… Read more »
Great point.
Don’t forget their tender care for the environment; how their sewage and trash just magically evaporated and so forth.
When we evaluate any type of cultural progress, we should judge success or failure on the level of the common, or ordinary person/house/music/art/etc. Giant long lasting pyramids or edifices can be built with slave labor, but “how did the average man live?” is a better question.
Other parameters of progress might include: Liberty, scriptural understanding, per capita Christianity, and understanding of creation.
“Firmness, commodity and delight”, A timeless combination who’s proportions may vary, from time to time.; – )