deathmtn

I’ve been reading Symbolic Architecture, written by a guy in the ‘80s who hated modernism. (I actually like a lot of modernist principles.) I don’t like some of his symbolism-driven architecture (though I do think it’s neat to have a symbolic system in place as he urges), but he is hilarious when ripping on modernist buildings.

On its exterior, the East Building, as it is known, uses the same light—toned marble as the adjacent gallery and would be formally understated, like the surrounding buildings, were it not for its aggressive Shape. In height, it keeps below the cornice line of the buildings opposite on Pennsylvania Avenue and takes its trapezoidal geometry from its irregular site. But this is where the public meaning stops and a host of private allusions start. Some of these pertain to the abstraction of Late-Modernism and its preference for Minimalist geometry rendered in a pristine material; others relate to precisionist construction — and no doubt this mechanical craftsmanship is admirable and appreciated. But then other associations rise up out of this inchoate form like the stereotypes inspired by a Rorschach blob. The main entrance is a giant dark slot, a cross between a gun—slit and that
rectangular hole which swallows Video-cassettes: the proportions are about right for the tapes. This emphatic void is contained in a flat H—shape, a veritable football post with elephantiasis, oriented for a 1,000-yard drop-
lir kick at the nation’s Capitol. These posts have funny skews with sharp points which attract the eye and (hands of art lovers but more about that later).

Incidentally, I added OCR to my notes client because I’ve wanted to quote from books, but I don’t want to post a picture of text. That’s needlessly inaccessible. Nor do I want to type out passages like a medieval copyist.

It turns out There’s a Module for That: tesseract.js. Like everything born of Emscripten, it’s a bit awkward, but well-worth it. And OCR being what it is means I have to delete garbage characters from the resulting text, but it’s still less net work.