Monthly Archives: August 2008
Local genius (and Water & Planning Policy Ctr. Executive Director) Doug Wilson explaining the impact of TS Fay on the area: “If you’ve got a low reservoir it can fill it up, you’ve got dry stream reaches and it can put water on for the ecology and that nature.” They sure do learn em up good down… Read more
On Southern Architecture
Being back in the American South, I have had plenty of opportunity to drink in the vernacular styles of housebuilding here. In particular I have been looking at, and thinking about, the “big houses” be they plantation or city houses, so popular before and immediately after the Civil War. They aspire to a classicism, and that pleases me. They strive. They make a touching homage to the impossible; they are monuments to it, in fact. It would be silly to consider such architecture a success, but as a bold failure, an intentional one, they are at least honorable. They aspire to nobleness, or at least nobility, conscious of their innate inability to achieve it. These houses, like so much in the South, are an allegiance to a lost cause, the same lost cause that in the period in which they were built suffused the entirety of the South and now lives on in rather more pathetic ways. These houses, in all their failed glory, their striving for nobility, show us modern man’s hopeless… Read more