porphyry: (Praetorius)
[personal profile] porphyry
Gandy (fl. 1830) is the subject of a recent monograph by Brian Lukacher, rescuing him from obscurity. He was an architecht whose bull-headedness and arrogance guarenteed that he was never allowed to do any important work. Partly for that reason, partly becuase of his personal predelictions, he was devoted to making renderings of fantastic architectural projects--monuments that transcend human scale and purpose or exist only as ruins (a popualr trned at the time with a generation of architechts schooled on Piranesi engravings). His chief employment was as the draftsman for John Soan, in which capacity he was responsible (without much credit in his lifetime) for most of the great architechtural drawings attributed to Soan and his son.

I've scaned about 40 of these and uploaded them here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10


Here is a sample:


Bridge over Chaos (1833)

These scans are huge (as much as 4 megabytes): to get the full sized images you have to click on "download photo" to the right of the image.

Date: 2007-03-31 09:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petrusplancius.livejournal.com
All very intriguing, sometimes quite original (though not in a style that really appeals to me), sometimes put together from a hodge-podge of ancient patterns. I have seen some of the black and white ones before but not the coloured ones; the first looks like some fantasy illustration from the 1950's.

Date: 2007-04-04 11:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] benicek.livejournal.com
Yes, a bit Lord of the Rings, some of it, but beautiful. Are you sure you're not a hippy, Malkhos? ;-)

Date: 2007-04-04 01:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] malkhos.livejournal.com
So you enjoy provocation?

Do you mean that the inherently fascisitic basis of the hippy movement could make a false appeal to certain rhetorical elements in Tolkien that could easily be misconstrued as fascistic?

Date: 2007-04-04 02:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] benicek.livejournal.com
Friendly provocation, yes.

Tolkien's work seems to contain fairly straight forwardly fascistic elements to me, though this is unsurprising as he was drawing upon the same warrior mythology that inspired Wagner and the Nazis. I doubt this was his intention. There's quite a strong ecological strand in there too.

The hippies were too heterogeneous to be called a 'movement'. They were just a hairstyle.

Date: 2007-04-05 05:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] malkhos.livejournal.com
I agree that Tolkien doesn't go over the edge to Fascism (though it would need a rther dense and potentialy interesting essay to explain how he avoids this).

Interestingly, if you look into the early hsitory of the Greens in Germany you will see that they had strong connections to the Nazis. And the Nazi's were without doubt eco-fanatics. For instance, I once had occasion to read the memoirs of Rommel's chief of staff during the campaign in '44. He records how Rommmel frequently lectured the officer's mess that, if they won the war, he would see to it that he would be placed in charge of electical genertion for all of Europe and do away with fossil fule use entirely in favor drawing power from the tides and the like. Goering (one of whose titles was Reichsmarshall of the Hunt) was actually in charge of a program to re-forest much of Europe--he personally intervened to see to it that the last remianing European Bison population in the forests in Poland were not disturbed when the Wheremacht had to attack through there in 1941. So it is no as though ecological conern is incompatible with fascism.

I'm glad you're a freindly presence.

Date: 2007-04-05 07:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] benicek.livejournal.com
I didn't know that about the Nazis, but it doesn't surprise me. In present-day European politics, including Britain, the hunters usually end up on the right and the Greens on the left, thus prohibiting a fairly obvious alliance of two groups who are both passionate about wildlife conservation.

You've got to hand it to fascism though; it is hideously flexible and will bolt on to just about any fashion/issue/religion like a lego set. The Nazis were fixated with mythology and ancient symbology; the Italian Fascists whole-heartedly embraced modernism and the cult of high speed technology. Modern European fascism has given up persecuting Jews and gays, put on nice suits and turned its sights on ill-defined immigrants.

Date: 2007-04-07 03:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] malkhos.livejournal.com
You're right that they could pick and choose. If Goering was a Green, Himmler was the mythologist. As important as Nordic myth and occultism were to the German right, Hitler thought it was so much nosense and used to make fun of Himmler behind his back (this in the "table-talk" recorded by his secretaries and published after the war).

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