Look at the Romanesque ivories in the V and A. They really are astonishingly beautiful. Reliquaries, gospel covers, crucifixes, portraits of the saints: every item is pitched at a level of spiritual intensity, and fashioned by a craft that is only possible through spiritual intensity, which we now find remarkable, though to some extent it must then have been routine, in the way that an icon painter’s work is routine; in the way that daily meditation for a Buddhist monk is routine. Interesting how banal we have made the word routine. Routine merely implies the necessity of repetition. To be always craving the new is to be condemned to triviality. You can’t learn anything, in the arts or out of them, without routine.
Even the ivories made for pure leisure and enjoyment, like the Lewis chessmen, are beautiful.
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Commerce and Art? For me it always brings to mind an image of Holborn Viaduct, built to facilitate trade and public intercourse, supported by those cast-iron Victorian virtues, which passes over Farringdon Street. Farringdon Street then runs south to Ludgate Circus, a crossroads named for mythic King Lud, founder of London.
Rick Klaw: For our readers out there, can you explain vimana?
Steve Aylett: These are spaceships and weird flying machines described in the ancient Vedic literature of India. Some are described in quite a bit of technical detail, and the drawings which late-19^th^ and early 20^th^ century scholars created from these descriptions are quite beautiful. Strange spaceships with veined sails.
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/10/london-aerial-photography-by-bernhard-lang/
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/05/doves-type/
https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-mens-room-analogy
The point is that by forcing single-family houses to predominate in residential development, even in most land area of most cities, we almost certainly end up with a lot of people in a single-family house who don’t actually need or even want one. And while the abundance of such houses might be seen as a good thing, they ultimately cost more, in a pure market and in public expenditures such as infrastructure, than smaller, denser housing. They impose extra costs—more space to maintain and decorate, lawn and garden care, etc.—on some people who don’t want them, and because some people who don’t want them end up in them, some people who want them pay more than they need to.
