A 1:1 scale toy rail road near by, bull dozed trees, undergrowth, and I'm sure many homes of animals. I've heard this was done for aesthetic reasons. As in, “we'll just go ahead and clean up this area“, and by “clean up” they mean demolish any living thing, and if its in the budget, pave it. Somehow trees, shrubs, and all sorts flora that Central (the most intensively used landscape in the world) Illinois is missing from around ninety percent of the landscape, was seen as ugly. Now it will probably be overgrown with ragweed, poison ivy, and exotic invasive species - then mowed down at exactly the wrong time of year for native plants to flourish - then called a beautiful improvement upon this landscape of beans and corn. If only they could of got those noxious species to grow in neat rows. Why this is seen to be more pleasing to the senses than that remnant of the prairie savanna? For example, how does an old factory, With some very beautiful details and a design that was well thought out, get regarded as an ugly blight. But an empty lot with a mowed weedy lawn look better. In another place that ruin of an old factory would be quaint, rustic, charming, and a tourist draw.
Order over disorder, I think that is the overriding factor. Persons not aesthetically aware mistakenly regard an orderly looking or sounding environment as higher in quality. This is not true. The chaos of the galaxy is beautiful, the chaos of ocean waves have a wide range of dramatic quality, and the clouds in the sky are always chaotically incline to please the senses. I think that this order over disorder mental pitfall has to be eliminated. How to go about this? Lets for a moment imagine that there was a United Nations department of aesthetic quality, which in turn handed down a program for each nation to use in its department of aesthetic justice - and the “DAJ” ,as we'll call it, oversees laws that conform with the UN program through a state government, called the department of environmental zoning - which would work with local county and city zoning boards to create a high aesthetic quality to our lives. And if I were appointed a supreme justice of the court of aesthetics, my first act would be to , ( and I might be going off the deep end at this point) abolish all strip malls and big box style development. My second act would be to bury all lines of transmission, no exceptions. And my third final act of my revolutionary first phase would be to enforce the littering laws with vigor. Oh ya and abolish the use of those silly court robes, maybe we could use clown suits or some form of archaic clothing.
As an artist I have been trained and have a natural tendency to not edit out my surroundings.
If it's there I see it, and let me tell ya there are a lot of things people just don't see. Power lines are a big one, road noise is another, that Christmas sock my wife has left up in the living room for over 9 months, is yet another. The clinical word for this is scatoma and I believe that the engineering profession is full of personnel that demonstrate what a severe scatoma is. Engineering is responsible for nearly all of the material objects in our culture, Heck they even set zoning rules. And if that isn't bad enough, general contractors design whats left. Our culture needs input from the artistic set and as I see it the engineering class is not going to ask or this ugly society of ours would not have developed. We have to push and take crucial quality of life issues away from those who don't care or are impaired. We have to get out there and do what is right.
Ian
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