So here's a contradiction : a city flâneur with a self-avowed soft spot for chaotic neighbourhoods, one who's drawn to streets torn between decay and transformation - in short a seedy city flâneur, who nevertheless nurtures a nostalgia for classical restraint.
True, neo-classical buildings almost never are the hallmark of bustling city-life. And was a century of classicism-bashing not a good thing to get rid of rigid academism in the arts & to allow finally for life-as-it-is?
Surely, but oh - what could be more beneficial for an aimlessly boiling mind than disciplined concentration on kindred, musical forms? And don't classical rhythms & patterns always seem to have that purifying, focusing effect? I do wonder what it is with them that lays the mind to lucid rest ….
When I hadn't yet substituted the walk-back-home-from-work for an adrenaline-charged bicycle-ride, I often tried to cleanse my mind by looking very intently at the neo-classical facades along the way.
Taking in their apparent regularity first, then overcoming boredom by noticing those subtle variations, those astute dissonances that relief the repetitive symmetries. ("Le bonheur naît de ces variations, source de toute musique").
Kneading geometrical forms into flowing patterns that match the organic mind's need for living rhythms - acknowledging the eye's need to play without renouncing geometry's dignity : (neo-)classical aesthetics know all about that re-assuring happiness.
I don't think of neo-classicism as mere academism or unimaginative plagiarism - its anachronistic sensibility is inspired by a nostalgia for classical perfection that is perhaps more permanent than the heroic illusion of the true high classical periods.
The bland regularity and shallow decorations of many contemporary (or temporary?) office-buildings couldn't ever command anything more than peremptory attention, they couldn't ever produce such relief & clarity in the onlooker's mind.
The eye just bounces off them, frustrated or even pained by such disregard for its needs.
So I like to feed on a classical sense of proportion wherever I can find it, in music, poetry and architecture. And so I suffer gladly even the most overbearing, resplendent buildings of the 19th century.
And yet all the while my first loyalty as an observer and flâneur lies with those many rambling streets vulnerable to the vagaries of a neighbourhood's history, savouring their sense of organic disorder. But what could be nicer than discovering in the midst of turmoil and decay some graceful formal pattern, some traces of geometry's dignity?