"Some mornings I wake up with my head
full of rhythms, and rhythms of
rhythms, and rhythms of rhythms of rhythms. And to have to speak
English
is like having to put on a straitjacket."
(Leroy Little Bear ‘Sa’ke’j’ Henderson)
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only
to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees
of Ingsoc, but
to make all other modes of thought impossible."
(George Orwell)
I first visited Oxford in 1993, as a tourist with a camera looking
for the postcard beauty of a legendary culture of education. I
found it in the intriguing orderliness of the place, the gothic
grandeur of its formal buildings and the romantic serenity of
its landscapes.
When I returned there four years later as a master’s
student, I felt doubly betrayed. In spite of all the intellectual
drama that played itself within the quad walls, a few months within
my sojourn I was confronted with the spatial sterility of the
place.
Sterility is a shocking word, I admit. We are
more willing to qualify Modern functionalist settings with it
than places like Oxford. But I assure you, the realization probably
shocked me far more than it does you. I had come from Beirut,
from all its post-war Mediterranean chaos, where I had been trained
as an architect. I had been trained to think of physical order
as the ultimate goal of our profession. I had come to the disciplined
context of Oxford to be promoted into an urban designer. Against
all my expectations, the values I carried as a template in my
mind were suddenly put to the test. In order to frame this appropriately
for you, I have to take you back and forth between several settings
in space and time, so that you can most accurately perceive the
arc of the experience that put this book in your hands today...
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