Nick Jones, South Lake Philosophy Club Forum
I stumbled upon the following words that probably best sum up some of the most poignant words ever expressed regarding my chosen profession, Architecture. I thought they might be worthy of sharing:
Architecture, “The Great Manuscript of Humanity” began like writing. A stone pointed upright, and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on a column. When there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnak is already a complete formula.
From the most immemorial temple of Hindustan, to the Cathedral of Cologne, architecture has been the great manuscript of the human race. This is true to such a degree that, not only every religious symbol but every human thought, has its page and memorial in that book.
Before the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, this was the only form in which free thought was possible, and therefore, it found free expression in those books called edifices.
Up to this time, architecture was the chief recorder of the human race; no single thought went beyond the fundamental but was embedded in some edifice. Every popular idea, like every religious law, has had its monuments.
The human race has never conceived an important thought that has not been written down in stone. And why? Because every thought, whether religious or philosophic, is anxious to be perpetuated; because the idea that stirred one generation longs to stir others, and to leave some lasting trace.
—Thoughts drawn from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris
South Lake Philosophy Club is open to the public on the fourth Wednesday of the month at the Kehlor Recreation Building next to the tennis courts in downtown Clermont, from 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
