Meaning Layer · No. 1
The Aims of Education
The presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, on inert ideas and the aims of a general education.
41 passages 1929 33 min 6 chapters
A library of readings
The house serial. Each number is one work given the full apparatus — read, listened to, annotated, and printed from one source.
Readings
10Scripture
The Holy Bible
The Douay-Rheims American Edition of 1899 — Challoner’s revision of the translation made at Reims and Douai from the Latin Vulgate, and the English Catholic Bible that was in print before the King James. Seventy-three books in the order the Vulgate puts them, under the names the translation itself uses, including the seven the Protestant canon sets apart. Every verse is a block, and every citation is an address.
73 books 35,811 verses
The Business of Design
Design is being remade by a new medium, again. This course runs the studio's four-phase process — discovery, definition, design, develop — as one engagement across the semester, with AI worked into every phase the way a practice actually uses it: researcher in discovery, option generator in definition, spec-reader in design, production method in develop. What the student documents all term is the part that stays theirs: the judgment, the process, and the price of the work.
Web Design and Usability
The archival record of the Spring 2016 course, transcribed from the syllabus. Responsive web design and user-centered design, taught in the GMU format: named workshops carry the techniques, two seminars carry the debates, and three projects of rising weight carry the semester — a startup's one-page site, its CMS-backed second version, and the portfolio. 400 points, weekly exercises scored 0 to 3, critique attendance mandatory.
From the readings
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas”—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
The plates
1-
The Aims of Education · fig.1 Every mark is a separate tree; the outline none of them draws is the wood. Editorial diagram, Meaning Layer. See it in context
The pictures
32And he put forth his hand and took the sword, to sacrifice his son.
Genesis 22:10 32 hands, 1492–1754
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Sacrifice of Isaac Andrea Mantegna 1492 Kunsthistorisches Museum, GG_1842, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
Sacrifice of Isaac Raphael 1511 Vatican Museums, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Mariotto Albertinelli 1511 Yale University Art Gallery, 1959.15.13b, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Brunswick Monogrammist 1525 Department of Paintings of the Louvre, INV 1980, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Antonio di Donnino di Domenico del Mazziere 1525 Fogg Museum, 1977.177, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Andrea del Sarto 1527 Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 77, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Andrea del Sarto 1527 Cleveland Museum of Art, 1937.577, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The Sacrifice of Isaac Andrea del Sarto 1528 Museo del Prado, P000336, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
Sacrifice of Isaac Lucas Cranach the Elder 1530 Bavarian State Painting Collections, 4557, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The sacrifice of Abraham: An angel restraints Abraham from sacrifycing Isaac; the servants wait at the foot of the mountain (Genesis 22:10-12) Lucas Cranach the Elder 1531 Liechtenstein Museum, GE 739, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
Landscape with the Offering of Isaac Herri met de Bles 1540 Cincinnati Art Museum, 1944.44, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain -
The sacrifice of Abraham Master of the Augsburg Ecce Homo 1540 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 5393, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The catalog
33The works the project is built on, and the seed of the shop. Each record names the edition worth owning and where to get it — a book is only listed where the library already engages with it.
- Weimar Germany
- Weimar Culture
- Psychological Types
- The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
- The Theory of Psychoanalysis
- Studies in Word-Association
- Modern Man in Search of a Soul
- Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
- Symbols of Transformation
- Psychology and Alchemy
- Aion
- Answer to Job
- The Undiscovered Self
- Memories, Dreams, Reflections
- Man and His Symbols
- The Red Book
- Man's Search for Meaning
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
- The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
- I and Thou
- The Sacred and the Profane
- Saving the Appearances
- Mnemosyne Atlas
- Lectures
- Aby Warburg
- Bauhaus Manifesto
- The New Vision
- Die neue Typographie
- The Elements of Typographic Style
From the readings
But above style, and above knowledge, there is something, a vague shape like fate above the Greek gods. That something is Power. Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power. But, after all, the power of attainment of the desired end is fundamental. The first thing is to get there. Do not bother about your style, but solve your problem, justify the ways of God to man, administer your province, or do whatever else is set before you.
A concept is a way through the library rather than a label on it. Each one gathers its definition, its etymology, and every passage that turns on it.
- culture 10 Activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.
- inert ideas 3 Ideas received into the mind without being utilised, tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
- power 2 The capacity for attainment of a desired end — beneath style, and prior to it.
- specialism 5 Study pursued far enough into one subject to give an eye for the whole chessboard — the condition of style, and the route back to culture.
- style 4 The æsthetic sense for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste — the ultimate morality of mind.