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| Sunset Place about a year ago. |
The management at Sunset Place shopping mall in South Miami
recently removed a creeping fig from the walls facing Route 1. This kind of fig is an aggressive vine that
can swallow up whole buildings in a season, but nevertheless I am sorry to lose that bit of subversive
green. The newly, sadly clean walls make
me miss the romance of ivy-covered halls, which runs so deep in the academic
tradition that only the most venerable schools bear the name. Most of the League has long since banished
the Ivy, but retains the hoary memory of a picturesque ancestry in the
architecture. The older buildings often
have a rough surface that already suggests overgrowth, perhaps in overloaded
detail, perhaps in the gnarliness of stone or the mottledness of brick. In imagination, this roughness retains a natural condition, as if the building were only slightly removed from its origins in the rock and mud below it. When
ivy (or creeping fig) grows, it carries living part of the earth up the walls
as if to reclaim them. Building
maintenance supervisors fight back with keen eye and sharp blade. To let plants advance unchecked suggests an
exquisite negligence or perhaps tolerance that remains part of the collegiate
imagination. Deep in ivy-covered walls,
perhaps scholars like St Jerome in his study have more on their minds than
pruning, and perhaps willingly make room in their world for other living things. In the
presence of big thoughts, clean buildings seem rather shallow, and all the
pruning and trimming obsessive, even violent. When you think about it, a smooth surface doesn’t
offer much to think about and requires a lot of repetitive work to keep it that
way.
