Some thoughts from Pamuk

Just finished reading Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City and he shares a few thoughts in the chapter, "The Picturesque and the Outlying Neighborhoods," that I think will be useful to consider in the future. A few quotes below:

p. 254-5: "For [John] Ruskin [in The Seven Lamps of Architecture], picturesque beauty rises out of details that emerge only after a building has been standing for hundreds of years, from the ivy, herbs, and grassy meadows that surround it, from the rocks in the distance, the clouds in the sky, and the choppy sea. So there is nothing picturesque about a new building, which demands to be seen on its own terms; it only becomes picturesque after history has endowed it with accidental beauty and granted us a fortuitous new perspective."

p. 256-7: "To savor Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke -- condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect -- a fountain form whose faucets no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for eighty years, a collapsing building, a row of homes abandoned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews as a nationalist state bore down in minorities, a house leaning to one side in a way that defies perspective, two houses leaning against each other in the way that cartoonists so love to depict, a cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings -- these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in the ruins -- invariably, we're people who come from the outside."

p. 257-8: "Let us recall that Walter Benjamin said people from outside a city are most interested in its exotic and picturesque features. These two nationalist writers [Yahya Kemal and Tanpinar] could see the city's 'beauty' only in those parts where they themselves were outsiders."

(Pamuk is referring here to Benjamin's "The Return of the Flaneur" -- see http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html)