What is barnsworthburning?
I think of barnsworthburning as a form of commonplace book, though it has aims in common with other knowledge management tools: the digital garden, the Zettelkasten, the memex. It’s also a kind of art project / web experiment—intentionally a bit confusing, with few guideposts or explanations. The goal is to become lost, as I often am.
Why did you make it?
Mixed feelings on Le Corbusier aside, there’s a quote I love from Towards a New Architecture:
To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. We have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.
In the Corbusian sense, barnsworthburning is my own house-qua-poem. The site represents some core part of me, distilled through the words and works of others who are better equipped to express it.
Who or what inspired you?
My introduction to the concept of a commonplace was Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, which similarly distills Fletcher’s boundless interests to a 1,000 page ultra-dense tome. It’s designed for the random leaf-through, but I read the book cover to cover during that liminal period between education and work. Before then I’d never been much of a collector, but it convinced me to start capturing and curating my own fragments, which I’ve now been doing for over a decade.