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Tuesday 23 July 2013

Sacred Work

"I have a great future before me. My forebodings cannot deceive me. If I can but succeed in fulfilling only a small part of that which swells my breast, I do not want anything more. I do not want happiness, I do not think of happiness; I want work, stern work, sacred work. There is a wide field before me, and my lot will not be a small one."
Bakunin in a letter to his family, 1842, quoted in Max Nomad, Apostles of the Revolution, 1939


Iurii Annenkov - Trotsky - 1921

(Unknown Photographer) Life & Getty Images - Le Corbusier -1951

Sunday 21 July 2013

The Lines of the Craftsmen - Arne Jacobsen's Aarhus Town Hall

"I have seen the lines of the craftsmen, the finest of which are like a spider's web, but mathematical lines are different. 
They are not the images of such things as the eye of my body has showed me. 
The man who knows them does so without any cogitation of physical objects whatever, but intuits them within himself."
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (book 10, chapter 12,) circa 397AD


Arne Jacobsen & Erik Møller - Aarhus Town Hall - 1937/42
Picture by Julian Weyer


Arne Jacobsen & Erik Møller - Aarhus Town Hall - 1937/42
Picture by Seier Seier

Arne Jacobsen & Erik Møller - Aarhus Town Hall - 1937/42
Picture by Maarten Helle

Arne Jacobsen & Erik Møller - Aarhus Town Hall - 1937/42
Picture by Seier Seier


Arne Jacobsen & Erik Møller - Aarhus Town Hall - 1937/42
Picture by Iznogut

Thursday 18 July 2013

Only the middling sort

“Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence"
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, October 10, 1908


Paul Strand - Wall Street - 1915 


Livio Vacchini - Palestra Gymanisum - 1995/7


Micahel Levin - New Concrete - 2009


“Extremely happy men and extremely unhappy men are equally disposed to harshness: witness monks and conquerors. Only the middling sort, and the mixture of good fortune with bad, offer gentleness and pity.” 
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk VI, Ch IX