Virtuous State

"The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural taste and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and virtuous state of society."

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

Haus KLR built by Jutta Klare and renovated by Archequipe - Cologne - 1980 & 2013

Via Dezeen

Adolf Loos - Villa Moller - Vienna - 1927/28

 Aldo Rossi - Scuola Elementare De Amicis - Broni - 1969/1971

Perpetual Indecision

"The unity of life and art that aesthetic culture aimed at, instead of lifting life to the sublime, transcendent realm of art by giving form to its contingencies and necessity to its trivialities, actually imbued art with its own dilettante hedonism. In sum, aesthetic culture pulled art down to its own level, the petty, ramshackle realm of perpetual indecision."

Georg Lukács, Aesthetic Culture, 1910

Unknown Photographer
From left to right: Emil Hesse Burri, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Wilhelm Speyer and Marie Speyer - Le Lavandou - 1931

To whom the entire world is as a foreign place

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his."

Hugh of St Victor quoted by Edward Said in Cultural Imperialism, 1993

Rancho de Taos - 1772-1816

 celebrated by Georgia O'Keeffe

Gary Schuberth - Domed building - 2012

winner of the 2012 Professional Hand Krob Architecture competition

Halde and Short - Alwyn Court - 1909

"Philosophy is really homesickness, the wish to be at home everywhere"

Novalis, quoted in Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, 1920