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Wednesday 29 January 2014

Perverse Optimism

"The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me at once bold and preposterous--the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical simplicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arithmetic. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyperbole, perverse optimism; something childishly headstrong and stirringly imaginative. . . "
Eugen Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 1937
quoted here


2+2=5 - 1931
"The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan plus the enthusiasm of workers." Soviet poster promoting the first five-year plan

Alexander Vesnin - 5 x 5 = 25 - 1921

Charles Demuth - The figure 5 in gold - 1928



"How could we divide the unit, if it were here that ultimate unity which characterizes a simple act of the mind ? How could we split it up into fractions whilst affirming its unity, if we did not regard it implicitly as an extended object, one in intuition but multiple in space ?"
Henri BergsonTime and Free Will: An essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889

Monday 27 January 2014

We will remain Fighters

"Here is what we cannot deny, had we wanted to: combat, the father of all things, is  ours also; It is him who has hammered us, chiselled us and tempered us to make us what we are. And forever, as long as the wheel of life shall dance in us its mighty ronde, this war will be the axle around which she roars. She trained us for the fight, and for as long as we live, we will remain fighters."
Ernst Junger, The War as Inner Experience, 1922

C. R. W. Nevinson - Explosion - 1916

George Grosz - Explosion - 1917

Frank Hurley - Death the Reaper - 1917

Tuesday 21 January 2014

Above Average

Today the Wise men of art call this work megalomania. They are right. Everything which exists above the average is a mania. I hear that the verdict passed on Russian work is: mechanomania.
 El Lissitzky, “Architecture in the USSR”, 1924


Jorge Oteiza - Conclusió experimental per a Mondrian - 1973

Sol Lewitt - Incomplete Open Cube - 1968

Gerrit Rietveld - Steltman Chair - 1963

Friday 17 January 2014

A World within a World

“You present a quality, architectural, no purpose. Just a recognition of something which you can’t define, but must be built… But that’s a definite architectural quality. It has the same quality as all religious places…It’s the beginning of architecture. It isn’t made out of a handbook. It doesn’t start from practical issues. It starts from a kind of feeling that there must be a world within a world.”
Louis Kahn, Silence and Light, lecture first delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, December 3, 1968, quoted in James F. Williamson, A World within a World: The Design of a Campus Interfaith Chapel


Jean Nouvel - Monolith - 2001-2002 - Unknown Photographer?


Konstantin Rozhdestvensky - Suprematist Landscape - 1935

Tony Smith - Die - 1962
via RUDY/GODINEZ




Unconditional Necessity

"Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity…
Thus all transcendental art sets out with the aim of de-organicizing the organic, i.e. of translating the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. But such a necessity man is able to feel only in the great world beyond the living, in the world of the inorganic." 
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 1907

Paul Strand - Abstraction - Twin Lakes, Connecticut - 1916

Aleksandr Rodchenko - Steps - 1930 


Alvin Langdon Coburn - Vortograph - 1917

Human Inertia

"Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature
wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beatiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious substitute products
in which the sperm of all artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships."


Louis Kahn - Library, Competition for Washington University - 1956
via Infinite Interior


J. L. M. Lauweriks - Interior for Exhibition of Christian Art - 1910

John Russell Pope - Proposal for Lincoln Memorial - 1912
via An Architectural Humanism

Otto Kohtz - Reichshaus am Königsplatz - Berlin
via Ross Wolfe