Corporeal, Material Nature

“Aisthesis is the sensory experience of perception. The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality--corporeal, material nature.” 

Susan Buck-Mors, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay reconsidered, 1992

Cornelis Van Eesteren and Theo Van Doesburg - University Hall - 1923

Hans Van Der Laan - Abdij Roosenberg Waasmunster - East Flander - 1975

Auguste Perret - St Joseph Church - Le Havre - 1951 -  By Alexandra Polyakova

The Divine Parallelepipeds

"Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish blue rows of Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a victory over the old god and the old life."

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

quoted in James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, 1998

Walter Gropius - Bauhaus master houses - Dessau - 1925/1926

Cornelius van Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg - Axonometrics east/north of Maison Particulière - 1923

Iakov Chernikov - Aristography - 1914/1927

The End of a World and the Birth of Another

"We are living an epoch both dangerous 

and magnificent which embraces

desperately the end of a world and

the birth of another - a seeming confusion 

is its most immediate appearance."

Fernand Léger, 1947, in Maurice Fréchuret, 

Catalogue du Musée National Fernand Léger, 2006

Cornelis Van Eesteren & Frieda Fluck - Ascona - 1927

via Charnel House (again!)

Traffic

"On that 1st of October, 1924, I was assisting in the titanic rebirth of a new phenomenon... traffic."

Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow. 1924, quoted in All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman, 1982

Cornelis Van Eesteren - Schematic representation of the optimal relationship between skyscrapers and traffic - 1926

Le Corbusier - La Cité Radieuse - 1924

Emilio Ambasz - Cooperative of a Mexican-American grape growers in California - 1979