The Chains of my Mortality

"I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality"

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, 397-398

Jacob Epstein - Rockdrill - 1913

Gustav Klutsis - Multilingual propaganda machine - 1925


Richard Vergez - Boost - 2007

Qualitative Modernity

“Modernity is a qualitative category, not a chronological one” 
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951

Karl Moser - Saint Anthony Church - Basel - 1927 

Picture by Carl Nalls

Renwick Battery Gunhouse Loophole
picture by Peter Nencini 2011 ?

Josef Albers - To Monte Alban - Graphic Tectonic serie - 1942

“No epoch has existed that did not feel itself, in the most eccentric sense, to be ‘modern’ and consider itself to be standing immediately before an abyss. The despairing, wide-awake consciousness, standing immersed in decisive crisis, is chronic in humanity. Every period appears to itself as unavoidably new. Every period appear to itself as unavoidably new. This ‘modernity’, however, is precisely that which is diverse just like the diverse aspects of and the same kaleidoscope.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, 1940

Since One Must Be Arbitrary

“In or about December 1910, human character changed.
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden,
and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg.
The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless;
and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.” 

Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, 1924

Hugh Ferriss - Philosophy - 1929

Antonio Sant'Elia - Project For The New Cemetery In Monza - 1912

Iakov Chernikov - Pantheons of the Great Patriotic War - 1942-45
via Icif.ru

“The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communication; the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry” 

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974

A Spacious Hive

"A Spacious Hive well stock'd with Bees,

That lived in Luxury and Ease;

And yet fam'd for Laws and Arms,

As yielding large and early Swarms;

Was counted the great Nursery,

Of Sciences and Industry."

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1705

John Leighton - Plan for hexagonal boroughs - 1865 - via Kosmograd

Konstantin Melnikov - Melnikov House - 1927 - Moscow

Du Besset-Lyon Architects - Lons le Saunier Library And Cinémas - 2012 - via ArchDaily

Technology reaching it's fulfillement - Charles Sheeler

"Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, 

it transcends into architecture."
Mies van der Rohe, Blackstone Hotel Speech on April 17, 1950

Charles Sheeler - The Upper Deck - 1929

Charles Sheeler - Water - 1945

Charles Sheeler - Golden Gate - 1955


"Any sufficiently advanced technology 
is indistinguishable from magic"
Arthur C. Clarke, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, 1962