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

via Charnel House

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

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

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

The name of infidel - Simon Ungers

“Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.” 

Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 1734

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

I lost interest in nature

"After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature"
Vladimir Mayakovsky 

quoted in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams : Utopian Vision 

and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, 1988

Alexander Rodcheckno - Vladimir Mayakovsky at the Beach - circa 1928

via Nasty, Brutalist and Short