Our Things in our Hands

“The light from the East is not only the liberation of worker, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”
Alexander Rodchenko, 'Rodchenko v Parizhe. Iz pisem domoi', Novyi lef, 1927
via Christina Kiaer

Unknown Photographer - Walter Gropius - 1968

via Exit Architects

"Since the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all individual things together, it follows each individual thing has the sovereign right to do everything that it can do, or the right of each thing extends so far as its determined power extends"
Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670

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

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