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

At the End of its Tether

"The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life-and not simply human life but all self-conscious existance - has been going on since its beginning. If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded."

H.G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether, 1946

Paul Klee - Ad Marginem - 1930

Kasimir Malevich & El Lissitsky - Suprematist Composition - 1918

via Manuellement

Hanafuda Suzuki suite

My Nightmare Yields

“Unprincipled men tried to malign our time. Always we had to look back, always we had to be modelled on another time. But my nightmare yields. Yes, our time is beautiful. So beautiful, that I don’t want to live in another.”
Adolf Loos, quoted here

Farkas Molnar - The red cube - 1923

via Ross Wolfe

Gloria Freedman - Le Carré Rouge - 1997

Luis Barragan - Casa Gilardi - 1976

photography by Kim Zwarts, 1988

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

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

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