The Center of Universal Life

"Our renovated consciousness forbid us to consider man as the centre of universal life. The pain of a man is as interesting in our eyes as that of an electric lamp which suffers with spasmodic flinches and cries to us the most heartwrenching expressions of colour."

Manifesto of the Futurist Painters - Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini - 1910

quoted by Eric Michaud

Bill Brandt - The Queen Elizabeth - 1946

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie-Woogie - 1942

Renato Guttuso - Boogie Woogie - 1953

Serene Buddhas

"I love machines . . . on their concrete bases, like serene Buddhas squatting on their timeless lotus" 
Henri Van der Velde, quoted in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, The Indivisibility of Design, 1962

Willi Baumeister - Mauerbild Mit Kreis - 1923

Robert Michel - 200 Horsepower Double "Gnome" Rotary Engine - 1921-22

Gerald Murphy - Watch - 1925

A World of Artifices

"You will find yourself once again, where all is factitious and mechanical, reduction and construction: another world inside the world; a world fabricated, rigged, engineered, a world of artifices, of distortion, of adaptation, of fiction, of vanity, a world that has sense or value only for man, who is its architect."

Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, 1926

Piet Mondrian - Composition no.10 in black and white (pier and ocean) - 1915

Theo Van Doesburg - Landscape Study for Composition XII - 1918

Mies van der Rohe - Brick Country House - 1914

Condensed

"Triumph of our I over our Weight, with its treacherous plots to murder our speed and drag it into immobility's ditch. Velocity = scattering + condensation of the I. All the distance covered by a body is condensed in that very body."

F. T. Marinetti, Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914
Quoted in Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Futurist Re-Fashioning of the Universe, 1996

Joseph Stella - Telegraph Pole - 1917

Lill Tschudi - Fixing The Wires - 1932

Cassandre - Poster for l'Intransigeant - 1925

Austere, Mechanical, Clearcut and Bare

"Most of us cannot state our position, and we use adjectives which in themselves do not explain what we mean, but which, for a group for a certain time, by a kind of tacit convention become the "porters" or "bearers" of the complex new attitude which we all recognize that we have in company, but which we cannot describe or analyze. At the present time you get this change shown in the value given to certain adjectives. Instead of epithets like graceful, beautiful, etc. you get epithets like austere, mechanical, clearcut and bare, used to express admiration." 

T.E. Hulme, Modern Art and its philosophy, in Speculations, 1924

Hans Hollein - Alles ist Architektur - 1968

via Sock Studio

Mies Van Der Rohe - Group of three court houses - 1938

Duilio Cambellotti - Plaster model of stage set for the theban cycle at the Roman theatre - 1924.

"But this wholly dynamic way of looking at things is repugnant to the reflective consciousness, because the latter delights in clean cut distinctions, which are easily expressed in words, and in things with well-defined outlines, like those which are perceived in space"

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the 
Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889

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

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

Ministers of Sound and Volume

“Le Temps et l’Espace sont les ministres du Son et du Volume.” 

(Time and Space are the ministers of Sound and Volume)

Reflexions, G. Vantongerloo, in De Stijl, volume 1 issue 9, translation mine

Frank Lloyd Wright - Detail from the Hollyhock House - 1919-1921

Michael Hansmeyer Studio - Cellular Automata - Voxel- 2009

"Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, 
since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed."
F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto., 1909