"Secularization is a nice technical word for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction, social life driven by a calculus of large scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting or resenting a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by information and played with endlessly, monotonously on nets and screens..." T.J. Clark "Parametricism cannot become the long-term successor to Modernism because, like nearly all starchitecture, it ignores and exacerbates the urgent challenges of our time, such as the environmental crisis and the need to reintegrate ruptured urban fabric. Instead it is a perfect example of what … [Read more...]

"Of course, most people don’t really have to come to grips with pride and fear. But artists do, because as soon as they’re alone and solitary, they feel fear." Agnes Martin "At least since the Enlightenment, and in some cases before, modernity has signified a process of ‘bringing to light’. The dark spaces of superstition and prejudice must be made to quail before the light, just as the wolves must be made to stand back from fear of the fire. No secrets are to be left untold; transparency is all. If you take to hiding in a cave, your motives are no longer to be seen as an understandable defence against incursion; rather, you are choosing, unacceptably, to renounce the onslaught of … [Read more...]

"Belonging to or identifying oneself with a religious body in America today certainly does not mean that one thereby takes over the traditional Christian values of tolerance brotherhood, and equality. On the contrary, it appears that these values are more firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any religious group." The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al). "It seems that Lewerentz was at various times leading and directed by this melancholia, and all that is inherent in its meaning. This fact became most explicit at Lewerentz’s Resurrection Chapel at Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. The pure starkness of the form is anchored in the studied geometry of the golden section, … [Read more...]

"If before the 1970s (roughly speaking) buildings were primarily regarded as (public) expenditure, after the 1970s buildings became mostly a means of revenue - which fact ironically only contributed to further downward pressure on construction budgets. Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital." Rainier de Graaf "Every generation must build its own city." Antonio Sant'Elia Futurist Manifesto "Everyday to battle the weight of increasing … [Read more...]

"Men relate to each other, but they do not see each other." Max Horkheimer "Our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality." Sigmund Freud The notion of exile has shadowed much of 20th and 21st century history. The resonance of exile, though, is predicated on a genuine sense of home, of that place from which one is sent into exile. I was struck recently, as I sat in our cabin here in central west Norway, when I looked at two photographs of California. One was just a snapshot of Los Angeles, K-town, at twilight, and the other was just a real estate photo of a nice mid century house located out in the further reaches of the San … [Read more...]

"It was a civilization in which the invisible prevailed over the visible. Like few others, it was liable to be misunderstood. There is no point looking for help from historical events, since there is no trace of them. Only texts remain." Roberto Calasso On Vedic India "If there is one point of which we may be absolutely sure, it is that graphism did not begin with naive representations of reality but with abstraction." Andre Leroi-Gourhan "Concentration camps are a key to all these things. In the society we live in all work is like the work in the camps." Adorno "Originally, the position of man is like that of a dog you want to train. He would like to return to an earlier state … [Read more...]

"Symbolic violence consists then properly speaking in the production of a double imaginary of fulfilment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convinces them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire." Frederic Lordon "When you give a needy person something, smile at him and be aware that it is you who are indebted to him, for he accepts a little from you for which you receive a reward worth more than the whole world." Imam Abdallah Ibn Alawi Al-Haddad The Book of Assistance "The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the … [Read more...]

"I maintain that we need to return to the question of aesthetics, particularly regarding its connection with the question of politics, in an appeal to the art-world to recover a political understanding of its role. {...} Obviously I do not mean artists should become politically 'engaged'. I mean their work is 'originally engaged' in the question of the sensibility of the other. {...} I believe, however, that aesthetic ambition today has largely collapsed. And this is because a huge proportion of the population is totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing, now hegemonic for the vast majority of the world, and is therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic … [Read more...]