#modernism

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two. ↗

— Tadao Ando

#between #cannot #exist #fully #i

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#build #builders #carelessly #cheaply #eventually

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#constraints #euphoric #everything #freedom #gone

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism. ↗

— Peter Gay

#been #interested #interests #me #modernism

To the mind (Geist), good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in…. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things: because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding: everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are speaking to it. And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere: on is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself. ↗

— Robert Musil

#age

I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: “But if the ornament is beautiful! ...” To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way. ↗

— Adolf Loos

#modernism #ornament #art

It's ugly, but is it art? ↗

— Randall Jarrell

#modernism #art

It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity. ↗

— Sverker Sörlin

#modernism #sweden #art

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#postmodernism #life

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism. ↗

— Christian Lacroix

#design #except #exists #french #hardly