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February 10th, 2014 | #21 |
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I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.
I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.J. and Newport News, Va. The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it. I too have often lamented the comparative fugliness of American architecture to that of the Old World, and wondered why it is so. Why didn't our European forefathers come here and build in the same beautiful, picturesque styles of their lands of origin? Some did, of course; living in Virginia, for example, means seeing more fine old buildings than in pretty much any other state - but even here, the majority of houses & places of business have no exciting style to speak of. Some pioneer cabins were constructed well enuf to last centuries, but most have little beauty other than that conferred by time.
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February 10th, 2014 | #22 |
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Give me Solvang, or give me Death!
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February 10th, 2014 | #23 |
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I had some chairs similar to these once - and hated them. I had no idea they were bauhaus until now, looking through bauhaus pics, they just came with a table. Guess what happens if you sit on them regularly? Your weight bends them backwards to the ground, because they have no support. Boom, dead, useless, throw 'em out, no way to fix them. How fucking stupid and annoying is that? I went through all six of them, and I don't weigh that much. Last edited by Alex Linder; February 10th, 2014 at 05:43 AM. |
February 10th, 2014 | #24 | |
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It's easy to romanticize Europe, but remember that Europe lacks basic functionality in stuff like toilets and showers - by our standards. I'm not kidding. In the stuff where functionality and convenience matter most, the US is better than Europe, generally. At least in countries outside of Germany. Yes, we have nothing like Europe's castles, and it is generally better kept than the US. But it's also small, heavily populated, and incrementally built up over many centuries. The US - half of it is hardly 100 years old. |
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February 10th, 2014 | #25 | |
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February 10th, 2014 | #26 |
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I'll say though, it's been remarked before, there are dozens upon dozens of beautiful old Victorian houses in St. Louis and Detroit, to name two. Presumably there are similar ones in many other cities. I've seen many I would love to live in, if I had 2 million to spare.
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February 10th, 2014 | #27 |
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[bauhaus stuff]
too cool for school chair (i think this is a 'cantilevered chair') does this chair not look like it would give you a dirty look and exclaim "as if!" if you dared to threaten to press an ass cheek upon its sleek angled surface? the chair is the occupant; it fairly shrieks: "get out of the way, you're blocking my sun!" random thought: are Lego blocks bauhaus? get it? bauhaus is kind of the squaring off of reality; changing it from the circular, the natural, the organic, to the computer generated, the squared the robotic: cold, angular, anti-septic, bloodless, unhuman-hence-antihuman - whatever is warm and inviting, cozy and pleasant - gemutlich, auf Deutsch - aint bauhaus note: i forgot until now a semi-famous old book by Tom Wolfe, the originator of New Journalism. he wrote a whole book: From Bauhaus to Our House. I read it decades ago, and I don't remember a damn thing in it, but it certainly covers 20th-century architecture, the competing ideas. Here it is online and free, in pdf. Takes a couple minutes to download. Bauhaus Inspired Apartment Building Hamburg Germany 'glass box': Institute of Design at 350 North La Salle Drive Skyscrapers of the Mad Men Era Flickr/leander.canaris. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and his Bauhaus counterparts were the trendsetters of design in the mid-20th ... The "Westmount Square" is a complex of four "skyscrapers" located in Westmount, Quebec, Canada. This project, designed by the world renown Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is a modern complex with office towers, terrace and shopping concourse. It was opened on December 13, 1967. basically, any kind of window-dominated box structure of any height is probably bauhaus or derived from it. key is the 'load-bearing' walls, or, uh, walls, are replaced with glass. basically, they're turning a building inside out: the building goes from a fortress, with the hard, tough, heavy stuff on the outside, to a skeleton, where the glass opens everything up, and the strength comes from support poles inside and on the corners. https://www.google.com/search?q=bauh...2F%3B280%3B318 Last edited by Alex Linder; February 10th, 2014 at 06:34 AM. |
February 10th, 2014 | #28 | |
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Themes[edit]
Wolfe prefers ornate stylings, such as in Louis Sullivan's Bayard Building (left), to the unadorned boxes of glass and steel, such as Mies van der Rohe's IBM Plaza. Wolfe bluntly lays out his thesis in the introduction to From Bauhaus to Our House with a riff on the patriotic song "America the Beautiful" Quote:
Wolfe's critique, however, was not purely aesthetic. As in The Painted Word Wolfe was critical of what he saw as too much adherence to theory. Wolfe characterized the architecture as based on a political philosophy that was inapplicable to America, arguing, for example, that it was silly to model American schools on "worker's flats" for the proletariat. The architecture world—like an art world dominated by critics, and a literature world dominated by creative writing programs—was producing buildings that nobody liked.[5] Many architects, in Wolfe's opinion, had no particular goal but to be the most avant-garde.[6] |
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February 10th, 2014 | #29 |
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These Bauhaus architects want to destroy Western architecture, then they ought not to mind some gang graffitti showing up on the sides and glass windows of their own shacks.
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February 10th, 2014 | #30 |
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The Bauhaus is one aspect of the degenerate Weimar culture that the National Socialists aimed to (and temporarily succeeded in) stamping out.
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February 10th, 2014 | #32 |
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He was a genius wordsmith, no doubt about it.
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February 10th, 2014 | #33 | ||
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February 11th, 2014 | #34 |
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contrast this exciting, interesting, mysterious, wonderful dwelling with any bauhaus structure (the one on lower left; the one on upper left may well be bauhaus)
interesting post on dream houses...many good pics http://jezebel.com/whats-your-dream-...ush-1520847098 notice how people don't actually like bauhaus stuff...which is all about theory and being non-bourgeois, as i've been rereading the tom wolfe book, the pdf of which is posted upthread. Last edited by Alex Linder; February 11th, 2014 at 08:17 PM. |
February 11th, 2014 | #35 | |
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"First: Do No Good." - The Hymiecratic Oath "The man who does not exercise the first law of nature—that of self preservation — is not worthy of living and breathing the breath of life." - John Wesley Hardin |
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