This idea of cyclical regularity of change

"For a long time the 'modern' has been seen as the opposite of the 'ancient.' It is a word which for centuries the new and the here-and-now have used in triumphalist self-justification as a means of relegating everything that is not themselves (or that they think is not themselves) to the past. Its magic powers seem inexhaustible. Yet its meaning has changed... In France in the middle ages the elected or co-opted magistrates of the towns with burgomasters...and consulates...were known as 'moderns.' The retiring magistrates were called 'ancients' as distinct from 'moderns.' [The term modern] involved the double idea of renewal and of regularity in renewal; elections were held according to a strict mode [Latin: modus] laid down in the charter, or according to municipal tradition. This idea of cyclical regularity of change, and of change as a norm, did not last long. In the different sectors of social and political life, and above all in culture, the term reappears at various dates, and is always heavy with polemical [i.e., divisively hyperbolic] meanings... Later, the issue loses its polemical edge; it does not vanish completely, but it becomes subsumed in the self-triumphalism of 'modernism' and 'modern' tastes. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the 'modern style', 'modernism' (i.e., the cult of innovation for innovation's sake, innovation as a fetish) is fully fledged."
—Henri Lefebvre, (opening lines of) "What is Modernity" in Introduction to Modernity [1962], John Moore, transl. (Verso, 1995) p168 . [brackets are my clarifying insertions] (parentheses are Lefebvre).

Some designers design discursive forms and publics rather than buildings

"Some designers design discursive forms and publics rather than buildings."—Shannon Mattern

http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Mattern_ClickScanBold.pdf

For the Art Students of Glasgow

"Fire in the Architectural Institute

Fire in the Architectural Institute!
through all the rooms and over the blueprints
like an amnesty through the jails...
Fire! Fire!

High on the sleepy facade
shamelessly, mischievously
like a red-assed baboon
a window skitters.

We'd already written our theses,
the time had come for us to defend them.
They're crackling away in a sealed cupboard:
all those bad reports on me!

The drafting paper is wounded,
it's a red fall of leaves;
my drawing boards are burning,
whole cities are burning.

Five summers and five winters shoot up in flames
like a jar of kerosene.
Karen, my pet,
Oi! we're on fire!

Farewell architecture:
it's down to a cinder
for all those cowsheds decorated with cupids
and those rec halls in rococo!

O youth, phoenix, ninny,
your dissertation is hot stuff,
flirting its little red skirt now,
flaunting its little red tongue.

Farewell life in the sticks!
Life is a series of burned-out sites.
Nobody escapes the bonfire:
if you live—you burn.

But tomorrow, out of these ashes,
more poisonous than a bee
your compass point will dart
to sting you in the finger.

Everything's gone up in smoke,
and there's no end of people sighing.
It's the end?
                  It's only the beginning.
Let's go to the movies! 
                            "
Andrei Voznesensky (1958); English translation, by Stanley Kunitz
in Antiworlds, (Anchor Books, 1967) p135.

I learned of this poem as a student, years ago, by reading Michael Sorkin's book Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings, in which he says: "The poet Andrei Voznesensky originally intended to become an architect. His plans were interrupted. In 1957, shortly before graduation, The Moscow Architectural Institute burned."  He recalls this story in the context of his own experience of a fire on June 14, 1969, at the Yale Art and Architecture Building (designed by Paul Rudolph).  The essay is entitled "Auto Da Fe" after the novel by Elias Canetti first published in 1935.  The first American edition was called The Tower of Babel, perhaps for fear no one would bother looking up the Latin for the burning of heretics.  The original German title was Die Blendung, or The Blinding. 

As Mackintosh's masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art, burns, we think also of the fire that ate the Library of Alexandria (again vulnerable), and the fictional fire depicted in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose.

No one is to blame.  History repeats itself.  And the wisdom of Heraclitus smolders on.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=HfADWI2MnyIC&lpg=PP1&dq=sorkin%20variations%20on%20a%20theme%20park%20google%20book%20search&pg=PA327#v=onepage&q=fire&f=false

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/23/glasgow-school-art-fire-charles-rennie-mackintosh-live

Feelings also have their dance - and playgrounds

“No, life has not disappointed me.  Rather, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day the great liberator overcame me: the thought that life could be an experiment…  And knowledge itself… to me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings also have their dance - and playgrounds.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science p181

More arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind

Borges, on the method of dreams (expanded):

"He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality… At first, his dreams were chaotic; somewhat later, they were of a dialectical nature. The stranger dreamt that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater... clouds of silent students filled the gradins... He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe… he comprehended with some bitterness that he could expect nothing of those students who passively accepted his doctrines, but that he could of those who, at times, would venture a reasonable contradiction...  He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind… he sought another method…  To take up his task again, he waited until the moon’s disk was perfect.  Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods, uttered the lawful syllable of a powerful name and slept.  Almost immediately, he dreamt of a beating heart.  He dreamt it as active, warm, secret, the size of a closed fist, of garnet color in the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; with minute love he dreamt it, for fourteen lucid nights.  Each night he perceived it with greater clarity…  He perceived it, lived it, from many distances and many angles… ”

— Jorge Luis Borges “The Circular Ruin” in Labyrinths p46-8.

Commons, subtle and intimate to our being, necessary for the emergence of persons

"...commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons."

— Ivan Illich, "Silence is a Commons" [from Illich's remarks at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, March 21, 1982]

Rhythm upset at a single point yields

"A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles." 
 
- Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street" (1928), in Reflections (1978, p79).

Huge spiral, ending in a most difficult maze

"There was a certain cave near Thebes in Egypt which resembled a shepherd’s pipe, since as it followed its winding course in the depths of the earth it formed a natural spiral; for it did not take a straight course at the opening and then branch off into straight-running corridors, but winding about under the mountain it made a huge spiral, ending in a most difficult maze. In it was set up an image of a Satyr wrought in marble. He stood on a base in the attitude of one making ready to dance, and lifting the sole of his right foot backward he not only held a flute in his hand but also was being the first to leap up at its sound; though in reality the flute’s note was not reaching the player’s ear, nor yet was the flute endowed with voice, but the physical effect which flute-players experience had been transferred to the stone by the skill of the artist." 

- Callistratus, from "Descriptions" (It seems he began the book with this description of a statue of a satyr), translation by Arthur Fairbanks.

Madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics

"True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." 

— Yevgeny Zamyatin, 'We' [written 1921] 1924.

I love this quote, but I never expected it to become my most popular post here at Ubu Loca. In honor of this surprise, the following excerpts from Zamyatin's "Foreword" to the English edition of We:

"Well, what else do you want? ...for three years I wrote about nothing but ice cutters, steam engines, refillers, and 'The Theoretical Exploration of the Works of Floating Steam Shovels.' I couldn't help myself. I was attached to the chair of Ship Architecture and busied myself with teaching in the shipbuilding faculty... If I mean anything in Russian literature, I owe this completely to the Petrograd Secret Service. In 1911 this service exiled me from Petrograd and I was forced to spend two years in a non-populated place in Lachta. There, in the midst of the white winter silence and the green summer silence, I wrote... 
     After that... in England where, during the war, I spent about two years, building ships and visiting the ruins of ancient castles. I listened to the banging of the German Zeppelin bombs and wrote...  
     Now ... Three new volumes are in the hands of the publisher ...The fourth will be my novel We, the funniest and most earnest thing I have written. However, the most serious and most interesting novels I never wrote. They happened to me in my life."
— Yevgeny Zamiatin [ca 1921] page xvii-xviii, "Foreword" to We, (as cited by a person named Zilboorg.

Those multiple identities whereby we learn

"The challenge inherent in cultural diversity is not posed simply at the international level (between nation-states) or at the infra-national level (within increasingly multicultural societies); it also concerns us as individuals through those multiple identities whereby we learn to be receptive to difference while remaining ourselves. Thus cultural diversity has important political implications: it prescribes the aim of freeing ourselves of stereotypes and prejudices in order to accept others with their differences and complexities. In this way, it becomes possible to rediscover our common humanity through our very diversity."

source: page 5 of, UNESCO's Report "Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue" (2009) http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001852/185202E.pdf

[note: The above quote has been posted in protest to the recent (descriminatory) decision by the US Supreme court to allow states to ban affirmative action measures intended to repair racial and socioeconomic inequality in society by increasing the diversity of students admitted to universities. The impetus: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/opinion/racial-equality-loses-at-the-court.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0]

A site, which plunges into the furor of its own evaluation

"In the pure vanishing image of its 'elusive foam' the sea is abruptly revealed to be a site, which plunges into the furor of its own evaluation. / This site is an event-site because among its consequences we find that the inexistent (consciousness, life) starts to exist maximally, that the ontologically vanquished becomes the living victor, that where the empty excluded of the place used to be there now stands a body capable of breaking the 'pensive form' of its submission."

– Alain Badiou (on Valéry's poem, "The graveyard by the Sea") in Logics of Worlds, p459.

Ping elsewhere always there but that known not.

In honor of Flight MH370, the last lines of Ping:

"Ping elsewhere always there but that known not. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image same time a little less dim eye black and white half closed long lashes imploring that much memory almost never. Afar flash of time all white all over all of old ping flash white walls shining white no trace eyes holes light blue almost white last colour ping white over. Ping fixed last elsewhere legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front head taught eyes white invisible fixed front over. Given rose only just one yard invisible bare white all known without within over. White ceiling never seen ping of old only just almost never one second light time white floor never seen ping of old perhaps there. Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning a nature one second almost never blue and white in the wind the much memory henceforth never. White planes no trace shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound. Head taught eyes white fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over."

— Samuel Beckett, (last few lines of) Ping [or Bing, in French 1966], collected in First Love And Other Shorts (New York: Grove, 1974) p71-2.

Thinking area... an unassimilable series that encourages the viewer to think... not fitting, but fits.

"At least one 'thinking area' could offer maximum contradictions for the possibility of abstraction in the visual art of the futurist moment and immediately after. An oasis from whatever overarching narrative the show otherwise provides. This would include works not ordinarily or, better to say, not easily considered abstract but that are exemplary of a counterclaim to abstraction. The criteria for inclusion in this area would not be because something fits but because it doesn’t, an unassimilable series that encourages the viewer to think abstractly. Implausible connections, but not arbitrary ones; a series of contingent possibilities. Not fitting, but fits."

— Charles Bernstein "Disfiguring Abstraction" Critical Inquiry v39 n3 (Spring 2013) p493.

Memory as a part of our existence in the environment

"We believe that our relation to up and down or in and out, to front, to back, to boundaries and edges shares space in our memories with more purely visual and conceptual matter. The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centered,' as dancers say, is not locked into the immediate present but can be recollected through time. The importance of memory as a part of our existence in the environment has frequently been denied in this century and by some is even now rather embarrassedly characterized as 'nostalgia' and dismissed again. We [however] view it as an extension of experience, certainly not as a negation of it."

– from "Body, Memory, and Architecture" Kent Bloomer & Charles Moore. 1977.

Leaves of Suggestiveness

"The word I myself put primarily for the description of [my 'Leaves of Grass'] as they stand at last, is the word Suggestiveness.  I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme.  The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine.  I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought – there to pursue your own flight." 

– Walt Whitman, from "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1892), in Leaves of Grass, (Library of America, 1992) p666-7.

Society for the Diffusion of Beautiful Knowledge

"We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? ... I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, – Go to grass ["like a horse" that "leaves all his harness behind in the stable"]. You have eaten hay [knowledge, facts, etc] long enough. The spring has come with its green crop [of Useful Ignorance]." 
 
– Henry Thoreau, from near the end of an essay called "Walking" 1862. 
[bracketed content is given to help the reader step over gaps in thought]

Nearer and Farther

"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, 
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the 
     lines of the arches and cornices?) 

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded 
     by the instruments, 
It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor 
     the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer 
     singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's 
     chorus, nor that of the women's chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they."

– Walt Whitman, A Song for Occupations 4, in Leaves of Grass [ca1891] 
(Vintage, Library of America edition, 1992) , p359.

Weave among Incidents

"The ox-blood from the hands which play
For fire for warmth for hands for growth
Is there room in the room that you room in?
Upon his structured tomb:
Still they mean something. For the dance
And the architecture.
Weave among incidents..." 

— Ted Berrigan, From Sonnet 1 in "The Sonnets"  (1964).  Below is a link to the full poem, which I've excerpted, but the entire book is a classic of collage poetry.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/244276

Reversible Destiny

"Even longevity — as but a postponement of the inevitable — is not enough.  The stakes must be changed entirely.  All consciousness involves, for the forming of the world, some degree of mastery over landing-site dispersal, but the seeker of reversible destiny must master the landing-site configuring process itself so that she may initiate alternative employments of landing sites."

— Madeline Gins (1941-2014), Reversible Destiny Foundation, January 25, 2013

http://www.reversibledestiny.org/

The secret sits in the middle

"
The Secret Sits

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows." 

— Robert Frost, first published as "Ring Around" in the journal Poetry (April 1936)

Every phantasy has the value of a possibility

"Naturally, it is self-evident that there cannot be nothing. But a mere 'tumult of sensations,' a chaos, which elapses in the pre-empirical procession of time so irrationally that no apprehension of things could be found and maintained, a mere maelstrom of sensations, I say, is indeed not absolute nothingness. It is only nothing that can in itself constitute a world of things. .... Thus we arrive at the possibility of a phenomenological maelstrom... All in all, the world - in its existence and in what it is - is an irrational fact, and its facticity resides uniquely and exclusively in the strictness of the motivational nexuses... Experience is the force which guarantees the existence of the world... in the perceptual nexus every perception is augmented by every other one, corresponding to all the series of fulfillments which interweave into a manifold braid, unitarily and harmoniously... possibilities are not empty possible thoughts but are possibilities grounded in motivation. ...actual perception in a harmonious perceptual nexus refers to these or those possible perceptions that are in accord with the elapsing perceptual nexus... Every phantasy has the value of a possibility... The appearances occurring at any time are appearances under motivating circumstances." 

 — Husserl, Final Considerations, in Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907 (Kluwer, 1973) p249-53.

The talent for transformation

"The talent for transformation which has given man so much power over all other creatures has as yet scarcely been considered or begun to be understood. Though everyone possesses it, uses it and takes it for granted, it is one of the great mysteries and few are aware that to it they owe what is best in themselves. It is extremely difficult to understand the true nature of transformation. The most hopeful course is to approach it from several different angles."

— Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [first 1960] (Penguin, 1984), p389.

The situation constituted by its relation

 "As grass is food in the situation constituted by its relation to the ox and is not food in the situation constituted by the tiger, so the distant object is colored in the perceptual situation constituted by its relation to an individual with our [sensing/acting] apparatus but is not colored over against an angleworm." 

— George Herbert Mead, Consciousness and the Unquestioned (Essay 4), in The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago, 1938) p76-77.

https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs2/philact/Mead_1938_04.html

The creation of durational spaces

"The creation of durational spaces in a poem – great but empty halls, narrow corridors, closets, enclosed pools, formal picture galleries, off and on ramps, pulleys and trap doors between levels – produces an internal or negative (in the sense of inverted or inner) architecture. – You are entering a building through a dark and musty subbasement; proceeding a few steps, you trip onto an elevator platform and are whisked to what is something like the 23rd floor, where you are stepping out into an abandoned soundstage... sighting a ladder, you climb up a flight onto a floor filled with hundreds of irregularly shaped cubicles populated by women dressed as Matadors..." 

— Charles Bernstein,  The Book as Architecture (essay), 
in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999) p56.

The madness of space

"How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and shapes you take
when crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you."

— Wallace Stevens (from Blue Guitar)

The event to which one is subjected is visualized in a symbol

"There is a kind of law of the shortest distance to the image, a psychological law by which the event to which one is subjected is visualized in a symbol that represents its swiftest summing up: I was a man who, carrying a pile of plates, had slipped on a waxed floor and let his scaffolding of porcelain crash. ... Horizon? There was no longer a horizon. I was in the wings of a theatre cluttered up with bits of scenery. Vertical, oblique, horizontal, all of plane geometry was a whirl.
                                      ...   There is nothing dramatic in the world, nothing pathetic, except in human relations." 

— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939) p83, 93.

Poetry is in everything

"Poetry is in everything—in land and in sea, in lake and in riverside.  It is in the city too... it is evident to me here as I sit: there is poetry in this table, in this paper, in this inkstand... in the rattling of cars on the streets, in each minute, common, ridiculous motion of a workman, who the other side of the street is painting the sign of a butcher's shop."

—Fernando Pessoa: Always Astonished (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988) p1.

The gesture explains things in a breath

"...life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message flies by these interpreters in the least space of time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely. But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they tell their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and sophisticating brain." 

— Robert Louis Stevenson, "Truth of Intercourse" in Essays: English and American.
The Harvard Classics.  1909–14.

Om In a Landscape

"Om In a Landscape may be performed as they see fit by any number of people who have enough good will to listen intently to each other and to everything else they hear while they perform it and to relate with what they hear by speaking or singing or both and observing plenty of silence from time to time. Please don't make your Oms too holy-holy."
 
— Jackson Mac Low, from Instructions [2002] to Om In a Landscape [1961 drawing], in Doings (NYC: Granary, 2005), p64.

http://www.granarybooks.com/book/98/Jackson_Mac_Low+Doings_Assorted_Performance_Pieces_19552002/

Make a place made where they need land

"Make a place made where they need land
It is a curious spot that they are alike
For them to have hold of which in need of plainly
Can be suddenly hot with and without these or either
For themselves they can change no one in any way
They can be often placid as they mean they can force it
Or wilder than without having thought..."
 
— Gertrude Stein, Part I, Stanza VII, Stanzas in Meditation [ca1932]
(LA: Sun & Moon Press, 1994) p23.

re. Sun & Moon press: http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/27/books/bk-57818

Distant objects please

"Distant objects please, because in the first place, they imply an idea of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy.  In looking at the misty mountain-tops that bound the horizon, the mind is as it were conscious of all the conceivable objects and interests that lie between; we imagine all sorts of adventures in the interim; strain our hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to 'descry new lands, rivers, and mountains,' stretching far beyond it: our feelings, carried out of themselves, lose their grossness and their husk, are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty, turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us, and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing. Where the landscape fades from the dull sight, we fill the thin, viewless space with shapes of unknown good, and tinge the hazy prospect with hopes and wishes and more charming fears."


—William Hazlitt on Why Distant Objects Please, Essay XXVI in Table-Talk [ca1778-1830] (London: George Bell & Sons, 1902) p356.
see also http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3020

big thumbs up

A sketch of "Big Thumbs-Up" by Lisa + Ted Landrum, one of several options considered for the NYC Halloween Parade, 2012. We have not gotten around to building this one yet, but did muster a tribute to Le Corbusier—called "Architecture's Open Hand"—for the Critical Halloween Costume Competition co-sponsored by NYC's Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery, and Domus magazine, October 2012.


To learn more about our work, see links provided either on my Linked-In profile, or in Lisa's profile page at the University of Manitoba.

http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/facstaff/faclist/landruml.html