Category: Resource

Sources: glass architecture; reflection and transparency

“Through as many walls as possible, made entirely from glass – from coloured glass… then we would have paradise on earth, and would not have to look longingly up to it.’

Paul Scheerbert, 1913

“…electrical advertising is a picture medium … a colour medium of motion, of action, of life, of light, of compulsory attraction.”

‘Be It So: Electrical Advertising Has Only Begun’ Signs of the Times cited in William Leach Land of Desire.

“I learned not just to paint life in all its hundreds and thousand of reflections, but to paint it in a style that would reflect back those reflections.”

Christian Schad Lebensweg, 1929

Only a big city can offer thousands of reflections, and only there can they be reflected back. On the other hand: reflection is the basis of self-knowledge, as unfolding.

“But how is self-consciousness possible? Precisely because I oppose myself to myself; I sunder myself from myself, but in spite of this sundering I recognize myself as the same in the opposites.”

Hölderlin ‘Judgment and Being’

Additionally:

Paul Scheerbert: Lesabendio

Bruno Taut: Alpine Architecture

Franz Hessel: Spazieren in Berlin

The Poshkenonian and the Londoner

from “H. G. Wells” by Yevgeni Zamyatin, 1922

“The Poshkenonian reconciles himself to his wonders happening in twenty-seven lands and forty kingdoms away. The Londoner wants his wonders today, right now, right here. And therefore chooses the trusties road to his fairy tales – a road paved with astronomic, physical, and chemical formulas, a road rolled flat and solid by the cast-iron laws of the exact sciences. This may seem paradoxical at first – exact science and fairy tale, precision and fantasy. But it is so, and must be so. For a myth is always, openly or implicitly, connected with religion, and the religion of the modern city is precise science. Hence, the natural link between the newest urban myth, urban fairy tale, and science.”

Yevgeni Zamyatin H. G. Wells, 1922 reprinted in A Soviet Heretic translated by Mirra Ginsburg, University of Chicago Press, 1970 pp. 260-61, cited in H. G. Wells The Time Machine: Centennial Edition edited by John Lawton p. 90-1.

On the other hand:

Weber on Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic

Tawney on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

It may not be of the nature of man to overcome myth, merely displace it.