Old Dog, New Tricks

Timbuktu, Paul Auster


pg37 "We all grew up with that junk, but now it's gone, isn't it, and who the hell cares anyway? Wallpaper, that's what it was. Background music. Zeitgeist dust on the furniture of the mind."

pg 79 "Before you go feeling too sorry for yourself, just remember that you're not the first dog who's ever been lost."

pg 103 "It might not have been perfect this place, but it had a lot to recommend it, and once you got used to the mechanics of the system, it no longer seemed so important that you were tethered to a wire all day. By the time you had been there for two and a half months, you even stopped caring that your name was sparky."



Surprisingly this book shed some light on one of our most frequent rants, who becomes one of "those" architects. Comfort, stuck, greed or perhaps the worst apathy?

“We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures
of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go
lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and
unknown by them”

Somerset Maugham



Image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkcotton/3736850281/sizes/l/

How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes

'For instance, Now I Lay Me Down to Eat is an entertaining tour of historical and cultural alternatives to the design problems of everyday life—dining, sleeping, sitting, cleansing, and bathing—and was "neither meant to spread dangerous heresies nor to undermine our birthright to make the worst of possible choices. Rather, it demonstrates by means of random examples that life can be less dull than we make it." By contrasting current western design solutions with earlier practices, he makes our current "solutions" look open to improvement, if not outright ridiculous and arbitrary. For instance, he asks why the standard American-style toilet is effectively a septic humidifier, and why American-style bathtubs are impossible for adults to lie down in and are as a matter of routine permanently fixed two or three feet away from a septic humidifier.
In 1944 Rudofsky and his wife Berta were invited to Black Mountain College for two weeks. Bernard gave two lectures on the sad state of clothing design, calling contemporary dress "anachronistic, irrational, impractical and harmful" and literally unsuitable. One of his lectures was called "How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes?".'

From Wikipedia's entry on Bernard Rudofsky, the author of 'Architecture without Architects'

hello? this london calling...

image via: postsecret