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FLW field guide reviewed
"The two-dimensional photograph can't begin to suggest what he put into the house for the observer," says Heinz, now an architect, author and photographer based in Mettawa. "The typical Wright house is meant to be walked by, driven by, lived in, not just seen from a single perspective-and that's where I think Wright's buildings are so different from everyone else's, and why photographs are often so deceptive. The photographer will take full advantage to bring you the best of the building, using wide-angle lenses, narrow cropping and so on, which alters your perception of it. Seeing it in person, you get so much more of the colors, textures and context of the building."
For example, photographs of Heinz's favorite Wright building -- the Robie House on the University of Chicago campus -- tend to make it look as if it were situated on a two- or three-acre lot, when in fact it's what Heinz calls "plunked down" on a corner and almost crowded by other structures. On the other hand, the same photographs don't convey the sheer majesty of the house's textured copper gutters, its massive brick piers and heavy limestone planters.
In his new book, Alain de Botton argues that human characteristics can be found everywhere in the inanimate world of objects
If we can judge the personality of objects from apparently minuscule features (a change of a few degrees in the angle of the rim can shift a wine glass from modesty to arrogance), it is because we first acquire this skill in relation to humans, whose characters we can impute from microscopic aspects of their skin tissue and muscle. An eye will move from implying apology to suggesting self-righteousness by way of a movement that is in a mechanical sense implausibly small. The width of a coin separates a brow that we take to be concerned from one that appears concentrated, or a mouth that implies sulkiness from one that suggests grief.
Codifying such infinitesimal variations was the life's work of the Swiss pseudoscientist Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose four-volume Essays on Physiognomy (1783) analysed almost every conceivable connotation of facial features and supplied line drawings of an exhaustive array of chins, eye sockets, foreheads, mouths and noses, with interpretative adjectives appended to each illustration.
Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture
hotel blue wave
nice accompanying film w/ "help! my condo is a big chuck of packing material and the hallways and apartments arnt marked" dream sequence.