Month: July 2017

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Athanor”” Oil on Canvas, 1991

Athanor is the painting executed in 1991 and exhibited in Berlin and Dresden. An evocative and controversial depiction of a Reichstag-like building as a brick oven makes Athanor – a monumental and a very important artwork that simultaneously presents a warning and a depiction of hope and potential to the German people. The title refers to the self-feeding furnace used by alchemists to keep the temperature during the process of turning lead into gold, and matter into spirit. This painting is a metaphor of the turbulent history of Germany, especially in regards to its art and culture. Created at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the painting evokes the memories of the destruction of Berlin in 1945, and the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Hermann Hesse: “Art Was a Union of the Father and Mother Worlds”

Photographer Unknown, (The Artist in His Studio)

“Art was a union of the father and mother worlds, of mind and blood. It might start in utter sensuality and lead to total abstraction; then again it might originate in pure concept and end in bleeding flesh. Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler’s trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master’s madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality.”

-Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

Lewis Carroll: “This Time It Vanished Quite Slowly”

Photographer Unknown, (The Grin), Folsom Street Fair

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.”

–Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce, Bahia House in Brazil

“Architecture is never using color, which is very strange. The Bahia House is full of color because color is important to transfer a meaning that is very close to the meaning of life — energy, color, life. For me, it’s very important to transfer all those things through architecture.” – Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce, “Up” Chair, 1969

Gaetano Peace is an Italian architect and a leading figure in contemporary industrial design. Mr. Pesce was born in La Pezia in 1939, and he grew up in Padua and Florence.  During his 50-year career, Mr. Pesce has worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design.

Slight Adjustment

Artist Unknown, (A Slight Adjustment), Computer Graphics, Animation Film Gifs

“There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing… They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.”
― Gail Godwin

Antonio Sant’ Elia

Antonio Sant’ Elia, Architectural Drawings and Computer Realizations

On October 10, 1916, Antonio Sant’Elia died fighting Austro-Hungarian forces at the eighth Battle of the Isonzo near Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast. The Italian architect was just 28 years old and left behind only one completed building, his Villa Elisi in Brunate, outside of Como.

Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis (1927) or watched Harrison Ford hunt replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is already familiar with Sant’Elia’s imaginative vision of the city of the future. His fantastical designs inspired the visual worlds of those two films, and even today, 100 years after his death, the future he envisioned still resonates.

The work Sant’Elia is best known for—Città Nuova or “New City” in Italian—came with machine-like superstructures, stepped skyscrapers interlaced with suspended walkways and highway overpasses. Designed between 1912 and 1914, it was intended to be the architectural remedy to Modernism’s perceived disconnect from lived experience.

Sant’Elia believed that the primary task of a city in the industrial age should be to facilitate movement in the most efficient way possible. For his Città Nuova, he proposed three levels of traffic according to vehicle and speed: pedestrian overpasses, roads for cars, and tracks for tramways. These, along with vertical elevator shafts, were the only traffic arteries in the city. Sant’Elia also proposed that the city exist in a state of continuous construction. “We must invent and rebuild the…city,” he wrote. “It must be like an immense, tumultuous, lively, noble work site, dynamic in all its parts.”