#imagination – @nickkahler on Tumblr

'I came here to escape the slave’s atmosphere of home,' he had written, 'to find freedom, to liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage and set it ‘whirling off into the widening gyre’ (Yeats) and what did I find? It was incapable of flight. It was some bird you had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to come out!' The next words were underscored twice. 'I have no imagination. I have no talent. I can’t create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn’t you kill that too? Woman, why did you pinion me?

Flannery O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill,” 1958

nickkahler

The challenge for bank architects seems increasingly to be about designing around kinds of crime that have yet to be imagined.

Julia Ingalls, “To Design a Secure Bank, Ask a Bank Robber,” 2016

#julia ingalls #bank #quote #architecture #design #crime #unknown #known #imagination #future-proofing

nickkahler

Now picture a valley, dense with pine and tapering cypress, ... there, in a sacred corner, in a cave surrounded by woodland, owing nothing to human artifice. Nature had used her talent to imitate art: she had molded the living rock of porous tufa to form the shape of a rugged arch.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE

nickkahler

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Halls of Extinction in Cosmos, 2015

#neil degrasse tyson #hall #extinction #cosmos #spacetime #architecture #design #space #imagination #earth #history #museum #life #science

nickkahler

Artists have their biggest social impact when they achieve it obliquely. If true racial reconciliation is achieved in this country, it will be through the kind of deep spiritual and emotional understanding that art can foster. You change the world by changing peoples’ hearts and imaginations.

David Brooks, “When Beauty Strikes,” 2016

#david brooks #beauty #artist #society #impact #oblique #reconciliation #race #racial #spirit #deep #emotion #understanding #art #change #world #heart #imagination

nickkahler

It's beyond time for a new generation of art historians not only to open up the system and let art be the garden that it is, home to exotic blooms of known and unknown phenomena. It's time to work against this system. We can't say painting is dead just as women and artist of color started to show up in art history. Our art history has stiffened into an ideology that clear-cuts a medium, pronounces it dead (like undertakers) and moves on like conquistadors to the next stage. The idea that art has an overall goal of advancing or perfecting its terms and techniques is made up. Imagined. Idiotic. Except to those benefiting from this intellectual fundamentalism. Someday, people will look back at this phase of art history the way we look back at manifest destiny and colonialism.

Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016

nickkahler

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire, “On Love,” c. 1740

#voltaire #love #canvas #nature #imagination #quote #fabric #making #thinking

nickkahler

Although they do not always lend themselves to the kinds of metrics used to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math, the arts and humanities play a vital role in the educational development of students. They keep and convey our cultural heritage while opening us up to other societies and civilizations around the globe. They help us explore what it means to be human, including both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions. If science and technology help us to answer questions of “what” and “how,” the arts and humanities give us ways to confront the intangible, to contemplate the “why,” to imagine, to create. If ever there were a time to nurture those skills in our young people, it is now, when our nation’s future may depend on our creativity and our ability to understand and appreciate the cultures around the world as much as on our proficiency in reading and math.

David J. Skorton, “On the Arts and Humanities,” 2007

#david j. skorton #cornell university #art #humanities #education #imagination #creation #skill #youth #culture #proficiency #question #humanity #existence #quote #civilization #socirty #technology #science

nickkahler

In art, what matters is curiosity, which in many ways is the currency of art. Whether we understand an artwork or not, what helps it succeed is the persistence with which it makes us curious. Art sparks and maintains curiosities, thereby enlivening imaginations, jumpstarting critical and independent thinking, creating departures from the familiar, the conventional, the known. An artwork creates a horizon: its viewer perceives it but remains necessarily distant from it. The aesthetic experience is always one of speculation, approximation and departure. It is located in the distance that exists between art and life.

Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007

nickkahler

Claude Parent, Open Limit, 2011

#claude parent #open #limit #drawing #landscape #architecture #landscape architecture #land art #geometry #fantasy #imagination #frame #nature #man #horizon #union

nickkahler

Claude Parent, La Maison Geuse, 2001

#claude parent #drawing #architecture #house #tone #pencil #opening #imagination #art

nickkahler

Different types of readers can be distinguished: 1. the imagined reader: the author's assumption of the actual reader, 2. the intended reader: the author's conception of the implicit reader, 3. the explicit reader: the fictitious reader who is addressed in the actual text, 4. the implicit reader: the reader as determined by the character of the text, 5. the ideal reader: the most competent reader for a given text, 6. the actual reader (like you when you read this!), 7. the archereader: an archetypical abstraction from a number of actual readers.

Cornelius Holtorf, “The Reception Theory of Monuments,” c. 1995

nickkahler

Everywhere we can imagine architectural spaces when you put the people inside or outside. [First], it looks like some scales … and then it looks like architecture. And then, sometimes, it is really creating unexpected spaces, unexpected relationship.

Sou Fujimoto, “Found Architecture,” 2015

#sou fujimoto #art #architecture #space #scale #relationship #quote #design #imagination

nickkahler

Sometimes the solution to the forces at play is an economic building; sometimes you need to focus people’s imagination with architecture. [The challenge is] to analyze in a coldblooded way what particular equation is required. The success, in conventional terms, is less guaranteed — you have less control over the project. But that’s thinking in artistic terms, if you consider your building a piece of art.

Alejandro Aravena, “On Social Architecture,” 2016

#alejandro aravena #quote #architecture #solution #play #economy #imagination #challenge #equation #control #artistic #art #focus #design

nickkahler

By the very simple device of building our new buildings in the Tudor Gothic style we seem to have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton. … by merely putting those lines in our buildings which point every man’s imagination to the historical traditions of learning in the English-speaking race.

Woodrow Wilson, “On Collegiate Gothic,” 2013 (via atlantic)

#woodrow wilson #quote #device #tudor #gothic #style #time #history #imagination #race #racism #english #line #building #point #simple #age #princeton #princeton university #age value

nickkahler

Far from being frivolous exercises as the name implies, follies have always been fragments that do not depend upon decoration, but follow the principles of good building and allow the imagination to elaborate on the simplest forms - the column, the hut, the grotto.

B.J. Archer, Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape, 1983

#b.j. archer #folly #frivolous #exercise #name #quote #decoration #fragment #principle #grotto #form #column #hut #imagination #architecture #landscape #design

nickkahler reblogged

mythologyofblue

This is what I see: a grain of wheat in the hand of a small boy barefoot on the unnamed roads, sleeping in the dream another is having. An oud, a violin, a guitar, a mirror of dew, a man about to undress, a woman staring. A traveler returning everywhere and forgetfulness stealing from itself. Maktoub, the Moor says, we hold clouds in our mouth and imagine God in our breath.

Nathalie Handal, “The Moor,” 2012 (via mythofblue)

#nathalie handal #moor #quote #see #grain #wheat #oud #violin #guitar #music #voyeur #stare #travel #steal #god #poem #poetry #breath #imagination #cloud #mouth #lit #literature