#transformation – @nickkahler on Tumblr

Working in the arts is about transformation, and transformation isn't a matter of letting go of the past, it's a matter of remembering, it's adapting, and it's modifying, but it's not a break.

Martin Brody, “On Pendleton Hall Rehabilitation at Wellesley College by Kieran Timberlake,” 2014

#martin brody #pendleton hall #rehabilitation #wellesley college #kieran timberlake #design #past #architecture #memory #modification #adaptation #break #transformation #change #art #arts

nickkahler

Changes of shape, new forms are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite. Inspire me, O gods (it is you who have even transformed my art), and spin me a thread from the world's beginning down to my own lifetime, in one continuous poem.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE

#favorite #inspiration #warhouse project #change #shape #form #theme #spirit #quote #lit #literature #classics #recitation #gods #art #transformation #ovid #metamorphoses #beginning #lifetime #poem #poetry

nickkahler

Beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.

David Brooks, “When Beauty Strikes,” 2016

#quote #art #beauty #big #transformation #thing #metamorphosis #civilization #goal #worldview #humanism #routine #education #emotion #connection #eternal

nickkahler

I was enamored with the idea of how what seemed broken, discarded, useless was transformed into a meaningful gesture. … We are conditioned to think that what is broken is lost, or useless or a setback, and so when we set out with big ambitions we don’t necessarily recognize what the next graduation is supposed to look like. Unlearning everything you learned in college is just an exercise in learning to recognize how the fragments and small bits lead to something that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Teresita Fernandez, “Commencement Address at VCU,” 2013

#ostracon #fragment #teresita fernández #commencement #address #lecture #vcu #art #idea #broken #useless #transformation #recognition #learning #college #university #exercise #sum #parts #quote

nickkahler

Follies as ruins, or as imitations of ruins, became the vehicles for such instant nostalgia encouraged by historicist regrets and supported by consumerist atavism. Here the Baroque cult of ruins was transformed from a simply relished fragmentation, a sense of the transience of history and the mortality of man into a ‘history lesson.’

Anthony Vidler, Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape, 1983

nickkahler

Architectural reenactments … study moments of architectural history through performing acts of architecture, undertaking large-scale design-and-build speculation based upon evidence found in action and the transformation of material as well as in text, drawing, and photograph. In analysis, projection, and making, these reenactments propose an understanding of architecture as action and construction as a verb, and seek to engage the nonverbal discourse of the making hand.

Steven Mannell, Architectural Reenactments at 1:1 Scale, 2013

nickkahler

The Bilbao effect has given rise to the Bilbao fallacy: the tendency, among politicians, boosters, and investors, to claim that a single expensive building will somehow alter a city’s identity, even though such transformations are more the exception than the rule.

Simon Lewsen, "What Good Can a Gehry Do?" 2014

#bilbao effect #fallacy #tendency #boosterism #investor #expensive #identity #rule #transformation #city #simon lewsen #architecture

nickkahler

The size and shape of the body don't matter, what matters is what the body contains. I take that idea in many different directions, such as the vibration of that material. Ideas are one more of our vibrations as we speak and the words fill space and stand frozen in the air; it's a way that we can transform into something physical.

Jaume Plensa, "Lecture at Davidson College," Davidson, NC, 2014

#jaume plensa #quote #size #shape #body #matter #container #idea #vibration #material #space #frozen space #freeze #transformation #physical

nickkahler

The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of "cultivating" the site. ... This inscription ... has a capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time. Through this layering into the site the idiosyncrasies of place find their expression without falling into sentimentality.

Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism," 1983

nickkahler

M.C. Escher, Cycle, 1938

#m.c. escher #cycle #movement #stair #pattern #transformation #geometry #art #etching #drawing #fantasy

nickkahler

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time!

Ovid, "Prologue" from Metamorphoses, 8 CE (via etext)

#ovid #prologue #metamorphoses #quote #lit #literature #transformation #god #immortal #change #song #strain #day #earth #time #soul #sing #form #body #strange #new #antiquity

nickkahler

Go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle. Pick out any shape in the process and pin up or place on the canvas an object, a smell, a sound or a colour that came to your mind in association with the shape.

Yoko Ono, "Painting to Be Constructed in Your Head" from Grapefruit, 1964

#yoko ono #painting #transformation #construction #head #grapefruit #shepe #object #smell #sound #color #shape #mind #canvas #circle

nickkahler

This passage from an era in which the construction of infrastructures was paramount to our era—in which emphasis is given solely to developing the performances of vehicles and projectiles—is far from being overestimated … As can be seen, military space is undergoing a radical transformation. The ‘conquest of space’ by military and scientific personnel is no longer, as it once was, the conquest of the human habitat but the discovery of an original continuum that has only a distant link to geographical reality.

Paul Virilio, “Military Space” in Bunker Archeology, 1997

nickkahler

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.

Jean-Paul Sartre, "On Refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature," 1964

#institution #jean-paul sartre #nobel prize #literature #philiosophy #writer #transformation #identity #prize