“Useless, meaningless statistics flood the attention of the viewer. Sportscasters call them ‘graphics’ in an effort to suggest that the information, graphically presented, is a vital supplement to the action of the game. For example: ‘Since 1984, the Buffalo Bills have won only two games in which they were four points ahead with less than …
Aimless Info
“Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves” [Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 63].
A Two-Way Street
Postman speaks of “one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo” [Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 5].
Why the Floor Plans Were All So Similar
“So Gropius falls upon the thorns of life; he bleeds. And his architecture is based upon a sociology of human relations which in turn rests on the exigencies of keeping a number of affairs going at once. This is the human matrix out of which the Wohnmaschine grows (the speech of this name was written …
The Cross At the Intersection of Heaven and Earth
“The flat roof was an article of faith for the Bauhauser, one whose religious dimensions would be exposed if the flat roof indeed did leak, which, as everyone knows, it indeed does. Once the impracticality of the flat roof becomes apparent, its antitranscendental meaning becomes obvious. When it comes to modern architecture, the flat roof …
The World With A Flat Roof
“In the limited vocabulary of the architect, there are only a few terms available to express an attitude toward the transcendent, and the roof is one of the more important. The flat roof was an article of faith with the modern architect, no matter what the practical consequences . . . Whether it leaked or …
Trying to Destroy the West
“But, like the Oedipus Complex, Bauhaus architecture, moral relativism, contraception, deficit spending, the automobile, and cubism, saturation bombing was used as the twentieth century’s revenge on the cultural legacy of the West. It was an attempt to use the power of the West in order to destroy the West.” [E. Michael Jones, Living Machines (San …
Machines for Living In
“By the time the rhetoric of modern architecture had been assembled into a modern ideology—let’s say by 1925—the form and the structure of the modern apartment, which was to replace the more traditional one-family dwelling as the preferred dwelling of socialist man, had become full of sociological meaning. Instead of man’s home being his castle, …
The Heart of the Problem
“Daix here puts his finger on a pattern that will recur throughout Picasso’s life. Realism is the visual language of love; when the affair turns sour, Picasso turns away from the object and reverts to Cubist distortions, which convey simultaneously lust, rage, and the desire to mutilate and destroy” [E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns (San …
Rationalized Lust
“The evidence, however, is all in, and the verdict is clear: modernity is rationalized lust . . . . Critical parlance notwithstanding, there is no postmodern age, just thinkers following the ever-constricting ruts of sexual liberation in increasingly compulsive, increasingly self-negating ways. If there is ever to be a postmodern era, it will have to …