america
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Worldly possessions, from cleansers and cars to homes and office buildings, are expendable. We have arranged things so that we think we must keep producing, consuming and producing again to survive. Our inventiveness has turned upon us to yield a population explosion, an automobile invasion, mass-education gigantism, television-age persuasion and a
... See moreJust a moment...
photography and the opacity of people - not thinking about who they are, what their story is, but just taking them at face value
“Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it.
We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what
enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance
piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's
unintentional. It arose independent of human
... See moreIt is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That's true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.
In the works of design and construction just reviewed, two qualities seem to stand out as tokens of promise. One is the continuing search for new aesthetic expression, in a contemporary idiom. The second is youthfulness. However old these structures may be, they embody a youthful spirit which has always been a prime ingredient in great design.
Ideal
... See more‘It changed 20th-century art’: revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans – in pictures
kerouac about robert frank’s americans