“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Fort Worth, Texas
“If your reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (…) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.”
― Richard Serra
Hall Texas Sculpture Walk with the Wyly Theater, Dallas Arts District
Mosaic – Sonia King – VisionShift
“this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Wells Fargo Tower in Fort Worth, Texas. Click on image for a higher resolution image in Flickr.
I have always been fascinated with the view of skyscrapers, looking up, from the sidewalk beneath. They cease to be buildings and are converted into insane abstract constructions.
Love/Hate – what amazing examples of man’s imagination, ambition, and effort – yet they are also the least human of buildings. From the street they are nothing but glass walls with tiny openings guarded by armed guards. Man is not welcomed into his own creations.
(title paraphrased from High-Rise, by J. G. Ballard. I wrote about it here).
“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Chapel Ceiling
Thanksgiving Square
Dallas, Texas
“She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Hyatt Regency
Dallas, Texas
“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. ”
― William Shakespeare, Henry V
Pegasus, Omni Hotel, Reunion Tower
Dallas, Texas
“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
Sculpture – Happy Again, 2014, Steel, by Michelle O’Michael
Building – Wyly Theater, Dallas, Texas
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Dallas City Hall
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
—-John Berryman, The Dream Songs
(click to enlarge)
Magnolia Building
Dallas, Texas
“It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.”
― Oscar Wilde
Downtown Dallas,
Texas
Bill Chance 