“If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.”
― Joseph Campbell
Architectural Detail,
Dallas, Texas
Simply Look At Its Biggest Buildings
Tag Archives: Architecture
In Dialogue With Pain
“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Arts District
Dallas, Texas
“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Let It Unfurl
“You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Some Whirlwind Rotating Too Slow
“Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Chapel, Thanksgiving Square, Dallas, Texas
Broken And Reassembled Every Day, To Preserve An Elite Few
“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Downtown Dallas, Texas
The Restless Urge Of Autumn
“…as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
Mural, Exposition Park, Dallas, Texas
The Pain Of His Love
“Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring
“Large Marge”
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas
(click for larger version on Flickr)
Clearly messed with using Illustrator and Photoshop.
Where the Sun Sails And the Moon Walks
“Farewell,” they cried, “Wherever you fare till your eyries receive you at the journey’s end!” That is the polite thing to say among eagles.
“May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks,” answered Gandalf, who knew the correct reply.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit: The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again
Central Business District
New Orleans, Louisiana
This is the eagle on top of the Duggins Law Firm building in downtown New Orleans.
Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Downtown Dallas, Texas
Verticality at Sunset
“Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
― Robert Frost
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 