I recently recalled the introductory monologue from the documentary film Zizek! In it the eponymous philosopher and social critic takes a stab at his theory of the universe, arriving swiftly and entertainingly at “love is evil.” The contrarian path he takes to that end is his trademark, and I wanted to put it up to […]
Author: the.vonz.himanen
Ivan Himanen is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York City.
The following is an excerpt from Building Sights, a BBC TV series which features famous works of architecture around Europe and the US– and the architects, artists, writers, and celebrities who provide short essays describing them. The parallels struck me immediately. Replace “Glasgow School of Art” with “Cooper Union” in Bruce McLean’s essay, and […]
“My parents were driving from L.A. to New York, in a cross country move that would re-unite our family. The were in Arkansas, or at least my mom thinks so, when I texted her, “What’s it like there?” Her reply was, “Dark and Pretty Flat.” This piece is about an American attachment to a certain […]
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Solitude
EXHIBIT A: Andrei Tarkovsky, “Learn to love solitude” EXHIBIT B: Louis CK, “Why I hate cell phones” EXHIBIT C: Gaston Bachelard, “Daydreaming” “…if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought […]
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Burp The Baby
Try as I mightI can’t burp the babywho won’t stop eatingPaper.Maybe insteadI’ll teach it to vomitand stop wasting my bottledInk.
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The Center Must Hold
First, Rousseau argued it…. Then Kant laid it out…. Then Nietzsche declared it…. Then Yeats sang it…. Then Picasso painted it…. Then Antonioni shot it…. Then Tschumi built it…. Then Bolano practically drilled it into our heads…. It is the primary motif of modernism. It is the concept of decentralization. Since the Enlightenment, the shift in our mode of thinking has […]
The purest amateurs require nothing more to operate than the purest excitement and love for a particular subject. The Satellite Collective can strike the balance between professional and amateur dedication. Its goal to envelop multiples contains that love-driven quality which is so often lost when artists find first success. This entire show is reflective of […]
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Flirting with Orchestration
Architects are extant Renaissance Men. Vassily L. As little as I hate to contradict or in any way undermine the prevailing layman’s impressions of architects and their profession… there is one niggling stereotype concerning one key task…. While not misconstruing this task, the stereotype does vastly shortchange it. It is so commonly allowed to subsist […]
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Utopia’s Paradox
I sat in on Rod Knox’s Utopia-inspired seminar yesterday with Noah. It was the semester’s final meeting, where closing remarks were made, and one point came up which needs recording. There is a paradox at the center of one of history’s archetypal utopias: that of Thomas More. On the one hand is the obvious point– […]
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A New Verticality
The first question is: are humans endowed with limits– are we endowed with yokes? The answer is yes, and there is one specific yoke which I wish to highlight, one of a highly fundamental nature. It is horizontality. And it’s getting to be a burden. Our sense of physical reality is shaped almost across the […]