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| Madelon Vriesendorp, Rem Koolhaas. Welfare Palace Hotel, 1975 |
We have only this life to live. Selected Essays by Jean Paul-Sartre. 1939-1975. Jean Paul-Sartre. New York: NYRB Classics, 2013
"To the man who strolled through New York before 1930, the highrise buildings towering over the city were the first signs of an architecture destined to radiate over the entire country. Skyscrapers were then living things. Today, for a Frenchman arriving from Europe, they are already mere historical monuments, witnesses to a bygone age. They still rise up into the sky but my spirit does not soar with them, and the New Yorkers pass by at their feet without so much as a glance. I cannot think of them without melancholy; they speak of an age when we believed in peace. They are already a little run-down; tomorrow, perhaps, they will be demolished. At any rate, to build them took a faith we no longer possess."Resident Alien: The New York Diaries. Quentin Crisp. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1996
"When I was young, no one who visited Manhattan talked about anything but its skyscrapers. Now every city has skyscrapers."
Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York. Lewis Mumford. Ed. Robert Wojtowicz. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998
"The aesthetics of skyscrapers have long passed the point of diminishing returns; there is nothing to say about a new skyscrapers tower except that it is another skyscraper tower."
The Eiffel Tower and Other Myths. Roland Barthes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979
"What is astonishing about the skyscraper is that it does not astonish. When we actually see one (but do we ever see one, actually) the feeling it inspires is: why not?"
Capital
Kenneth Goldsmith
Verso Books, 2015
Capital
Kenneth Goldsmith
Verso Books, 2015