No Design Without Discipline

"The parts that are essential are the cause of beauty, the parts introduced by necessity cause every license, the parts added by caprice cause every fault." Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture

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To most observers, the underlying premises of the earlier nineteenth-century approach, called "assimilation," were twofold: French cultural predominance in language, laws, and even architectural style...

Gwendolyn Wright

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Most important, the effort to replace certain groups' actual involvement in political life with a purely visual expression of their cultural autonomy demonstrates one of the ways in which historicist design, in many different settings, can be used for political power.

Gwendolyn Wright

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Walter Gropius, “Principles of Bauhaus Production”

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Three major lines of argumentation seem to inform the rejection of coziness first, an argument in which modernity is defined in "cold" terms such as purity, functionality, transparency, openness, hygiene, second an argument in which modernity is understood in terms of social equality, leading to the demand to abolish coziness, for the sake of the proletarization of culture and the emancipation of women, and third, an understanding of modernity dominated by a heroic idea of progress that necessitates liberation of man from symbiotic and constraining structures.

Karina Van Herck

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Karina Van Herck, “'Only Where Comfort Ends, Does Humanity Begin': On the 'Coldness' of Avant-Garde Architecture in the Weimar Period," in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (New York: Routledge, 2005), 124

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Henry van de Velde, Decoratieve plantencompositie, c. 1892–93. Pastel on paper, 47.8 × 50.5 cm. Collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

"The bulky orange fruit of the image has been compared to an engorged breast; I see it as part of a rubber vine swollen with milky latex. The visible stem and gourd resemble closely those with coarse skin and “savory pulp” that writers said the Congo natives enjoyed. And the sinuous cord and adhering wraparound, “dividing and subdividing,” echo the “tendon”-like firmness and multiple, and multiplying, curves of the Congo forests that contemporaries noted were draped with the vines that were the source of the wondrous “caoutchouc.”"

-Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I

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Severed hands in the Congo. Photograph from Edmund D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo (London, 1904).

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By 1908, after eight years of acrimonious debate in the Belgian Parliament, the nation was forced to annex King Leopold’s realm, finally acknowledging the devastation wrought by a “red rubber” regime of forced labor, invasion terror, hostage taking, and hand severing, the last the product of a vicious accounting system which required that native troops, whose ammunition was carefully rationed, present Belgian post commanders with a severed hand for every villager killed as proof that they had not wasted bullets.

Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I

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A postcard of Berkley Square. In the late 19th century, 50 Berkley Square was declared the "Most Haunted House in London." 

"Haunted-house stories broadcast the urban deformation of the domestic ideal."

-Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories

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A man's house is his castle.

Edward Coke on Domestic English Culture and Architecture

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White articulated here what we will see to be a persistent topos: England as a nation whose collective identity consisted in a secure isolation of its members from one another.

Sharon Marcus on William H.White, Apartment Stories

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Albert Mansions, London, UK

Developed by Philip Flower and designed by James Knowles. 1867-1870.

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Holyoke Scenes

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Etienne-Louis Boullee, Cenotaph for Isaac Newton "The images that they [buildings] offer to our senses should arouse in us feelings analogous to the use to which the building is put." 

-Etienne-Louis Boullee

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Here’s some further examples of architecture designs from the French Revolution by the designers mentioned in the Auslander reading I found online. The images helped - I can definitely better see the “utopian” aesthetic mentioned in the article. 

1. Etienne-Louis Boulee - Portes de villes triomphales 

2. Jean-Jacques Lequeu - Orthographie du tombeau de Porsenna roi d’Etrurie, appellé le labyrinthe de Toscane (1792).

3. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Alternate spiral tower version for the exterior of the Temple of Death (1795)

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Tricoloured Cockade on Phrygian Cap

"A national costume will accomplish the goal, a goal which is so important to a free people, to announce, or to be reminded of oneself everywhere and at all moments."

Leora Auslander, Regeneration Through the Everyday? Clothing, Architecture, and Furniture in Revolutionary Paris

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Opinions on Architecture”