We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the journey of transforming raw material into meaningful creative expression amidst chaos.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe highlights the creative process as a progression from the raw material through its functionality to the final artistic work. This journey is aimed at establishing order and clarity in a world that often feels disordered and chaotic, reflecting the essential role of creativity in making sense of our surroundings.
In practice
In a speech at an art exhibition discussing the importance of creativity in addressing societal issues.
We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.
Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.
Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.
If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.
This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.
It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance.
I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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