A central image in this project is the glass house. I don’t yet have a perfect picture of it, but I now realize I have been reading and writing and dreaming around it for years. I remember the first time I read Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the Paris arcades, how their iron and glass construction prefigured not only modern architecture but the experience of modernity itself, how they gave rise to the flâneur and, eventually, the department store (which monetized flânerie). How at the same time, the interior became cozier, was filled with art, was turned into an expression of the individual — bourgeois interiors that would be destroyed by the war at Benjamin’s doorstep. Benjamin said that every epoch “not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”
A House Made of Glass
A House Made of Glass
A House Made of Glass
A central image in this project is the glass house. I don’t yet have a perfect picture of it, but I now realize I have been reading and writing and dreaming around it for years. I remember the first time I read Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the Paris arcades, how their iron and glass construction prefigured not only modern architecture but the experience of modernity itself, how they gave rise to the flâneur and, eventually, the department store (which monetized flânerie). How at the same time, the interior became cozier, was filled with art, was turned into an expression of the individual — bourgeois interiors that would be destroyed by the war at Benjamin’s doorstep. Benjamin said that every epoch “not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”