muir me lineara: addieplum: Well’s original office concrete wall - quote (via lavardera) just learned that malcom wells died. i was fascinated with this wall and the quote for most of my pre-internet youth (i had no idea what it meant, or who he was, or how to find out!). he was a visionary architect. I drive by this every day on my way to work, and never realized it was an architect’s office. Fittingly, the wall faces a particularly congested intersection, and as a result I’ve spent a lot of time over the years pondering what the quote meant (and what zoning ordinances it must violate.) Our country’s last 5-star general was also concerned with open space preservation, was my best guess. Since the architect who thought it was worth putting up on a wall died, I guess now’s a good time to research the quote. Via Google News, excerpts from Bradley’s 1959 Armed Forces Day address: “And in such matters as rockets and missilery, I shall disqualify myself — except, perhaps, to say that mankind has discovered an exceedingly difficult way to take a dim view of the world in which he lives. “We need not ascend into space to perceive the dimness, It is much too close at hand. It is manifested in the disappearance of our nature preserves, in the debasement of our countryside, in the pizza palaces and highway honkeytonks with which we have littered the land.” Bradley counseled against leaving to the nation’s children a legacy of billion dollar roads leading nowhere except to congested places like those they left behind. “As the pressures of civilization mount, it would seem to me that we probably have as much need for part-time Thoreaus as we have to for full-time nuclear scientists.” So there’s that.

muir me

lineara:

addieplum:

Well’s original office concrete wall - quote (via lavardera)

just learned that malcom wells died. i was fascinated with this wall and the quote for most of my pre-internet youth (i had no idea what it meant, or who he was, or how to find out!). he was a visionary architect.

I drive by this every day on my way to work, and never realized it was an architect’s office. Fittingly, the wall faces a particularly congested intersection, and as a result I’ve spent a lot of time over the years pondering what the quote meant (and what zoning ordinances it must violate.)

Our country’s last 5-star general was also concerned with open space preservation, was my best guess.

Since the architect who thought it was worth putting up on a wall died, I guess now’s a good time to research the quote. Via Google News, excerpts from Bradley’s 1959 Armed Forces Day address:

“And in such matters as rockets and missilery, I shall disqualify myself — except, perhaps, to say that mankind has discovered an exceedingly difficult way to take a dim view of the world in which he lives.

“We need not ascend into space to perceive the dimness, It is much too close at hand. It is manifested in the disappearance of our nature preserves, in the debasement of our countryside, in the pizza palaces and highway honkeytonks with which we have littered the land.”

Bradley counseled against leaving to the nation’s children a legacy of billion dollar roads leading nowhere except to congested places like those they left behind.

“As the pressures of civilization mount, it would seem to me that we probably have as much need for part-time Thoreaus as we have to for full-time nuclear scientists.”

So there’s that.

Notes

  1. addieplum posted this