
"Here, then, is Le Corbusier describing the walks he took with his father, there in the Swiss Alps when, as a child, he was still Edouard Jenneret. 'We were constantly on summits', he says, 'the immense horizon was quite usual for us. When the sea of mist stretched away to infinity it was just like the real ocean - which I had never seen. It was the most magnificent sight.' The sea of mist below; the sky is above; one is, oneself, merely a point in an unarticulated immensity. A gravitationless field. A space that, defying the norms of the body, is verging on the almost purely abstract. There is nothing of the void about this magnificence. Instead this space inside this cosmic envelope is everywhere vectored, scored by ordinate and absscissa, marking out the numberless sites of an always potential Prägnanz. For form is possible everywhere." Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
“All landscapes can be described as hills and valleys, and time is said to flow. But geographically speaking, hills and valleys are maxima and minima whose definition presupposes the choice of gravitational vector. Such that the reading of a landscape, in a relation not to extrema but to inflections, leads us towards an experience of weightlessness.” - Bernard Cache, Terre Meuble |