Nicholas Fox Weber > Quotes

“[The Bauhauslers] were joined in their will to replace outmoded values for everyone, rather than to retreat to alternate lives for themselves alone. They were not revolutionaries who wanted to topple the existing framework, but pioneers who sought to transform it. The Bauhauslers respected what was best in the existing German culture; they did not unilaterally disparage all its traditions. They wanted to forge connections, to see their ways accepted and integrated. (362)”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism

“Artists who shared (Paul) Klee's fundamental beliefs, such as (Piet) Mondrian, were searching for universal truths, often derived from nature and having "all-mighty power." For some, a traditional notion of God was part of this; for others, it was of no consequence. What mattered was not the precise character of the object of worship, but the shared belief in its superiority to the cult of self. (104)”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism

“Observation precedes vision.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Albers celebrated the way that color and line have no truth of their own; what matters is their perception, which depends on what is adjacent to them.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“To be true to the Bauhaus is not to follow a “style.” It is to maintain impeccable standards, consider every nuance, and make successful functioning the priority.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“The panoply of consumers has iPhones or the lower-priced clones not because of what they represent but because of what they do.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“That he produced the quintessential Bauhaus object is evidence that the ideals of the school were as they purported to be—capable of transcending all that was European, going beyond what was unique to a single culture, and spreading across the map of the entire world.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Anni and Josef Albers’s house was the whitest place imaginable.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“The iPhone can have a way of presumptuously insisting that it is better than you are. If you want to have it fixed or get an accessory for it, you are required to go into one of the horrid stores with metallic bad-breath air, and then inevitably wait for two hours after being told it would only be ten minutes. The salespeople act as if they have everything you need, but enjoy concealing it from you while you have to figure out what it is. What”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Nothing is crowded, although infinite functions are available.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“The Bauhaus fights against the cheap substitute, inferior workmanship, and the dilettantism of the handicrafts, for a new standard of quality work.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Once you had a solid base and sufficient knowledge, and respect for the essential facts and real needs of life, nothing rivaled careful observation and contemplation fired by a passion for the invention of new means for experiencing life.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Like a clap of thunder, at a high decibel level yet with a suddenly squeaky voice, as high as it was loud, with his flying white hair in the light of the slide projector and therefore magnified a hundredfold as filaments gone haywire over the exquisitely painted van Eyck, Professor Schapiro shouted out, “He’s pissing! He’s pissing!”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Self-expression was to be avoided. The essence of the Bauhaus design teaching that helped form Jony Ive was that what mattered in drawing technique and color exploration were the properties of the components and methods, not a personal narrative.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“What counted was focus, paring down: the form of the Parthenon as opposed to all the ornament and complexities of wedding-cake architecture.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Now, what made something work well was in and of itself the core of its aesthetic quality.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“The Bauhaus was an attitude, not a style or a time period.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“For those who see austerity and affordability and lack of chic as vital elements of the forms of beauty that last, the betrayal of those values is here.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Then there is Plato on human happiness: “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Bauhaus. And there were many other occasions when he praised the Bauhaus by name for having simplified and humanized the material objects of everyday living.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“To reduce apparent details was to increase emotional and physical ease.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“In essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; it is for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of shows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink….The mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself….And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. —Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in Moby-Dick; or the Whale (1851)”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“At the Bauhaus, Josef Albers wrote a friend for whose apartment he was designing furniture, “An empty room is always the best.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“If a glass tabletop was half a centimeter thick, its support and legs precisely doubled or tripled that measure. The iPhone also depended on the exact relation of proportions, so that a sense of rightness enters the user.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“iPhones are not the Elgin Marbles, or Stonehenge, or anything else where part of the miracle is that it lasts.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“They revered good form, in behavior and objects alike, in accord with the ideas of Plato, the Bauhaus’s intellectual god.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“For Josef, the goal of art was to reveal new ways of seeing, “to open eyes.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“Marcel Breuer’s armchair, with its horsehair fabric stretched taut on an armature of tubular chrome, is one of the Bauhaus designs that has remained a classic.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“In 1934, when Josef Albers designed, at the request of the architect Philip Johnson, the cover for the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition, brandishing a dramatic photo of an industrial ball bearing, Josef rejected the initial proofs from the printer, demanding that his name as designer be removed if its flaw was not corrected. Johnson wrote back contritely. He assured Josef that the margin between the edge of the paper and the powerful image of that glistening, perfectly functioning machine part would be reduced to a precise three millimeters in accord with Josef’s original design. Johnson understood the gravity of the mistake and the importance of measurements.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

“And all of them were obsessed with the appearances of the objects that served their quotidian needs.”
― Nicholas Fox Weber, Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design