John Perivolaris > Recent Status Updates

'Our life is furniture, though the table doesn't exist / Off which master and servant may eat and imagine / themselves equals.'

'It's impossible to overestimate the importance of transport in the development of British towns and cities'

'It's impossible to overestimate the importance of transport in the development of British towns and cities.'

'Only a fraction of the world's concrete is touched by architects, but their impact on the medium has been disproportionate to the very slight control that they have over the totality of what is built the world over.'

'Compared to the all-or-nothing attitude towards the use of concrete that was characteristic of the 1950s '60s, now it is common to find the concrete only partially exposed and occupying a more subtle and ambiguous role in the total ensemble.'

'It is much more rare than it was to see concrete being used to demonstrate technical innovation.'

Those who, like Gio Ponti', have confidently asserted that concrete is 'colorless' have merely been lazy with their eyes. That is why I choose to photograph concrete in colour.

'For many mid-twentieth century architects, the quality of architecture lay not in the thing, but in the idea.'

'The anaesthetic of concrete deserves closer attention.'

'The immediate architectural reason for the re-emergence of concrete in the early 1990s was as a reaction to post-modernism.'

'Whatever critics thought of the results, the New Photography freed photography from pictorial ism, and in this the subject matter provided by new concrete structures had been of service.'

'Concrete and human flesh, two ideal surfaces to demonstrate the medium of photography'

'Although the story of the appropriation of industrial structures by modern architecture is now well known, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was through photographs that the transaction took place: it was the images of structures, not the structures themselves, that sustained the argument.'

'In reinforced concrete's success, photography played an important, and in some people's opinion, indispensable role.'

'Of all the occupations involved in building, architects are the group for whom there is most doubt whether concrete has enhanced, or weakened, their position.'

'Frequently the province of low-status immigrant labour - Italian in the U. S., Irish or West Indian in Britain, Algerian or Portuguese in France - concrete is low down in the hierarchy of building trades.'

'Otherwise denied the opportunity to refer to history, the memorial is the one class of construction where concrete can deal with what convention forbids it to address, namely the past.'

'Concrete helped rescue the memorial from its archaic and obsolete status, and make it of the present.'

'Some of the concrete memorials of the post-war era bear an uncanny physical similarity to works of minimal art, despite their apparently opposite aesthetic intentions.'

'Concrete has become the default material for memorials.'

'There are signs this twentieth-century religion's love affair with concrete is waning.'

'The extensive use of concrete all across Europe during the Second World War for defensive fortifications and bombproof shelters [...] altogether changed the meaning of concrete, overlaying its previous association with progress, with other properties, of aggression and of protection.'

'The synthetic nature of reinforced concrete made it a symbol for Lenin's view of the "indissoluble unity" of the proletariat, formed through the process of revolution.'

'The sense that reinforced concrete offered a means to draw people closer together.'

'Concrete is political in many senses, but it has been particularly identified with the politics of the left.'

'It is the "natural" effect of concrete to unite all nations, and put each in relation to the other.'

'German National Socialist ideology identified steel with America, while concrete provided a more völkisch alternative'

'As with the argument that says a place is a place in so far as it is both global and local, maybe what makes a place of concrete concrete is its connection to both.'

'When in the 1950s '60s people started looking for arguments against the international style of modern architecture, the interpretation of concrete started to change and the possibility of regional or national differences began to be given more weight.'

'Following the First World War, the universality of reinforced concrete became entangled with architectural aesthetics and the pursuit of an "international style".'