Adolf Loos
[1870 - 1933 ]
Born in Czechoslovakia, Practiced
in Austria Adolf Loos was an architect
who became more famous for his ideas than for his buildings. He believed
that reason should determine the way we build, and he opposed the decorative
Art Nouveau movement. In Ornament & Crime and other essays, Loos described
the suppression of decoration as necessary for regulating passion. Adolf Loos was born to a stonemason
in Czechoslovakia, but -- to his mother's grief -- he refused to continue
the family business. Instead, he studied architecture in Dresden and then
went to the United States, where he worked as a mason, a floor-layer,
and a dishwasher. Loos was impressed by the efficiency of American architecture,
and he admired the work of Louis Sullivan. Eventually Loos found work
with the architect Carl Mayreder, and in 1898 he opened his own practice
in Vienna. He earned little money, but he lived comfortably because his
customers often paid their fee with goods. He also started his own school
of architecture, and taught the Raumplan idea of simple, functional building.
Two of his students, Richard Neutra and R. M. Schindler, went on to great
careers in the United States. Josephine Baker house (model,
never built) THE GLASS BEES A Novel By Ernst
Junger Translated from the German by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer;
New York Review of Books: 224 pp., $12.95 paper By BRUCE STERLING It beggars belief that this
novel was first published in 1957. Its speculations on technology and
industry are so prescient as to be uncanny. Not merely "ahead of
its time," this book is supremely anachronistic. Junger outlived Imperial Germany,
Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany and even the Federal Republic, finally seeing
his country become Germany all over again. This clearly tired him far
less than it would most mortals. The greatest strength of "The Glass
Bees" is its Olympian disdain for the mere exigencies of time. We're
never told the year. Our narrator never gives us his age. The slithering narrative perfectly
suits the spotted career of its hero, the gallant cavalryman Captain Richard.
He tells us of his boyish cowboy-and-Indian games. His formative years
at officer school. The ambivalence of his married life. He often alludes
to merciless wars which somehow blend seamlessly into one another. As early as Chapter One, "robots"
enter the tale. The ageless Captain Richard (who grows markedly more sinister
as he grows more open and confiding with the reader) needs a new job.
He needs one pretty badly. He's even willing to forsake his knightly pretensions
for a day job in high-tech. Robots as Junger portrays them
have nothing to do with the common standards of 1957. These robots don't
clank, beep or take any orders, Isaac Asimov-style. On the contrary: these
microminiature, computerized, bug-like automatons are straight out of
the MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine, circa 1994. Uncannily anticipating
the scattered structure of the Internet, Junger's glass bees "resembled
less a hive than an automated telephone exchange." ...... osv. Studs Terkel Louis (Studs) Terkel was born
in New York City in 1912. When he was eight, he moved to Chicago where
his mother ran a hotel. He was shaped by the Great Depression and the
international socialist movements in the 1930s and 40s, out of which Terkel
developed his interest in investigating "the common people"
who infuse American society with vitality and creativity. Terkel's famous
interviews arose out of his job as a disk jockey when he sometimes interviewed
jazzmen and folk singers. His radio program was carried on WFMT in Chicago
for forty-five years. In 1985, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good
War. Terkel currently works as writer-in-residence at the Chicago History
Society cataloging his audiotapes from the thousands of interviews he
has done over the years. Bibliography: Giants of Jazz (1957)
Ernst
Junger, who was born in 1895, lived to be 102 years old. Even 20th century
Germany was hard put to produce enough historical tumult for him. After
a teenage stint in the French Foreign Legion, he signed up for patriotic
action on the first day of World War I. The ensuing whirlwind of catastrophe
inspired his first book, "The Storm of Steel." Adolf Hitler, who
fought on the same battle front, was a devotee of the book and asked Junger
to run for public office. He declined, preferring to versify, philosophize
and practice entomology. He spent World War II, back in uniform again, writing
veiled attacks on the regime and sipping champagne in occupied Paris. He
was censored but survived the Nazi purges. When the war was over, he was
censored by the victors, and he survived again. By 1951, Junger was dropping
LSD. In 1962, at age 67, he married his devoted second wife. Even after
all that, there were still entire decades ahead: magazine editorship, diaries,
learned essays, respectful visits from European heads of state. The calendar
could not stop him.
Division Street: America (1967)
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression in America (1970)
Working (1974)
Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977)
American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980)
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984)
Chicago (1986)
The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988)
Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession
(1992)
Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995)
My American Century (1997)
The Spectator (1999)
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the central figures of the existentialist movement and has had a major influence in the areas of phenomenology and ontology. His seminal work, Sein und Zeit, affected the philosophical and cultural landscape of continental Europe for decades. Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is remarkably monolithic in its devotion to metaphysics and ontology. Time and again Heidegger returned to the question, "what is the meaning of being?" One of Heidegger's later works [17], The Question Concerning Technology (1977), deals with the issue of dehumanization in modern society, what Heidegger called the "darkening of the world." The book was based on four lectures delivered in 1949 and captured Heidegger's ontological approach to issues important to post-World War Europe. Heidegger was greatly concerned about technical nihilism, and for a time believed that Nazism could provide a solution. After the war, Heidegger described the catastrophe as, "the confrontation of European humanity with global technology" (Heim, 1993, p. 55). However, throughout his work, Heidegger is careful to approach technology with neither praise nor blame-neither as an optimist nor pessimist. Heidegger's concept of technology is not defined by things or processes. For Heidegger, "technology's essence is nothing technological" (1977, p. 4). Instead it is a system, Gestell, looming but undefined (Heim, p. 57). Gestell [18], literally "framing", is an all-encompassing view of technology, not as a means to an end, but rather a mode of human existence. As such, the real danger of technology for Heidegger was the process by which the machines begin to alter our existence. According to Heim,
What Heidegger called "the essence of technology" infiltrates human existence more intimately than anything humans could create. The danger of technology lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. Not that machines can run amok, or even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. Instead, technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon. (p. 61)
Institut
for Antropologi, Københavns Universitet
Frederiksholms kanal 4, DK-1220 København K, Denmark
Tel: +45 35323464 - Fax: +45 35323465 - E-mail: reception@anthro.ku.dk
