Artist: Anna Maria D’Onofrio

sudden upheaval—
plans disrupted—
surprise! crisis! chaos!

release! explosion! outburst!
eruption of anger—
crash through defenses—
break through pretenses—

fall down humbled.
crash.
topple from height.
fortune wrecked.
ego blown.

revelation— the truth—
a burst of insight

the answer—

Architecture strives toward infinity; but more than any other art … remains bound to tangible materials. For this reason it cannot carry itself off into spheres of a transcendental world in which it metamorphoses into an idea. It remains … tied to the earth.

—Peter Behrens in Tilmann Buddensieg and Hennig Rogge, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, trans. I.B. White (1984), p. 223.

But who can give soul to an image, life to stone, metal, wood or wax? And who can make children of Abraham come out of stones? Truly this secret is not known to the thick-witted worker … and no one has such powers as he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, and mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels to the archetype itself, with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things.

—Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia (1533) as quoted in Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, p. 136.

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between the social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

—Richard Wright, Native Son

The savaging sea piles its fears

on the shores of the world
:
no tower can deliver us now

from the enemy wave.

—Pablo Neruda, excerpted from “Bomb (II)” from Fin de mundo