It was like reading in Towards a New Architecture of Le Corbusier’s veneration of the white paint, rows of windows, and spiral staircases of transatlantic ships: a “pure, clean, bright, correct, and healthy architecture.”
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It was like venerating Le Corbusier’s veneration of the austere architecture of transatlantic ships while your mind drifts off to more of a Victorian interior: niches and turrets, rose-patterned wallpaper, girandoles, ormolu.
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It was like admiring and resisting the machine for living, the aspiration toward the shipshape, faces neatly framed in portholes, bodies in tennis whites leaning on the ship railing of reason.
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It was like wanting to divide your two-room apartment into the Le Corbusien and the Victorian, one room “correct and healthy,” one room diseased and false, sailing to nowhere but its own red-velvet unreason.