2025.10.22
curious cabinet
2016.10.22
Architectural Axiom/Statement Re-Writes
Every brick just wants to get laid. --Loose Icon
2008.10.22
Interesting ADA / Universal Design / Accessibility solutions
What [is] reenactment but the rituals of nostalgia? Ah, like the custom of the groom carrying the bride over the threshold reenacts the rape of the Sabine women. It says so right in Livy's Romulus.
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 22 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
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We have therefore undertaken today for the good of letters, and out of interest for the human race, a work which our descendants would have had to undertake, but under much less favorable circumstances: when the overabundance of books would have made its execution extremely laborious.
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Allow me now, before examining further the encyclopedic material, to consider for a moment those authors who already occupy so many shelves in our libraries, are gaining terrain by the day, and in a century or two will by themselves occupy whole buildings. It must be a mortifying thought for these prolix writers, that from all the paper they have blackened with ink, there will not be a single line to extract for the universal dictionary of human knowledge. If they cannot survive by their excellence as colorists, the particular quality which men of genius possess, I ask what will become of them.
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But it is natural that these remarks which we allow ourselves about the fate of so many others, should also bring us to examine ourselves, and contemplate the fate awaiting us. I examine our labor without partiality; I see that there is perhaps no kind of error we have not committed, and I am forced to admit that barely two-thirds of an encyclopedia such as ours would find a place in a genuine encyclopedia . That much is considerable, especially if one concedes that by casting the foundation of such a work, we were forced to take as our starting point a bad author, whoever that might have been, Chambers, Alstedius, or some other. Almost none of our colleagues would have agreed to work, if we had proposed to them to create their own sections de novo ; they would all been frightened away, and the Encyclopedia would not have been written. But by giving to each a sheath of papers, which he had only to review, correct, and augment, the labor of creation, which is always what one dreads, disappeared, and one allowed himself to become engaged with barely a thought. For those disparate fragments turned out to be so incomplete, so badly written, so ill translated, so full of omissions, errors, and imprecision, so contrary to our colleagues' thoughts, that most rejected them. Would that all had been so bold! The only advantage the former obtained, was to learn at a glance the word list of their section, which they could have found at least as completely in the tables of different works, or of some dictionary of the language.
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That slight advantage cost dearly. How much time was lost translating bad things! What expenditure, from which to direct nothing more than continual plagiarism! How many mistakes and accusations we would have spared ourselves with a simple word list! But would it have sufficed to persuade our colleagues? Moreover, even that section could only be perfected through execution. As one executes a piece, the word list expands, the terms to be defined come up by the score; countless ideas occur to reference under various headings; what one does not do is at least indicated by a reference, as belonging to someone else's province: in a word, that which each one furnishes and asks of the others is the fount from which words spring.
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From this it can be seen (1) that in a first edition, we could not make use of too many colleagues, but that if our labor is not entirely useless, a small number of well-chosen men would be enough to execute a second. They should be put in charge of different subordinate workers, whom they would honor for the assistance de they provided, but whose work they would be obliged to accept, so that they would have no way to avoid finishing up, so that their own reputation would be in play, and they could be directly blamed for negligence or incompetence. A worker who dares to request that his name not be placed at the end of one of his articles, admits that he considers it less than well done, or at least not worthy of him. I believe that, according to this new arrangement, it would not be impossible for a single man to handle anatomy, medicine, surgery, the medical material, and a part of pharmacy; another chemistry, the remaining portion of pharmacy, and the chemical part of the arts, such as metallurgy, dyeing, part of the goldsmith's craft, part of the coppersmith's, plumbing, the preparation of all sorts of colors, metallic and otherwise, etc. A single man well-informed of some iron craft, could include the trades of the nail maker, the cutler, the locksmith, the edge-tool maker, etc. One versed in jewelry would be responsible for the jeweler’s art, the stone merchant, the stone mounter. I would always give the preference to a man who had successfully written about the subject he is in charge of. As for the man who was in the process of preparing an opus on the subject, I would accept him as a colleague only if he were already my friend, the honesty of his character was well known to me, and I could not without doing him the greatest insult suspect him of a secret design to sacrifice our opus to his own.
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(2) That the first edition of an encyclopedia can only be a very shapeless and incomplete compilation.But, you will say, how with all these defects did you manage to achieve a success that no production so considerable has ever had? To that I reply, that our Encyclopedia has over almost every other work, I do not say of the same length, but any at all, created by a society or by a single man, the advantage of containing innumerable new things, ones which anywhere else one would look for in vain. This is the natural result of the fortunate choice of those who have devoted themselves to it.
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There has never been, and will not be again for a long time, such a large and fine collection of machines. We have about a thousand plates. We are determined to spare nothing on engraving. Despite the prodigious number of figures that fill them, we have taken care to allow almost none that do not portray an existing and socially active machine. If you compare our volumes with the much applauded collection of Ramelli, [63] the machine theatre of Lupold [64], or even the volumes of machines approved by the Academy of Sciences, you can judge whether from all of those volumes combined, it was possible to take twenty plates worthy of being included in a collection like the one we have had the boldness to conceive and the good fortune to execute. Here there is nothing superfluous, nothing out of date or idealized: everything is in action and living. But independently of that merit, and whatever difference there may or ought necessarily to be between this first edition and subsequent ones, is it not something to have begun? Among countless difficulties which will come spontaneously to mind, just weigh simply that of having assembled a large number of colleagues, who, without knowing each other, all seem to collaborate in friendship in the production of a common opus. Men of letters have done for their peers and equals what one would not have obtained from them for any other consideration. Such is the motive to which we owe our first colleagues; and it is to the same cause that we owe those who are daily added to the enterprise. There prevails among all a sense of emulation, respect, agreement which is scarcely imaginable. Not content to furnish the assistance they have promised, they also make mutual sacrifices, which is much more difficult! Whence so many articles that coming from foreign hands, yet none of those responsible for the sciences to which they belong has ever taken offense. The reason is that individual interest is not involved; there obtains among us no petty personal jealousy, and the perfection of the work and usefulness to the human race have spawned the general feeling that motivates us.
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We have enjoyed a rare and precious advantage which must not be overlooked in the project for a second edition. Men of letters of the highest reputation, artists of first rank, have deigned to send us pieces of their work. We owe Eloquence, Elegance, Esprit, etc., to M. de Voltaire. M. de Montesquieu left us at his death fragments for the article Taste; M. de la Tour has promised us his thoughts on Painting; M. Cochin the younger would not refuse to furnish us the article Engraving if his occupations left him time to write.
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It would not be without usefulness to establish correspondences in the principal sites of the learned world, and I have no doubt it could be accomplished. From it would come information on customs, productions, labors, machines, etc., if no one is overlooked, and if everyone is accorded that degree of consideration that is due the disinterested man who wants to make himself useful.
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It would be an inexcusable oversight not to obtain the great German encyclopedia, the collected regulations of the arts and crafts of London and other countries; the works the English call mysteries , the famous regulations for Piedmont manufactures, customs registers, several inventories of the households of great noblemen and bourgeois; all the treatises on the arts in general and particular, the regulations of commerce, the statutes of communities, all the collections of the academies, especially the academic collection of which the preliminary discourse and the first volumes have just been published. Such a work cannot fail to be excellent, to judge by the sources on which they propose to draw, and by the breadth of knowledge, the fecundity of thought, the firmness of judgment and taste of the man who directs this great enterprise. The greatest fortune that can befall those who will succeed us in the Encyclopedia , and who will assume the work of the following editions, is that the dictionary of the French Academy, such as I conceive it, and as it is conceived by the best minds in that illustrious company, should have appeared, that the natural history should have been published in its entirety, and that the academic collection be completed. What labor would be spared!
2000.10.22
Re: AR:Evo Model (brown 2)
Is the more aesthetic problem, perhaps, the ongoing (generational?) process of institutionalize evasion itself? And hasn't the 20th century already well proven that humanity's artists now overwhelming treats art via what it COULD be rather than what it SHOULD be? And just maybe the biggest problem for architecture (and architectural aesthetics) today is its struggle making the methodological/critical shift from what should be architecture to what could be architecture.
1953.10.22
1953. Thursday, Philadelphia
In what appears to be his first visit to Philadelphia since the transport of the Large Glass to the museum [31.12.1952], Duchamp is invited to see the rooms, now finished and ready to receive the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
Ephemerides
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