1 “If the future is ‘out of date’ and ‘old fashioned,’ then I have been in the future.” Robert Smithson, “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967), The Collected Writings

2 “Quite arbitrarily, all the works selected are black, white, or grey, so chosen to keep the viewer from being distracted by the emotionalism of colour.... Among the sculptors, Tony Smith, also an architect, moves in a parallel path with Robert Morris, where human scale, proportion, symmetry, order, restraint, clarity and the flat surface, neutral black or indifferent grey, produce a similar effect of noble and hierarchic presence.” Samuel Wagstaff Jr., “Paintings to Think About,” Artnews (1964)

3 “Morphologically there are common elements: symmetry, lack of traces of process, abstractness, non-hierarchical distribution of parts, non-anthropomorphic orientations, general wholeness.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3, Notes and Non Sequiturs” (1967), Continuous Project Altered Daily

4 “I view art as something vast. I think highway systems fall down because they are not art. Art today is an art of postage stamps. I love the Secretariat Building of the U.N., placed like a salute. In terms of scale, we have less art per square mile, per capita, than any society ever had. We are puny.... Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe-abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me.” Tony Smith, quoted in Samuel Wagstaff Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum (1966)

5 “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belong only to the planners in charge.... Le Corbusier was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility.” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

1 “Spacecraft in science-fiction films prior to 2001 were generally smooth and shiny and very sleek looking. The ships in 2001 represented more of what you would see at NASA at the time. That was a new vision for spacecraft, and of course that vision affected Star Wars.” Ben Burt, Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001 (2007)

2 “Surfaces under tension are anthropomorphic; they are under the stresses of work much as the body is in standing. Objects that do not project tensions state most clearly their separateness from the human.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3, Notes and Non Sequiturs”

3 “George wanted it to look like a spaceship from 2001 that had aged two hundred years.” John Barry, quoted in J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars (2007)

4 “There are no Negroes in this vision of America’s space program; conversation with Russian scientists is brittle with mannerly terror, and the Chinese can still be dealt with only by pretending they’re not there. But technological man has advanced no end.” Penelope Gilliatt, “After Man,” the New Yorker (1968)

5 “From the very outset of work on the film we all discussed means of photographically depicting an extraterrestrial creature in a manner that would be as mind-boggling as the being itself.... You cannot imagine the unimaginable. All you can do is try to represent it in an artistic manner that will convey something of its quality. That’s why we settled on the black monolith—which is, of course, in itself something of a Jungian archetype, and also a pretty fair example of ‘minimal art.’” Joseph Gelmis, An Interview with Stanley Kubrick (1969)

6 “I was working very hard to keep everything nonsymmetrical. Nothing looks like it belongs with anything else.... It’s a very common thing in science fiction to see a set that has one influence. Everything matches. The chairs match the table, match the rug, match the design of the doors, match the door handle, match the lamps. I wanted it to look like one thing came from one part of the galaxy and another from another part of the galaxy.” George Lucas, quoted in The Making of Star Wars

1 “Minimalism is an apogee of modernism, but it is no less a break with it.” Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (1996)

2 “[Piet] Mondrian went so far as to claim: ‘Sensations are not transmissible, or rather their purely qualitative properties are not transmissible. The same, however does not apply to relations between sensations. Consequently only relations between can have an objective value.’ This may be ambiguous in terms of perceptual facts, but in terms of looking at art it is descriptive of the condition that obtains.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture I” (1966), Continuous Project Altered Daily

3 “Arthur Clarke and I also looked up and secured the support of the famed anthropologist Louis R. Leakey, who supplied invaluable insights that Kubrick would later apply to the “Dawn of Man” opening sequence of his film. [When] the director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight saw the amount of documentation Lange and I had brought with us from the States, he dubbed our office complex ‘NASA East.’” Fred Ordway, scientific adviser, 2001: A Space Odyssey in Retrospect (1982)

4 "They commit themselves to the third dimension because it is, among other things, a coordinate that art has to share with non-art (as Dada, Duchamp, and others already saw). The ostensible aim of the Minimalists is to 'project' objects and ensembles of objects that are just nudgeable into art." Clement Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture" (1967), in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimalism: A Critical Anthology

5 “Adorno championed modernist art not only for its negative capability, however, but also for its utopian moment, its vision of something other or better than the present regime. Here we encounter minimalism’s departure: its refusal to picture something else: a refusal which finally returns the viewer—at best a more disillusioned viewer—to more of the same.” Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine (1990)

6 “The monolith would not only be a symbol of God, but of authority in general, therefore of the father, whom the child dreams of killing in order to take his place.” Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition (1982)

1 “Two decades ago, any biologist would have assumed that our ability to wield tools and lay concerted group plans made us far more murderous than apes—if indeed apes were murderous at all. Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance of being murdered as does the average human.” Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (1992)

2 “The bone goes up and turns into what is supposed to be an orbiting space bomb—a weapon in space.” Arthur C. Clarke, quoted in Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001 (2007)

3 “Minimal art was the attempt to recuperate transcendent Puritan values by reencoding them via an iconoclasm of austere formal spatial purity. At the same time its ambition was to transpose and redeem utilitarian industrial processes and gestalt forms into an aesthetic space of the phenomenological. Echoing the ambitions of William James, minimal art wanted it both ways: on the one hand, the tough-minded empiricism of Frank Stella’s remark that what you see is what you get; on the other, the elusive, tender-minded transcendence (never part of the official doxology) encoded by the purity of the formal spatial relations, whose lawlike severity implied a transcendent order reaching beyond the aesthetic phenomenalism.” Robert Morris, “Size Matters,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 2000)

4 “To see someone actually do it, to make a visual film, was hugely inspirational to me. He did—I can do it.... When 2001 first came out, I was in film school, where obviously it had a huge impact on me.... I think it was the first time people took science fiction seriously.” George Lucas, quoted in Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001

5 “A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings.” George Lucas, quoted in The Making of Star Wars

1 “We have been working with many, many companies; about fifty, really. IBM, General Electric in Philadelphia, RCA in Michigan, Bausch and Lomb in Rochester, New York, and so on down the list. Wherever we needed help, we’ve gone to industry and they have been more than delighted to give it to us.” Fred Ordway, scientific adviser and technical consultant, 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Look Behind the Future

2 “This spring, Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Center, said early next year we’ll flight-test the huge three-stage Saturn V rocket, which will transport three Apollo astronauts to the moon.... This amazing progress in space finds the American people less than well prepared to comprehend its social impact. Scientists maintain a dialogue with scientists, quite properly to be sure. But there remains a much-needed job of indoctrinating our public with the consequences.... One means of preparing ourselves for the future is to educate by entertainment.” Vernon Meyer, publisher of Look magazine, 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Look Behind the Future

3 “It hit me hardest of all when I was sitting behind U. Thant and Dr. Ralph Bunche in the Dag Hammarskjold Theater, watching a screening, which we had arranged at the United Nations’ Secretary General’s request. This, I suddenly realized, is where all the trouble started and this very building is where we are trying to stop it. Simultaneously, I was struck by the astonishing parallel between the shape of the monolith and the UN Headquarters itself; there seemed something quite uncanny about the coincidence. If it is one.” Arthur C. Clarke, Moonwatcher’s Memoir (2002), foreword

4 “Every city’s primary use, whether it comes in monumental and special guise or not, needs its intimate matrix of ‘profane’ city to work to best advantage.... Furthermore, a city matrix needs its own less spectacular internal minglings (‘jumbles’ to the simple-minded). Else it is not a matrix but, like housing projects, it is ‘profane’ monotony, working no more sensibly than the ‘sacred’ monotony of civic centers like San Francisco’s.” Jane Jacobs

1 “Modernism was regularly outspoken about the barrenness of the working-class movement—its politics of pity, its dreary materialism, the taste of the masses, the Idea of Progress, etc. But this may have been because it sensed socialism was its shadow—that it too was engaged in a desperate, and probably futile, struggle to imagine modernity otherwise.” T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (1999)

2 “Social realism in a Mies pavilion would be as unthinkable as a WPA mural in the Petit Trianon (except that the flat roof itself was a symbol of socialism in the 1920s).” Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, & Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (1972)

3 “I am not interested in idealizing technology.” Sol LeWitt quoted in Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), The Collected Writings

1 Morris discussed his early work experience in and around rail yards, which culminated with him being blackballed as a brakeman in the late ’50s, as part of the Sculpture Center’s Subjective History series, in 2008.

2 “Consider the influential model of postmodernism developed by Jameson over the last decade. He adapts the long-wave theory of economic cycles elaborated by the economist Ernest Mandel, according to which the capitalist West has passed through four fifty-year periods since the late eighteenth century (roughly twenty-five years each of expansion and stagnation): the Industrial Revolution (until the political crises of 1848) marked by the spread of handcrafted steam engines, followed by three further technological epochs—the first (until the 1890s) marked by the spread of machined steam engines; the second (until World War II) marked by the spread of electric and combustion engines; and the third marked by the spread of machined electronic and nuclear systems.” Hal Foster

3 “The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s—everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it’s seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about ‘air-mindedness’ as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it’s the politics of internet governance.” Charles Stross, “Shaping the Future”

4 “It signifies a new sophistication in bureaucratic circles that even dense and technical work of the intelligentsia, as long as it was self-censoring in its professional detachment from values, could be used ambassadorially as a commodity in the struggle for American dominance.” Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After (1973)

1 “Profoundly historicist, Greenberg’s method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things, like art itself, or painting and sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal, transhistorical forms. But in the same breath it is to assert that the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal, not unlike that of the living organism.” Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986)

2 “It did not matter that constructivist forms were intended as visual proof of the immutable logic and coherence of universal geometries, while their seeming counterparts in minimalism were demonstrably contingent—denoting a universe held together not by Mind but by guy wires, or glue, or the accidents of gravity. The rage to historicize simply swept these differences aside.” Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October (1979)

3 “Statistics, multiple perspective, subjectivity, and self-reference, alone and together can be shown to have devolved from the collapse of ontological continuity. Severally they lead to the nonlogical, nonobjective, and essentially causeless mental universe in which we (with the exception of a few historians) now live.” William Everdell, The First Moderns (1997)

4 “The process behind the making of a storage facility may be viewed in stages, thus constituting a whole ‘series’ of works of art from the ground up. Land surveying and preliminary building if isolated into discrete stages may be viewed as an array of art works that vanish as they develop.” Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (1967), The Collected Writings

5 “The requisite awkward system of troughs, spouts, and pumps is mostly visible-an example of classically post-minimalist procedural candor.... Neglected of late, the tradition of mechanically engineered abstraction embraced two ideals: utopia and science. The first seems irrecoverable...but the second feels newly promising, in a time when technological advances outpace our imaginative resources.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Uncluttered,” the New Yorker (2008)

1 “I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue on Apocalypse Now.... [There would be] a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire.... The Empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election.... We are at the turning point: fascism or revolution.” George Lucas, quoted in The Making of Star Wars

2 “Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people.” Le Corbusier, L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (1925)

3 “Through the twenties, as Manhattan is ‘removing stone by stone the Alhambra, the Kremlin and the Louvre’ to ‘build them anew on the banks of the Hudson,’ Le Corbusier dismantles New York, smuggles it back to Europe, makes it unrecognizable and stores it for future reconstruction.... It left as hedonistic instrument of the Culture of Congestion; it returns from Europe brainwashed, instrument of implacable Puritanism.” Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (1978)

4 “Pruitt-Igoe is a ruin. Like the Berlin Wall...this ruin has become a great architectural symbol. It should be preserved as a warning.” Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)

5 “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the moon / Her face and arms began to swell, and Whitey’s on the moon / I can’t pay no doctor bill, but Whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still, while Whitey’s on the moon” Gil Scott Heron, “Whitey on the Moon,” The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1972)

6 “Minimalism’s fundamentally architectural, classical, visual language invites comparison with the classically founded architectural mode of the International Style. By the 1960s those elegant, precise and antiseptic-looking glass boxes that we recognize as the legacy of the International Style had become well established as the architecture of big business.” Anna Chave

1 “By 1952 these artists, continuing the interest in social issues they inherited from the 1930s, did not see anything wrong with their political affiliations with Cold Warriors. But to say that de Kooning or Pollock were working with the CIA, the answer is of course no.” Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games,” Reconstructing Modernism (1999)

2 “A second generation of Modern architects acknowledged only the ‘constituent facts’ of history, as extracted by Sigfried Giedion, who abstracted the historical building and its piazza as pure form and space in light. These architects’ preoccupation with space as the architectural quality caused them to read the buildings as forms, the piazzas as space, and the graphics and sculpture as color, texture, and scale. The ensemble became an abstract expressionism in architecture in the decade of abstract expressionism in painting.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

3 “A certain pinnacle of the Wagner effect was no doubt achieved in Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Exhibiting a strong gestalt form scavenged from minimal and earth art conventions, the black granite wall of names functions as a curtain drawn across governmental criminality. Criticality evaporates in this tight theater foregrounding private grief, the expression of which serves to effect closure on a national wound that should have been left open. Here is public art at its most devious and perverted.” Robert Morris, “Size Matters”

4 “Representing power in such an abrasive, terse and unapologetic way, the work none the less has a chilling effect: this is authority represented as authority does not usually like to represent itself; authority as authoritarian.” Anna Chave

1 Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site”

2 “The farmer or engineer who cuts into the land can either cultivate it or devastate it.... When one looks at cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, one cannot separate art from nature. And one cannot forget the Indian mounds of Ohio.” Robert Smithson, “Fredrick Law Olmstead and The Dialectical Landscape” (1973), The Collected Writings

3 “The picturesque is located...between the grand pretensions and death drives of the sublime, and the agonized longing for an enthrallment by the beautiful. When an object becomes sublime it is the all, the totality, the incomprehensible. In short it becomes an idol. When an object is beautiful, we must have it, take possession of it, master it, and of course it inevitably enslaves us. In short it becomes a fetish.” W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (2005)

4 “[Spiral Jetty’s] location near a disused oil-drilling operation reflect Smithson’s great interest in rehabilitation of land damaged by industry. One of his last works was a proposal for the reclamation of a strip mine—he wanted to act as a mediator between ecology and industry by reclaiming the land in terms of art.” Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996)

5 “The making of artificial lakes, with the help of dams, brings into view a vast ‘garden.’ For instance, the Peligre Dam in the Republic of Haiti consists of 250-foot-high concrete buttresses. The massive structure, with its artificial cascades and symmetrical layout, stands like an immobile facade. It conveys an immense scale and power. By investigating the physical forms of such projects one may gain unexpected esthetic information. I am not concerned here with original ‘functions’ of such massive projects, but rather with what they suggest or evoke.” Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site”

6 “[Tony] Smith mentions other ‘abandoned’ sites artists like [Robert] Smithson soon entered, but one of his examples might qualify the avant-gardist value of this ‘expanded field’: the Nazi drill ground in Nuremberg designed by Albert Speer. In short, on the other side of traditional forms lies mass spectacle, and the desublimation of these forms can also abet a regression of the subject.” Hal Foster

1 “The flying hamburger was my favorite design.... I wanted something really off the wall, since it was the key ship in the movie; I wanted something with a lot more personality. I thought of the design on the airplane, flying back from London: a hamburger. I didn’t want it to be a flying saucer, but I wanted to have something with a radial shape that would be completely different from anything else.” George Lucas, quoted in The Making of Star Wars

2 “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

3 “When the Engineers completed construction of the Peligre Dam, the waters flooded previously productive farmland and forced the residents into the surrounding desolate terrain. Old-timers lamented about the idyllic life in the days before the dam...and they all knew who benefited from the dam—the agribusinesses downstream and the wealthy elites who controlled these businesses along with their American backers.” Edward O’Neil, Awakening Hippocrates (2006)

4 “I can remember, as well, standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth-notes and wondering what part if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might rightly be considered ‘natural.’” Dave Hickey, Air Guitar (1997)

1 “Modernity sees humanity as having descended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors.” Houston Smith, quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2006)

2 “Neoteny, the fact—long recognized by embryologists—that the human brain is not completed, and not completely ‘wired,’ at the time of birth is what has given the cortex and neocortex their phylogenetic prevalence over older (both in embryological and evolutionary terms) cerebral structures and has allowed the formidable development of human intellectual capacities.... It will always be too soon to grant autonomy to human beings, and this is why humanity cannot be freed but only emancipated. It is bound to anticipate an adult stage that its very nature precludes—’bound’ in both the sense of a natural determination and of a moral obligation.” Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)

3 “Our progress from being just another species of big mammal to being uniquely human therefore depended on the remodeling of our pelvises and skulls, but also of our sexuality.” Jared Diamond

4 “There never was a point at which we become social: descended from highly social ancestors—a long line of monkeys and apes—we have been group-living forever. Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out—if a starting point is discernible at all—as interdependent, bonded, and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious.” Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers (2006)

5 “‘Togetherness’ is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. ‘Togetherness,’ apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.... There is no public life here, in any city sense. There are differing degrees of extended private life.” Jane Jacobs

1 “Art today is no longer an architectural afterthought...but rather a total engagement with the building process from the ground up and the sky down. The old landscape of naturalism and realism is being replaced by the new landscape of abstraction and artifice.” Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art” (1969), The Collected Writings

2 “There is some [discussion of space] in Japanese and Korean literature, mixed with an astrology of place, called Pung-su in Korean and Feng Shui in Chinese, both meaning ‘wind and water,’ classed vaguely in English as ‘geomancy.’ But the subject of space in architecture, the nature of architecture, is not developed.” Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Donald Judd Colorist (2000)

3 “Architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment, because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian, and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive: Architects have preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

4 “In these minute niches, indeed, we can observe the work of no less energy—call it wit, invention, decoration or ornament.” Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (2005)

5 “Here then, the faculty which produces aesthetic or artistic decoration has suddenly become more public and more collective in its function than the ‘august shaping power’ of Imagination or primal wish-fulfillment, which sinks to a rather shameful and private activity that needs to be disguised at all costs.” Ibid.

6 “The term ‘detail’ is used here in a special negative sense and should be understood to refer to all factors in a work that pull it towards intimacy by allowing elements to separate from the whole, thus setting up relationships within the work.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture II”

1 “[T]he theme of reprogramming (or deprogramming) is a neglected feature of Utopias that repress the problems of their transition or emergence, just as it is an essential feature of any Cultural Revolution, which must substitute new habits for those of the past and the old order. The reflexive paradoxes of reprogramming—the educators must themselves be educated or reeducated—are common to revolutions and Utopias alike.” Fredric Jameson

2 “So strong is the grip of the rhetoric of exaltation as an attitude in the large context of the European culture pattern that the elements of sublimity in the revolution we know as modern art, exist in its effort and energy to escape the pattern rather than in the realization of a new experience.... We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting.” Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” Tiger’s Eye (1948)

3 “An immense, devastating brutal evolution has burned the bridges that link us with the past.” Le Corbusier, The Guiding Principals of Town-Planning (1925)

4 “Greece, the medieval, the Incas, Protestantism: these are the four crucial elements of More’s Utopian text, the four raw materials of its representation.... Nor is it without significance that both these social realities—the Inca empire and the monastic compound—are in the process of wholesale dissolution in More’s own time: the former by way of the Spanish conquest, the latter by way of Henry VIII’s reforms.” Fredric Jameson

5 “[A]lmost exactly contemporaneous with most of the innovations that we have seemed to define modernity (conquest of the New World, Machiavelli and modern politics, Ariosto and modern literature, Luther and modern consciousness, printing and the modern public sphere).” Ibid.

6 “We have been calling ourselves ‘modern’ in the West since the sixteenth century. In a more than graceful gesture to our past, we began a hundred years ago to term ‘modern’ everything that had happened to us since the fourteenth century.” William Everdell

1 “Concentration camps were in fact a very modern invention—modern in their insistence on analysis and fragmentation.... For the concentration camp was invented and given its name at the same time as cubism and quantum physics, by the same civilized Westerners.” William Everdell

2 “In truth, a man-of-war is a city afloat, with long avenues set out with guns instead of trees, and numerous shady lanes, courts, and by ways. The quarter-deck is a grand square, park, or parade ground, with a great Pittsfield elm, in the shape the main mast, at one end, and fronted at the other by the Commodore’s cabin.” Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1892)

3 “Early Modern architects appropriated an existing and conventional industrial vocabulary without much adaptation. Le Corbusier loved grain elevators and steam ships; the Bauhaus looked like a factory; Mies refined the details of American steel factories for concrete buildings.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

4 “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans J. Miskowiec, Diacritics (1986)

5 “In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift presents both an extended parody of experimental science and a vision of a terrifying superweapon, a flying island used by its rulers literally to crush any earthly opposition to their tyranny.” H. Bruce Franklin, “What Is Science Fiction and How It Grew,” Reading Science Fiction, eds. James Gunn, Marleen Barr, and Matthew Candelaria (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, London)

1 “[More] seems to have ceased all sexual relations at a relatively early age, and to have worn a hair shirt the rest of his life.” Fredric Jameson

2 “Total design is the opposite of the incremental city that grows through the decisions of many: total design conceives a messianic role for the architect as a corrector of the mess of urban sprawl; it promotes a city dominated by pure architecture and maintained through ‘design review,’ and supports today’s architecture of urban renewal and fine arts commissions.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

3 “Now that the masses have solved the problem of pleasure, they present the elite elsewhere on the island with the problem of the masses.... ‘There is scarcely any variety of human flotsam and jetsam that is not represented in this permanent population.... Every defaulting cashier, every eloping couple, every man or woman harboring suicidal intent...comes flocking to it from every part of the island’ to be exposed to ‘a concentrated sublimation of all the mean petty, degrading swindles which depraved ingenuity has ever devised to prey upon humanity.’” Rem Koolhaas

4 “Leia is dressed in white and is part of the technological world—black white and gray.... She has a spaceship, but she would have been a stranger if she had gone to Tatooine, the natural world, tan, brown, and green.... Artoo fits in with everything [on the Death Star] because he is primarily white. We made the stormtroopers white, too (also to mix things up, so not all the bad guys were dressed in dark colors).... The only thing that we varied a little bit was the Han Solo costume: He’s dressed in browns and has a spaceship, because he is an eclectic. He takes from everything.” George Lucas, quoted in The Making of Star Wars

5 “But what appears as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as rigorously logical from another.” Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”

6 “Apart from theaters and ball parks [saucers], the occasional communal space that is big is a space for crowds of anonymous individuals without explicit connection with each other.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

1 “Art at the present is confined by a dated notion, namely ‘art as a criticism of earlier art.’” Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site”

2 “Modernism injected a new kind of heroism into the civic realm. Enormous abstract sculptures, landed like spacecraft in front of courthouses or shopping malls, have tended to be—with the exception of, say, a Calder stabile—as still as a tomb and as eternal.” Cathleen McGuigan, “The Hottest New York Exhibit Is So Big, It Won’t Fit in a Museum,” Newsweek (2008)

1 “The purest examples that come to mind from the early 1960s are both by Robert Morris...quasi architectural integers whose status as sculpture reduces almost completely to the simple determination that it is what is in the room that is not really the room.” Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”

2 [But critics] demonstrated that the functionalists, despite their protestations, derived a formal vocabulary of their own, mainly from current art movements and industrial vernacular.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

3 “‘Hidden Fortress was an influence on Star Wars right from the very beginning,’ Lucas says.... One of his notes summarizes Lucas’s thinking: ‘Whole film must be told from robots’ point of view.’” J. W. Rinzler

4 “George Lucas...wanted the sounds in the film to sound natural. He wasn’t interested in perhaps what was the tradition in science fiction films which was to generate electronic sounds and synthesized sounds that would have an otherworldly quality. He wanted the sounds to have a worldly quality. That they would sound like real objects, real motors, actual places. The doors would be rusty on the space ships or the places where people lived. The engines would sound like that they were maybe mis-tuned or would backfire once in a while. He wanted a used universe in a sense.” Ben Burt, Star Wars DVD commentary

1 “Who is more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?” Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars (1977).

2 “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted [M. M. Haith], the human brain is an ‘anticipation machine’ and ‘making future’ is the most important thing it does.” Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2006)

3 “Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner [1982], offers an elegant futuristic melancholy very much at odds with its literary source, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1966].... Dick is notoriously the epic poet of entropy and of the transformation of the world into kipple, the layer of dust, the rotting of all that is solid, a destruction of form itself that is worse than death.” Fredric Jameson

4 “The Culture of Congestion proposes the conquest of each block by a single structure.... On each floor the Culture of Congestion will arrange new and exhilarating human activities in unprecedented combinations. Through Fantastic technologies it will be possible to reproduce all ‘situations’—from the most natural to the most artificial—wherever and whenever desired.... The Culture of Congestion is the culture of the 20th century.” Rem Koolhaas

5 “Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean...plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.... Old ideas sometimes use old buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” Jane Jacobs

6 “Human self-awareness is a psycho-social phenomena resulting from feedback in modeling the behavior of one’s neighbor, and, almost coincidentally, modeling one’s own behavior to make sure we’ll fit into social activities.... Self is not an illusion; it’s real. But not unitary, it’s not primary, and it’s not always in charge.” Greg Bear, Darwin’s Children (2003)

1 “The white-glazed brick denotes decoration as a unique and rich appliqué on the normal red brick. Through the location of the white areas and stripes on the façade, we have tried connotatively to suggest floor levels associated with palaces and thereby palace—like scale and monumentality.” Venturi, Brown, & Izenour

2 “The world has arrived at a period which renders it the part of Wisdom to pay homage to the perspective precedents of the Future in preference to those of the past. The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; the Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backwards, and forever incapable of looking before.” Herman Melville

3 “By originality here I mean more than just the kind of revolt against tradition that echoes in Ezra Pounds ‘Make it new!’ or sounds in the futurists promise to destroy the museums that cover Italy as though with countless cemeteries.’ More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.” Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

4 “The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.” Jane Jacobs

5 “Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts-studios, galleries, stores, for musical instruments and supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb the uneconomic discussions—these go into old buildings.” Ibid.

1 “10% of the world’s population lived in cities in 1900, 50% live in cities today, 75% is an estimate for the year 2050.” Ricky Burdett and Phillipp Rode, The Endless City (2008)

2 “Asia has been in the grip of a relentless process of building, on a scale that has probably never existed before. A maelstrom of modernization is destroying, everywhere, existing Asian conditions and creating completely new urban substance. The absence, on the one hand, of plausible, universal doctrines, and the presence, on the other, of an unprecedented intensity of new production, create a unique wrenching condition: the urban condition seems to be least understood at the moment of its very apotheosis.” Rem Koolhaas, “City of Exacerbated Difference” (The Great Leap Forward (2001)

3 “If time is a place, then innumerable places are possible.” Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”