In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir.”

Walter Benjamin (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.216. [ emphasis mine ]

J. Henry Fair [ profile ], Demolished Kaiser Aluminum Refinery, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2009.

Found in issue 31 of the Harvard Design Magazine. See also Burtynsky, Tarkovsky. [ edit: also latz+partner ]

Before air-conditioning, on some full summer nights in Atlanta occurred a black physics less rarely than you might have imagined. Precise and intricate, matter itself reorganized; it began with a circulation of heat, humidity, and imperceptible motes of red clay that hung in the air suspended. Hung endlessly like Ernest, Red, Hickey, and the other winos at Lou’s bar on Edgewood Avenue, who, with a mere precession of their shoulders, could fend off the gravities that would pull them away from their King Cotton Peach, and down.

Into that circulation spilled the attars of wisteria and honeysuckle, the sweat and stink of cars and trucks and animals and sex and race, and other ingredients too many and too ordinary to mention. Cricket rhythms massaged the flux and cicadian crescendos pressurized it, irritating component after component until each abandoned its identity and the mixture condensed into a sweet, thick, elemental Dark. This Dark spread everywhere, broaching no resistance; whatever It touches It became and it became It until everything cohered in its flavor and murk and listlessness.

By morning the Dark itself dissipated, but left a sticky residue on things and people that could not be rinsed off for days. Despite all efforts to take up life again at a normal pace, the viscous coating retarded all motion, and it is this more than anything else, It and its ruddy patina, that was being named when one said ‘Southern.’

Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘Southern’, Log 17, Fall 2009, p.136.

This weekend house consists of a large living room capable of accommodating two automobiles; small bedrooms in which the bed completely fills the floor; a study that doubles as a studio; two enclosed gardens; bathroom; and external garage. The layout plan involved disposing the component elements on a basic 3×3 meter grid. Since all surfaces are painted black, the interior is a somewhat dark box. However, daylight entering from the large and small enclosed gardens creates a varying mixture of light and dark areas.

Gained by a ladder, a small loft is provided above the living room, which is used for book storage and a reading place. A base of pebbles is placed at the bottom of the ladder, whose sounds when people are going up and down it make this little collection of pebbles something of an interior sound effect system. None of the walls are pierced by sizable openings, with lines of sight running to the exterior only in the vertical direction. Which is not to say, however, that this is a sealed space. It would be much more accurate to describe it as an open space. A ‘dark box’ it may appear, but with its innumerable holes, it is much more of a ‘bird cage’.

Weekend House: Dark Box and Bird Cage (1993), Hiroshi Nakao, Masahiko Inoue, and Hiroko Serizawa. Text and images from Japan Architect 9, Spring 1993, pp. 228-29.

Project Echo 2 passive communications satellite, 1965, via Binky the Doormat, and NASA Images. [ related defiance of gravity ]