Flatiron.3

[alice wellintown]

In Flatiron.3 we add John Marin's Movement, Fifth Avenue, watercolor, 1912

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Marin/artwork/65955

When we consider this idea of the Flatiron and the WTC functioning as
bookends we can focus on the first and the last decade of the century, the
economic and demographic, social and political, aesthetic and artistic
similarities and differences.

 For now, we'll consider one similarity: the cult of the machine. In these
bookend decades political leaders, educators, business leaders,
intellectuals, and artists  enthusiastically lauded the mythical power of
the machine, idealized its transformative forces, its imagined, expected,
and believed potential to make a more perfect, better functioning, more
efficient, more just, more equatable society.

The Dynamos, the New Cathedrals, where the moderns would live and work and
worship world give the world   a center that would hold.

Of course, as the allusions to The Education of Henry Adams, and to
Yearts's famous poem, The Second Coming,  suggest, not everyone was so
enthusiastic about the Age of the Machine or the Digital Age, but when the
Flatiron was built and when the WTC was destroyed, the majority was
converted to the cult of consumerism and the machine.

"The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there
worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and
praise."
      --Calvin Coolidge
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