Word: rybczynski
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Terry's special attention to the Festival makes this production seem like more than just a bunch of cartoons, it is. Some of the animations are brilliant political commentaries, like Zbignew Rybczynski's Tango, which was awaraded an Oscar in 1982. Others films are intriguing social reflections, like Paul Driessen's Elbowing or the 1981 Academy Award-winning film The Fly. Still others are just simply hillarious, like my favorite animated short, Charade, and the 1988 animation, The Cat Came Back...
AGAINST ALL HOPE, Armando Valladares A BOOK OF TRAVELLERS' TALES, assembled by Eric Newby CECIL BEATON, Hugo Vickers HOME, Witold Rybczynski KRAZY KAT, Patrick McDonnell WARTIME WRITINGS: 1939-1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupery...
...century. In 1870 fully 60% of employed American women worked as household servants; 50 years later most of the servants had vanished, to be replaced by electric vacuums and washing machines. "The feminine idea of the home . . . shifted the focus from the drawing room to the kitchen," Rybczynski writes, "which was why, when electricity entered the home, it was by the kitchen door...
...Rybczynski keeps differentiating between what a house looks like and how it functions, and charges that architects all too often concentrate on the former. A case in point was Le Corbusier's celebrated "New Spirit" pavilion at the Paris exposition of 1925: bare white walls, stairs made out of steel pipes, only a few restaurant-style chairs. "The house is a machine for living in," said Le Corbusier. This concept became very fashionable, but Rybczynski finds it hopelessly contradictory: "Marble kitchen counters and bamboo window shades . . . a Matisse on the wall and a sleeping mat on the floor...
Only after writing a whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly...