Meso Filler Quotes

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste. ~ Martin Filler

During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions. ~ Martin Filler

I did have a go with Botox, but I couldn't move my eyebrows. I also, at one point, had that filler stuff injected, but I looked like a hamster with wodges of food in its cheeks, so I stopped that. ~ Deborah Moggach

Last year was the fourth or fifth attempt to get fall launched till 'American Idol' comes in January. To be honest, the reality programming we had on last year was considered filler until we could get to the good stuff. It was meant to hopefully get us to January andor to November. To get past baseball. But (it) didn't work very well. ~ Mike Darnell

One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings. ~ Martin Filler

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. ~ Martin Filler

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity," he wrote in one of his essays. "The next is to strive and deserve to conquer; but he whose life has passed without contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence. ~ Anonymous

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement. ~ Martin Filler

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades. ~ Martin Filler

I've always wanted to have a suitcase handcuffed to my wrist. That's not a full joke there! It's filler. ~ Mitch Hedberg

Oh, My God..." Even as he saw the face and heard that voice say "Crow..." he was throwing himself backward out of the shaft. Then the top of the elevator car blew out and the air was filler with shrapnel, everybody hit the deck, and crow grabbed his crossbow, yelling, "Get back! It's him, the vampire!" But it was too late. The vampire rose with the grip of a single beautiful hand, almost levitating toward them, his power and eyes and smile and terrible beauty so alien but so familiar, so pale but so solid, so horrible but so magnetic. And he came closer and closer. "Get back," ordered crow, and the Team started to obey. "Too late," the vampire said, halting them with the voice. "You've let me get too close." Crow raised his crossbow all the way then saied: "Hold it there." The thing laughed and said, "Are you joking?" "Stop!" said Crow. And the vampire smiled and showed his big teeth and said: "Stop me... ~ John Steakley

Avant-garde architects have never been able to depend on the support of the establishment, since the customary patrons of this most conservative and slowly moving art form have historically been resistant to innovation and experiment. ~ Martin Filler

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience. ~ Martin Filler

The moments between your milestones are not filler. ~ Nelou Keramati

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects. ~ Martin Filler

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. ~ Vernor Vinge

Although there are countless tangents that a career in the building arts can take, it is nonetheless most unusual for a major architectural practice to emerge once a firm's principals are well into what is loosely called middle age. ~ Martin Filler

Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved. ~ Martin Filler

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. ~ Martin Filler

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable. ~ Martin Filler

Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book. ~ Martin Filler

Readers often tell me after they've read the books, they find it difficult to sum up the plot in a simple way. My response is, "It's a story about the love a father shares for his daughter. All the rest is just filler."
- MJ Mancini, on his best-selling trilogy, "Revelation". ~ M.J. Mancini

The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type. ~ Martin Filler

During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent. ~ Martin Filler

A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did. ~ Martin Filler

Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration. ~ Martin Filler

Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. ~ Martin Filler

Art has simple founding principles: Less is more, more or less; fill in the blanks with no filler. ~ Kevin Focke

I'm a lazy guy. I can't focus for too long. I'd rather hear a record that has no filler. ~ Thomas Mars

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity. ~ Martin Filler

What was that you gave me to eat?" Winter panicked.
A Filler Crisp," Clover said, his eyes seventy percent concerned and thirty percent mischievous. ~ Obert Skye

Bucket filling is in the eye of the bucket holder, not the bucket filler. Fill their buckets with things that are important to them ... not you. ~ David Cottrell

Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. ~ Martin Filler