Tom McDonough Quotes

#1. There was good in seahorses, in yellow dwarfs of destiny, but they are in no way adapted to the requirements of modern life.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Tom McDonough

#2. But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?

Tom McDonough

#3. We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)

Tom McDonough

#4. The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.

Tom McDonough

#5. Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?

Tom McDonough

#6. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Tom McDonough

#7. We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Tom McDonough

#8. Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival
whether of labour or of leisure
will no longer be a basis for society.

Tom McDonough