Quotes from Nicholas Fox Weber

Artists who shared (Paul) Klee's fundamental beliefs, such as (Piet) Mondrian, were searching for universal truths, often derived from nature and having all-mighty power. For some, a traditional notion of God was part of this; for others, it was of no consequence. What mattered was not the precise character of the object of worship, but the shared belief in its superiority to the cult of self. (104)

Observation precedes vision.

Like a clap of thunder, at a high decibel level yet with a suddenly squeaky voice, as high as it was loud, with his flying white hair in the light of the slide projector and therefore magnified a hundredfold as filaments gone haywire over the exquisitely painted van Eyck, Professor Schapiro shouted out, "He's pissing! He's pissing!

From Plato: "The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Know your materials! See the most minute nuances! Savor them! God is in the details.

Marcel Breuer's armchair, with its horsehair fabric stretched taut on an armature of tubular chrome, is one of the Bauhaus designs that has remained a classic.

And all of them were obsessed with the appearances of the objects that served their quotidian needs.

Nothing is crowded, although infinite functions are available.

If a glass tabletop was half a centimeter thick, its support and legs precisely doubled or tripled that measure. The iPhone also depended on the exact relation of proportions, so that a sense of rightness enters the user.

Anni and Josef Albers's house was the whitest place imaginable.

Gropius characterized what was essential: "An object…must fulfill its function usefully, be durable, economical, and 'beautiful.

The Bauhaus fights against the cheap substitute, inferior workmanship, and the dilettantism of the handicrafts, for a new standard of quality work.

Now, what made something work well was in and of itself the core of its aesthetic quality.

Then there is Plato on human happiness: "The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

At the Bauhaus, Josef Albers wrote a friend for whose apartment he was designing furniture, "An empty room is always the best.

Albers celebrated the way that color and line have no truth of their own; what matters is their perception, which depends on what is adjacent to them.

To reduce apparent details was to increase emotional and physical ease.

For those who see austerity and affordability and lack of chic as vital elements of the forms of beauty that last, the betrayal of those values is here.

To be true to the Bauhaus is not to follow a "style." It is to maintain impeccable standards, consider every nuance, and make successful functioning the priority.

The iPhone can have a way of presumptuously insisting that it is better than you are. If you want to have it fixed or get an accessory for it, you are required to go into one of the horrid stores with metallic bad-breath air, and then inevitably wait for two hours after being told it would only be ten minutes. The salespeople act as if they have everything you need, but enjoy concealing it from you while you have to figure out what it is. What

The panoply of consumers has iPhones or the lower-priced clones not because of what they represent but because of what they do.

iPhones are not the Elgin Marbles, or Stonehenge, or anything else where part of the miracle is that it lasts.

Bauhaus. And there were many other occasions when he praised the Bauhaus by name for having simplified and humanized the material objects of everyday living.

The Bauhaus was an attitude, not a style or a time period.