If he’s got money he buys, and he buys, and he buys…

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There are three main issues in this fragment that makes it interesting:
First of all, the consideration of Europe as “nothing but a great big auction”. Then, the fact that if you have money, you almost become a thoughtless buyer.
And finally, the last sentence of the fragment: “The reason why [a man] buys everything he can, is because of a crazy hope that one of the things he buys will be life everlasting… which it never can be.”

I kind of disagree with this last one: an object can go beyond someone’s life… and should. For any designer this has to be the goal of his/her designs.

Basin of man’s most anciend hand

Spoon,
basin
of
man’s most
anciend hand,
we still
see in your metal
or wooden form
the mold
of the primitive
palm,
where
water
bore
freshness
and the savage
blood
the throb
of fire and hunt.

[...]

Man
added
to the hollow detached
from his hand
an imaginary wooden
arm
and
the spoon
sallied forth
into the world
ever
more
perfect,
accustomed
to passing
from plate to pink lips
or flying
from meager soup
to the forgotten mouths of the hungry.

[...]

With few words, Neruda describes the genesis, design and usage of this small utensil.

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Don’t you know how to open a door?

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Barton Keyes gives a client the precise instructions on “how to open a door”.
Just in case he didn’t know…

I was made eleven years ago

Lots of people must think that finding oneself next to people in the most intimate moments has lots of advantages. Especially chairs – who think they withstand people in the most boring moments – they keep on insinuating. They imagine that when someone lays on us…

For what I’ve been through, I can tell you that few are the times that it is exciting to be the altar of people’s intimate moments. Of course my life is really short: I was made eleven years ago, out of oak, Louis XVI style. From the carpenter to the shop (where I spent one year at last), and from the shop to a dentist’s house. Widower, as rich as moth-eaten and faulty. Who could find exciting to be this character’s bed?

After six years, the dentist died. I ended up in another home. At the beginning, when I found out my usufructuary was a thirteen-year-old girl, I was anxious not having a clue why somebody had the thought to give such a big bed to a child. After a while, a chair – chairs, sometimes, with the cleaning, they go up and down the house and not always return to the same place – explained to me that the whole house was filled with old furniture, really well cared for. It seems that these people really liked antiques. If they only knew that I, despite the style, had been around for only eleven years…!

[...]

This is the beginning of a short story, where the use of a non-human narrator gives the story an unusual point of view. If objects had thoughts…

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The good and new ideas are really close to the ridiculous

“El hombre de al lado” tells the story of an architect who lives in Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House. The house was designed for a doctor, who visited his patients at home. The architect also opens the doors to his students.

There are two scenes about corrections, each one with a really different atmosphere:

It’s like floating

The Placentero (‘pleasant’) chair, designed by Batti in 2004, is the main character in this scene from “El hombre de al lado”. In the film, Leonardo, the man in the white shirt, is the designer of the chair. While he’s talking with his lawyer to arrange some issues, he describes the chair. Although we do not see the entire object in any moment, we can imagine it by its movements.

Slow dynamite

[The sound of a clock ticking is heard, louder and louder]

chance: No, listen. I didn’t know there was a clock in this room.

princess: I guess there’s a clock in every room people live in…

chance: It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heart-beat, but it’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to burnt-out pieces. …Time – who could beat it, who could defeate it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes, but not Chance Wayne. I lived on something, that – time?

princess: Yes, time.

[act iii]

The presence of clocks in everyday life is really vast. Through the years they have become more silent and small, making them less noticeable, but we know they are still all around.

What is that over there?

In this story, firemans’ work is to find books and burn them. They are considered dangerous, interestless, disturbing, and therefore, they are forbidden. They make people unhappy and antisocial, so they have to be destroyed. “Burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes”.

The fragment shows the first time Montag, a fireman, starts to read a book. What is curious is that he turns on a screen instead of a lamp -even when he has one in the livingroom- showing the change of habits in everyday life.

Further on the movie he asks a friend what is a rocking chair, the paradigm of easy-going life, where people have time to chat and read for pleasure. This should never cease to be.

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This nail doesn’t work

I want to show you the sword I made.
Look how beaut…
This nail doesn’t work.
I should have put one of those that have little twists and combed with the hair parted in the middle. Do you know?

What Miguelito doesn’t know is the word “screw”. And yes: to build that wooden sword he should have used a screw better than a nail. A couple would do a lot better, to avoid the parts spinning.

Point to the players their new stance

You roundness, high in flight, giving away
both hands’ warmth as if it were your own,
carefree; what has not the will to stay
constrained in objects, flying too buoyant for them,

not quite Thing and yet still Thing enough
to have remained, unlooked for and unseen,
beyond us in the organized outside,
slipped, though, into you at the uncertain

fulcrum tilting flight to fall; climbing
you seem to catch the throw and lift it with you,
stealing and freeing it―and now incline,
slide onward, point to the players their new stance,
suddenly from your height ordering them
as though they were a figure of the dance―

until, awaited by them all, wished for,
fast, simple, artless, natural, falling
into the cup of their raised-up hands.

[Tr: s.r. & m.s.]

In some games, a nice dialogue is held between the ball and the players:
The ball is where the players put it, and the players take their positions depending on where the ball is.
Balls are wonderful, not only because their perfect geometry, but for the power they have to mesmerize people: who has not stared at one while waiting for its fall?

» original source & credits