Apollo 17, The Blue Marble, 1972

The photograph was taken about 5 hours and 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission, and about 1 hour 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit around Earth, to begin its trajectory to the Moon. The time of Apollo 17's launch, 12:33 a.m. EST, meant that Africa was in daylight during the early hours of the spacecraft's flight. With the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated.
The 1972 Tamil Nadu cyclone can be seen in the bottom left of the image. This storm had brought flooding and high winds to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on December 5, two days before the photograph was taken.
The photograph's official NASA designation is AS17-148-22727. NASA photograph AS17-148-22726, taken just before and nearly identical to 22727, is also used as a full-Earth image. The widely published versions are cropped and chromatically adjusted from the original photographs.
The photographer used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss lens. NASA credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew—Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt—all of whom took photographs during the mission with the on-board Hasselblad, although evidence examined after the mission suggests that Schmitt was the photographer.
All Apollo flights were heavily scheduled down to the minute. At the time this photo was taken, none of the astronauts was scheduled to do so. Thus this photo was taken quickly in a stolen moment. The astronaut who took the picture was weightless, and the continents were hard to see, and he took the photo quickly, which explains why he held the camera upside down compared to the north up orientation of all maps. If every photo on this roll of film is printed, and all of the photos on the roll of film are oriented the same way, then when viewed in sequence, to put feet down and heads up, this photo will have the south pole up, breaking the map convention.
Apollo 17 was the last crewed lunar mission. No human since has been far enough from Earth to photograph a whole-Earth image such as The Blue Marble, but whole-Earth images have been taken by many uncrewed spacecraft missions.
The Blue Marble was not the first clear image taken of an illuminated face of Earth, since similar shots from the ATS-3 satellite had already been made as early as 1967. The Apollo 17 image, however, released during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s, became a symbol of the environmental movement, as a depiction of Earth's frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is among the most widely distributed images in history.

source: wikipedia

Revista Life, 1909

"1. THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WORLD

In the era of the staircase all floors above the second were considered unfit for commercial purposes, and all those above the fifth, uninhabitable. Since the 1870s in Manhattan, the elevator has been the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor. Otis' apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiority in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e" light and air). The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further it goes up, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind. It also establishes a direct relationship between repetition and architectural quality: the greater the number of floors stacked around the shaft, the more spontaneously they congeal into a single form. The elevator generates the first aesthetic based on the absence of articulation. In the early 1880s the elevator meets the steel frame, able to support the newly discovered territories without itself taking up space. Through the mutual reinforcement of these two breakthroughs, any given site can now be multiplied ad infinitum to produce the proliferation of floor space called Skyscraper."

source: page 82, Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas

Pierre Patte, A French city street- sanitation, 1780

"... Patte's section focuses on the relationship between infrastructure (the street, the sewers, the drainage system) and houses. Both cases (el otro es Scena Tragica de Serlio) address the space of circulation as the main datum of the city, but in Patte's case, urban space us shown in relationship with the appartment interior. In Serlio's perspective, the city is still made up of clearly representative architectural forms, whereas in Patte's section the city is represented as mere infrastructure, as an anonymous machine for living.

Patte's section is not only a clear manifestation of the shift in importance from architecture to engineer, but also demonstrates the expanded role of design within the organization of the city. In this case, design is no longer manifested through "figurative" forms, but through generic protocols that address neither belief nor ideology. These protocols are the height of the rooms, the provision sewers, and the maintenance of the street as a clean and wide space. As the historian Antoine Picon has written, in Patte's section, the architecture of the city becomes a productive work: "the street became a machine regulating a set of flows: the flowing of water and the traffic of vehicles." In his Mémoires, Patte described the city as a theatre of machines, an apparatus that regulates basic human needs from birth to death (among other things, Patte proposed an efficient system for burial in which the cadaver would be "entombed" in the parish chapel and then moved from there to the cemetery by a carefully organized process of corpse disposal).

Patte's city is no longer the coherent body that all classicist theories on architecture put forward; it is simply a machine that reproduces and controls the life of its inhabitants. Life as such becomes the generic property that the city addresses with its functioning as infrastructure. From this moment onwards, architectural theory's main topics were concepts like distribution, economy, and comfort: not moral or ideological values, but possibilities for managerial control of the population. It is precisely here that we can find the rise of urbanism as an autonomous discipline, independent from architecture."

source: página 32, Introduction, The City as a Project, Pier Vittorio Aureli

Hannes Meyer, Swiss pavilion for the International Exhibition of Co-operatives in Ghent, 1924

"In 1924, Meyer designed the Swiss pavilion for the International Exhibition of Co-operatives in Ghent.[8]8. K. J. Winkler, Der Architekt Hannes Meyer: Anschauungen und Werk (Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 1989). The space was meant for co-operative propaganda through “popular education” using folks culture. Meyer imposes “the simplest simplicity” in the expression of abstraction to convey the message about co-operation. In this manner he could at the same time promote co-operation among the individuals comprising mass society, as well as co-operate with them through “the education of new vision and perception” to stir them to become more politically aware. At one end of the exhibition space was the co-op vitrine. The showcase consisted of a large glass box like a shop window offering thirty-six standard items of co-operative production and co-operative trade. The collection of co-op products symbolizes a production that has grown out of the alienation of the capitalist market economy and ownership, demonstrating how co-operation can disenthral man from capital. Products are arranged in a clear spatial composition and clearly recall the form of repetition of industrial mass production, for they are stacked and arranged as if at the end of production assembly lines. No product is individually displayed; rather each is presented as part of a group with no centre while nonetheless remaining individually recognizable. People entering the pavilion could admire the vitrine at any time of the day. At night, however, at the other end of the exhibition space the curtain rose on co-op theatre."

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Hannes Meyer, Co-op Interieur, 1926

"In 1926 the Berlin architecture critic Adolf Behne received a photograph from Basel: depicted on it were four objects, prosaically arranged in a makeshift corner of a room. Entitled Co-op. Interieur, the photo had been sent by the architect Hannes Meyer who had composed the scene. Bearing the caption “Die Wohnung,” (The Apartment) the photo was published in the journal Das Werk, as the last of a series of images accompanying Meyer’s article “Die Neue Welt” (The New World). Behne used it almost simultaneously in an essay for the popular Berlin monthly magazine Uhu, commenting: “Extreme. A modern room, which will not be to everyone’s taste.” As the two parallel publications of that year intimate, Meyer sought to position this motif of a sparsely furnished interior as the illustration of an idea. With the photo of a room, distinguished as much by the absence of people, objects, and spatial characteristics, as it is by the uniqueness of its design, he was articulating a radical, anti-bourgeois lifestyle: rather than serving to gratify needs shaped historically, architecture and design were now the means to overcome precisely these constraints. What Behne interpreted as a matter of taste, constituted a general standard for Meyer. For Co-op. Interieur was not the draft of an interior design, but a manifesto for a different principle of living and thus for a new world."

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