21/01/2011

Design


Orobanche gracilis Sm.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modern conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is ugly, because we live in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty, and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is the misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we should still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mend nothing.

H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)

3 comentários :

Virginia disse...

Parece de ouro. Tem umas semlhanças com a flor a que camavamos "boca de lobo" em criança. erá da família?
Muito bonita e carnuda. Gostava de ter umas no meu jardinzito - canteiro na varanda. Será que se dá ao ar livre?

Maria Carvalho disse...

Certamente se dá bem ao ar livre, é onde ela vive em geral (a da foto estava num dos montes do Gerês). Para a ter na sua varanda, precisa de lá colocar também algumas das plantas (leguminosas de preferência) que ela parasita, porque ela não tem folhas verdes que a alimentem.

Nós chamamos «bocas de lobo» a estas, que pertencem a outra família (Scrophulariaceae).

Alexandre disse...

De "feia" é que não tem nada. Mais um excelente apontamento sobre uma planta para conhecer.