Unknown Goldsmith, French, “Rectangular Snuff-box” (1725-26), gold, tortoise shell, diamonds, 3 x 8,5 x 6,5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Image via Web Gallery of Art)
In Hyperallergic this week, Allison Meier reported on a house (“the Hemnet House, or “House of Clicks,”) that was designed via 200 million clicks from 2 million visitors to a Swedish real estate website.
The visitors showed a preference for “fireplaces, an open plan kitchen, a tiled bathroom, a balcony, and an average of four rooms.” Meier writes that the architects, Tham & Videgård,”combined this data with two types of Swedish home,” described by the designers as “the red wooden cottage that represents history, local resources, crafts, and national building traditions, and the white functionalist box which stands for modernity, optimism, industrial development, the welfare state, and international ideals.”
I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.
—Lord (George Gordon) Byron
If some confectioners were willing
To let the shape announce the filling,
We’d encounter fewer assorted chocs,
Bitten into and returned to the box.—Ogden Nash
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.—Sylvia Plath, “Last Words”
When I retire I’m going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned.
—Richard Milhous Nixon
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
—Adlai Stevenson
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
—Hunter S. Thompson
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
—Truman Capote
She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks
I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar-pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black—Kurt Cobain, “Heart-Shaped Box”
