Appropriation: Back Then, In Between, and Today

Putting one's ear onto the railway tracks (there weren't any nearby) or on the telegraph poles, or peering through the ice at the frozen lake fired the imagination. Since 1942, in front of our house there stood giant electromagnetic listening dishes for the sky. The tin cans of shoe polish with the frog on the lid, two connected with a long piece of string and used as a telephone, back then, by us kids, glorious, praise the Lord. "2 To exemplify this process, one might turn to the realm of architecture and to Gottfried Semper's theory of Stoffwechsel, of material transformation, whereby the same motif is appropriated and reappropriated over the centuries, moving from simple materials and structures to new materials and more complex structures, while constantly maintaining a visible link to the archetypal form. [...]the ropes and knots used to construct the primeval hut and the garlands used to decorate it survive over the aeons as architectural motifs that move through material transformations: from cloth to wood, from wood to stone, or from stone to iron and steel.