From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography (Otto Neurath)

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) wrote From hieroglyphics to Isotype during the last two years of his life and this is the first publication of the text in full, carefully edited from the original manuscripts. He called it a 'visual autobiography', in which he documents the importance of visual material to him from his earliest years to his professional activity with the picture language of Isotype. Neurath draws clear links between the stimulus he received as a boy from illustrated books, toys and exhibitions to the considered work in visual education that occupied him for the last two decades of his life. This engaging and informal account gives a rich picture of Central European culture around the turn of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Neurath's insatiable intelligence, as well as a detailed exposition of the technique of Isotype, a milestone of modern graphic design. This edition includes the numerous illustrations intended by Neurath to accompany his text, and is completed by an extensive appendix showing examples from the rich variety of graphic material that he collected.

A primer of Mayan hieroglyphics,

Mode of access: Internet.

A historical view of the Hindu astronomy, from the earliest dawn of that science in India to the present time. In two parts. Part I. The ancient astronomy. Part II. The modern astronomy, with an explanation of the apparent cause of its introduction, and the various impositions that followed. To which are added, I. Hindu tables of equations. II. Remarks on the Chinese astronomy. III. Translations of certain hieroglyphics, called the Zodiacs of Dendera.

Mode of access: Internet.

Rudiments of a vocabulary of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Mode of access: Internet.

Reflections from damaged modernity

The cliché about modern architecture being the fairy-tale fulfillment of every fantasy ceases to be a cliché only when it is accompanied by the fairy tale’s moral: that the fulfillment of the wishes rarely engenders goodness in the one doing the wishing (Adorno). Wishing for the right things in architecture and the city is the most difficult art of all: since the grim childhood-tales of the twentieth century we have been weaned from dreams and utopias, the stuff of modernism’s bad conscience. For Adorno writing in 1953, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition (mimesis) of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics,” like the archaic language of pictures in Ancient Egypt which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. Arguably, today the iconic architecture industry is the executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality. As I will argue in this symposium, such buildings are not a reflection of external ‘reality,’ but regression to an internal architectural polemic that secretly carries out the rituals of modernism’s death and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history.

The chapters of Coming forth by day : the Egyptian text according to the Theban recension in hieroglyphic edited from numerous papyri, with a translation, vocabulary, etc. /

pt. 1. Egyptian text in hieroglyphics.--pt.2. Vocabulary.--pt. 3. Translation.

Lettre à Mr. Charles Coquerel, sur le systême hiéroglyphique de Mr. Champollion : considéré dans ses rapports avec l'Écriture Sainte /

Includes bibliographical references.