Authenticity

“The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it…Why is it so important–what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right–so long as it’s not yourself?”  excerpt from “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, quoted from Trend Trafficking

“More than sixty years after ‘The Fountainhead’ was published, the ‘sophistication of clean lines’ is the prevailing theme in the Manhattan triplex that Michael Rabin completely re-designed for his eldest daughter. The biggest drawback of the original space gave rise to its most stunning attribute:  a light fixture made of hand-blown glass bulbs that illuminates two out of the three floors as well as the newly installed staircase. What began as a practical solution to the need for more light is now the centerpiece and a work of ingenious design. Any man can make a copy but it takes vision to manufacture beauty from defective qualities.” Trend Trafficking

“I often think that he’s [Howard Roark] the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict–and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass.”  excerpt from “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, quoted from Trend Trafficking

“In addition to being an inspired painter, [Juliana Lazzaro] is also an astute detective, and intuitively sees people for who they are instead of how they would like to been seen. There is integrity and authenticity in all that she does. Out of all of the people I have ever met, she is one of the few that has aspects of Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ and the epitome of the “prime mover.”  Juliana Lazzaro: Art in Motion

“As Matthew was obsessed with photography, Heidi remembers that his apartment was also his studio. The bathroom was a make-shift dark room and he had dead animals strewn about, his subjects at the time. Another woman might have run away screaming but Heidi was intrigued.”  Matthew Benson: The Seductive Farmer