Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a...
When Brian Eno approached the father of Anthea Norman-Taylor for permission to marry her, he was told, What you have to ask yourself is, ‘Would I wish this woman to be the grandmother of my grandchild...
The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survi...
It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the...
What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is...
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Bateson proposed that the metaphor of mother Earth is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it we...
Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purit...
Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space becomes completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero.
The product of careful continuity is love....Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well.
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