The Concrete Oasis
Do monuments or buildings have revolutionary potential? How? My sense is that architecture is not a driver of culture, but a lagging reflection. At one point, architects could move the cultural needle, but I think that reality, if it ever actually existed beyond romanticism, is long gone, since probably before the 20th century. Architecture is uniq
... See moreHe’s an architect’s architect; he told me he’s interested in how buildings can help do the metaphysical work of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called true dwelling—a social triad made of people, one to another and in their environments.
Sara Hendren • What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt t... See more
Venkatesh Rao • A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
The perennial driver of haste is what is called “the time value of money.” To be an attractive investment, a building must earn at a rate greater than the interest paid on its purchase and construction loans. The project has to make money fast. More developers are done in by payments on their loans than by any other cause. This they insist on bliet
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