Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
Alain de BottonTags: complexity architecture chaos building order
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)
Alain de BottonTags: complexity elegance simplicity intuition architecture design complicated construction
We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.
Alain de BottonTags: nature architecture houses land homes
We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.
Jonathan RabanTags: inspirational citizenship architecture sustainability
The only direction not represented in their construction was vertical.
Lee BattersbyTags: humor architecture construction
Modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.
Beatriz ColominaTags: media architecture
Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity.
Henry SpencerTags: complexity elegance architecture engineering brute-force
[The building] had been designed by an architect, so it bore little resemblance to any normal structure.
Gary CorbyTags: humor architecture
Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us.
Leslie WeismanTags: feminism architecture
What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.
“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”
He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him.
“I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”
“Reflections?” he asked quietly.
“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.
Tags: romance architecture chicago city the-cityscape-series
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