Architecture

Our thermal environment is as rich in cultural associations as our visual, acoustic, olfactory, and tactile environments. This book explores the potential for using thermal qualities as an expressive element in building design.

Until quite recently, building technology and design has favored high-energy-consuming mechanical methods of neutralizing the thermal environment. It has not responded to the various ways that people use, remember, and care about the thermal environment and how they associate their thermal sense with their other senses. Not only is thermal symbolism now obsolete but the modern emphasis on central heating systems and air conditioning and hermetically sealed buildings has actually damaged our thermal coping and sensing mechanisms.

Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear. This is a lamentation for lost tools and a quiet manifesto describing our desire for slowness. We write not in opposition to computers—in fact we are in the midst of bringing them into our studio—but rather it is a discussion about the importance of slowness. We write in support of slowness.

I'd never seen legible photos of any of his projects at that point, except perhaps Julian Street. I recall a strong sense of flash recognition—I had no time to reason out the characteristics or perform an analysis. It wasn't any small set of things. My mind simply shouted, "this one," and I believed it.

Christopher Alexander turned to me and said simply, "Yes."

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings and streets we’re surrounded by.

And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be – and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

Raking sunlight is a fantastic way to get information about a facade. Any out-of-plane geometry is immediately visible as a shadow. You can see the natural irregularity of a brick wall...and a bulge that might indicate steel damage.

I have on occasion waited around longer than I care to admit for the sun to get to the position necessary to rake the facade.

One of the most underrated and fascinating parts of McMurdo is its patchwork evolution over the decades.

This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs.

The buildings reflect this patchwork approach. Each building has its own unique style, based on when it was built, the standards at the time, the parties involved in its construction and operation, and what role it plays in town.

Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the doors to the buildings. I thought I’d share a collection of my favorite doors, to give a sense of what it’s like on a day-to-day basis doing the most basic task around town: entering and exiting buildings.

An illustrated account of the development of urban form, written by Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), who was the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970. The work looks at the many aspects that influence city design, including spatial form, interactions between humans, nature and the built environment, perception of favorable environments, color, and perspective. Bacon also explores the growth of cities from early Greek and Roman times to Philadelphia's design in the 1960s. It is considered a seminal text on urban planning.

Shigeru Ban Architects has innovated in wood for over 35 years, creating inspiring spaces that have a positive impact on building inhabitants, communities, and the environment. The firm has built over 65 wood and mass timber projects, from prefabricated plywood houses to parametrically modeled glulam gridshells.

Timber in Architecture presents the trajectory of 45 works from concept through construction, demonstrating the challenges and merits of wood buildings through essays, technical drawings, and photographs.

Unno is deeply concerned with providing simple methods of construction that people can use to build houses for themselves. These concerns originate in the events of the Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, and in his profound spirit of generosity. He has developed several different yet related URC methods of forming cast-in-place walls. All of these methods provide large reductions in the materials consumed in construction. Most noteworthy perhaps is his method of using sheets of rigid insulation in place of plywood on the flat side of a fabric-cast wall, while using a plastic netting as a formwork membrane on the ‘finished’ side. The insulation, which is captured by the concrete cast against it, provides an insulated structural wall with essentially zero construction waste as no plywood or other disposable rigid mold materials are required.

The tower is just a common grater. It is not used to look out toward a distant world from above, but only to slice, grind and grate its surroundings.

Anyone who stepped inside would see an irremediably cold, metallic, empty void, and a few scattered holes where the world literally seeps through in pieces. It is a sad project.

There was a fence with spaces you
Could look through if you wanted to.

An architect who saw this thing
Stood there one summer evening,

Took out the spaces with great care
And built a castle in the air.

The fence was utterly dumbfounded:
Each post stood with nothing round it.

I posited in an earlier work that when you look through an information-theoretic lens, the fifteen properties [of The Nature of Order] cluster around three categories of conveying information, compressing information, and throttling information to facilitate uptake—a connection we will surely be revisiting. This falls in line with the semiotic aspect of the properties, in their capacity to communicate their significance just by looking at them.

So that's the program: one property per issue, mapped onto software. Then a conclusory, synthesis issue the end—at least one, or however many it takes to make sense of what we surface. Thanks for being part of the journey.

But over the past decade, Boston has fallen ill with a grave case of the Architecture of Right Now. Featureless glass — or even worse, plastic-cladded — high-rises in a minimalist or deconstructive style have been steadily replacing or crowding out beloved older buildings. As the new structures, which overwhelmingly lack traditional architectural elements or ornamentation, ooze across more of what used to be a defiantly unique cityscape, the overall effect is like that of being conquered by especially tasteless barbarians.

An archive of artist' homes and studios around the world.

There are many ways of learning and traveling. We found that we navigated towards destinations where we gain insight into our own time by transcending ourselves and experiencing other people’s lives in different times in history.

Whether it’s Georgia O’Keffee’s home and studio in the desert in New Mexico,
the Eames’s modernistic home in the hilly sides of LA,
or Philip Johnson’s the Glasshouse in Connecticut,
we learn from the places we visit.

We are fascinated by their life work, the aesthetics and details of their places, the philosophy they lived by and the conversations we imagined they had with like-minded artists and friends.

The project is located on the MIT Campus and will be a “Student Hub” containing restaurants, large event spaces, and smaller study spaces.

If there is a larger takeaway here perhaps it is about paths of least resistance, with regards to both the actual flow of water and design decisions. On the one hand, it is easy to blindly follow regional precedents and traditions with long histories (or grab whatever is handy at the hardware store). On the other hand, sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and decide consciously how to reveal (or conceal) a natural process.

This isn't an attack on capital M Minimalism, which is a conscious design movement. Like the Minimalist music of the composer Philip Glass, which is frankly beautiful.

What I'm talking about is unconscious, small m minimalism. Which has become the social default for seemingly every design choice, whether architectural or corporate or anything else.

It is a troubling phenomenon because of what minimalism represents: a lack of detail.

For the first time in history, many high-status buildings have little or no ornament. Although a trained eye will recognize more ornamental features in modern architecture than laypeople do, as a broad generalization it is obviously true that we ornament major buildings far less than most architectural cultures did historically. This has been celebrated by some and lamented by others. But it is inarguable that it has greatly changed the face of all modern settlements. To the extent that we care about how our towns and cities look, it is of enormous importance.

The naive explanation for the decline of ornament is that the people commissioning and designing buildings stopped wanting it, influenced by modernist ideas in art and design. In the language of economists, this is a demand-side explanation: it has to do with how buyers and designers want buildings to be. The demand-side explanation comes in many variants and with many different emotional overlays. But some version of it is what most people, both pro-ornament and anti-ornament, naturally assume.

However, there is also a sophisticated explanation. The sophisticated explanation says that ornament declined because of the rising cost of labor. Ornament, it is said, is labor-intensive: it is made up of small, fiddly things that require far more bespoke attention than other architectural elements do. Until the nineteenth century, this was not a problem, because labor was cheap. But in the twentieth century, technology transformed this situation. Technology did not make us worse at, say, hand-carving stone ornament, but it made us much better at other things, including virtually all kinds of manufacturing and many kinds of services. So the opportunity cost of hand-carving ornament rose. This effect was famously described by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s, and in economics it is known as Baumol’s cost disease.

Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

In Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects, Juhani Pallasmaa delivers an insightful and expansive collection of his most compelling ideas into architecture’s position among arts and culture. Pallasmaa speaks to architecture students and young professionals, discussing each topic with sincerity and openness, suggesting what can be learned from areas of culture beyond the boundaries of familiar professional disciplines. He outlines the growing need for an architecture based in self-awareness, reconnection to the environment, and a sense of ethical responsibility.

The house’s structure is divided into two main volumes connected by a corridor, framing the courtyard and the jacaranda tree. The front volume houses the service areas and bedrooms, while the rear volume contains the living room, dining area, and the indoor swimming pool.

The lost art of drawing for engineers and architects.

Inventing kindergarten is the first comprehensive book about the origin of kindergarten, a revolutionary educational program for children that was created in the 1830s by charismatic German educator Friedrich Froebel. Froebel's kindergarten was the most successful system for teaching children about art, design, mathematics, and natural history ever devised. Kindergarten changed the world, and this book tells its story.

Towards the middle of the 12th century, a Scottish theologian named Richard moved across the Channel to Paris and to the Abbey of Saint Victor.

...Richard’s drawings are like nothing made before. They are precocious in pointing to a masterful visualisation of space long before the language of architectural drawing was systematised. Richard used recent developments in geometry to fully articulate the relationship between the plans and elevations: in fact, the drawings represent the beginning of architectural abstraction in the West, not because he uses plans and elevations, but because he uses them together to give readers a real sense of the buildings’ three dimensions. As far as we know, no one in Europe had done this previously.

The film traces the rise of one of the world's premier architects, Norman Foster, and his unending quest to improve the quality of life through design.

In architecture, a folly is a costly, generally nonfunctional building that was erected to enhance a natural landscape. Follies first gained popularity in England, and they were particularly in vogue during the 18th and early 19th centuries, when landscape design was dominated by the tenets of Romanticism. Thus, depending on the designer’s or owner’s tastes, a folly might be constructed to resemble a medieval tower, a ruined castle overgrown with vines, or a crumbling Classical temple complete with fallen, eroded columns.

Photographic survey of the Barbican Estate, London, starting with the pillars.
Shot on a Mamiya RZ Pro II using a 6x6 film back.

To sum up: there’s a few reasons to believe that stone construction could theoretically be cheaper than concrete or steel, based on the fact that stone could have simpler supply chains and construction process, and be less energy intensive to produce. And there's a small group of architects and engineers (most of whom are talking their own book) advocating for the material. But the theoretical lower cost of stone is partly based on intuitions that don't take into account economies of scale, which can make added process steps and long supply chains surprisingly inexpensive. Highly processed materials like OSB can be as cheap or cheaper than “raw” ones like dimensional lumber, and it's not clear if structural stone could be produced as cheaply as concrete or steel, even if automation greatly improved.

A duck is a building whose confirmation is a complete symbol or icon. A decorated shed is a building to which symbols, often commonplace signs, have been attached.

A ha-ha (French: hâ-hâ or saut de loup), also known as a sunk fence, blind fence, ditch and fence, deer wall, or foss, is a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side. The name comes from viewers' surprise when seeing the construction.

The design can include a turfed incline that slopes downward to a sharply vertical face (typically a masonry retaining wall). Ha-has are used in landscape design to prevent access to a garden by, for example, grazing livestock, without obstructing views. In security design, the element is used to deter vehicular access to a site while minimising visual obstruction.

Las Vegas was regarded as a "non-city" and as an outgrowth of a "strip", along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles, and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered. The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the "duck" and "decorated shed."

Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.

Our goal in archiving the work of Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure is to make it accessible throughout the world to all those who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive.

The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”

After the Fair puts in focus the Yugoslavian Pavilion at the International Vienna Fair and recalls absent images of the pavilion and the absence of an euphoric projection of a happier future which should be built after the recent historic trauma. The exhibition in its archtectonically determined space of the Georg Kargl BOX cannot reconstruct these 'events', however it can bring up questions as a kind of an inventory making.

For his part, Gehry has noted in defense of his recent museum extravaganzas: "artists want to be in an important building, not a neutral one." At Dia:Beacon, Irwin pursued the opposite logic. As Govan has pointed out: "The money was spent to make it look like nothing was done to the building." Or, as a partner from Open Office observes: "We talked often about the idea of doing nothing with precision. Do it right and they'll never know we were here." As one critic has written, what the result showed was, as he puts it, "Irwin's unwavering conviction that museum spaces should serve the art and not the other way around."

Any time you have a big built-up section, the question arises of how to actually assemble it. That’s shop work, so it was a bit easier than field riveting, but it’s quite easy to draw something that can’t physically be built.

It’s a long angled reach to the center-web connection, and it’s a tight fit to the side web connection because of those protruding steel angles. I expect the shop drawings had notes about sequencing to prevent – and I say this with absolutely no experience of having done so – having to take your IKEA furniture apart because you put a piece in wrong and can’t finish assembly.

Dieste's unique and innovative method of design, a melding of architecture and engineering, elevated these often humble buildings to masterworks of art.

A city block on Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The block is noted for having buildings by four of Barcelona's most important Modernista architects, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Enric Sagnier, in close proximity. As the four architects' styles were very different, the buildings clash with each other and the neighboring buildings.

In this collection of idiosyncratic lessons, architect and teacher Pier Paolo Tamburelli engages with the very foundations of architecture, proposing a series of new and open-ended perspectives on how we build the world. Developed for the ‘Grundkurs’, or ‘basic course’, at Vienna Technical University, Tamburelli’s lessons are presented through the annotated sketches that form the basis of his lectures – variously rough and precise, sarcastic and sincere, and always uniquely expressive.

This project is an abridged, hyper-textual, and copyleft manifestation of the 1977 architecture classic A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience.

...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia.

I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.

Once you spend enough time in either of these domains, you also start seeing a world that feels like a secret place that most others don’t experience. I’ll admit that I scrutinize a restaurant’s choice in foliage a little more than I should — what plants they have, where they are, and whether they look healthy. Similarly, I can’t help but notice whether any care has been taken with the menu’s typography and the interior design decisions. I fully recognize how ridiculous this is, but I still find myself having to resist those details from coloring my overall experience.

Forms which have a high degree of life tend to contain some type of interlock – a “hooking into” their surroundings – or an ambiguity between element and context, either case creating a zone belonging to both the form and to its surroundings, making it difficult to disentangle the two.

The interlock, or ambiguity, strengthens the centers on either side, which are intensified by the new center formed between the two.

Industrial in construction, [the polikatoikias] were still aligned to a traditional street in densely packed urban neighborhoods, with differing building heights and lengths giving a haphazard, un-regimented impression.

The state contributed little or no cash to these buildings, but it did place limits on some aspects of their design. It ensured, for example, that any polikatoikia rising above six floors was set back in tiers from that floor upwards. This created a characteristic Athenian roof-scape, in which little ziggurats of penthouse-style flats, with broad wrap-around terraces, could be found topping many buildings, even in less wealthy areas.

The resulting variety of apartments within the same building ensured a good deal of social mixing. “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor. And the polikatoikias in the richest and the poorest areas were more or less the same building.”

The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society.

The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city.

If you are there at sunset, as are the scientists every day, you see the most magical of transformations: the golden glow that fills the sky to the west is first reflected in the water of the ocean and then shoots like a line of fire up through the gathering darkness of the plaza's stone floor, to reach its source in the cubic fountain. The court is breathtaking in its sublime power, opening at the edge of the continent to the Pacific Ocean and framing the light blue-on-dark-blue horizon line of the sea and sky.

This rental property includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed.

...Writing sheds don’t make the specific cognitive act of writing easier...but these sheds do seem to improve many of the general factors that surround this act.

...When it comes to cognitive work more generally, psychological factors matter. Whether you’re writing a book, or crafting computer code, or solving a business problem, or analyzing noisy data, you’re attempting to coax sustained abstract focus from a human brain not necessarily evolved for such intensely symbolic processing.

An architect who needs complete and consistent requirements to begin work, though perhaps a brilliant builder, is not an architect.

The modernist architect Le Corbusier was an admirer of American grain elevators, suggesting that their regularity and modularity could serve as a model for other kinds of buildings. At least one later architect took the suggestion seriously. The Quaker Square Inn in Akron, Ohio, occupies the shell of a former elevator. If you're in town for the night, you can rent a round room in one of the silos.

In the last half of Brosterman’s book...things really start to take off. Because that’s where he starts placing images of constructions or parquet work or sewing pages by unknown five-year-olds of the 1880s side by side with avant-garde masterpieces from the 1910s and 1920s—works by Albers and Mondrian and Kandinsky and Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright and Gropius and Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller—and you can hardly tell the difference.

And indeed, as Brosterman mines the biographies and memoirs and late-career interviews of all of these twentieth-century masters, it turns out that, in case after case, they had a hugely influential mother or uncle or neighbor who taught kindergarten, that they’d all attended kindergarten, and each one in his own way testified that the germ of his entire vocation had been planted in those kindergarten experiences

...What we are given to understand across Brosterman’s and now Wertheim’s and Kuhn’s work is nothing less than the way many of the greatest avant-garde breakthroughs of the twentieth century were being incubated in the kindergarten classrooms of the nineteenth.

I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn't need to be big; it didn't even need to be beautiful – it just needed to be mine.

I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house.

In 1964, the historian Bernard Rudofsky curated a show at MoMA called Architecture Without Architects, celebrating the formal qualities of a range of traditional building practices drawn from around the world.

Setting aside the endlessly troubled implications of the Western gaze on “primitive” cultures, the show had the very constructive impacts of encouraging formal diversity at a time when mainstream architecture had grown desperately, myopically monochromatic and of suggesting that “non-architects” were capable not only of making good judgments about their environments but of actually taking the lead in creating them.

Conceptually speaking, architects have come a long way: from the house as a machine, to the house as a machine in the garden, to the garden as a machine for living in, now scaled to the entire planet itself. But considering the current state of the environment, our terrestrial habitat is in need of repair at all scales. Affirming what should be obvious, the obligation to steward our habitat should become all the more binding. Though written some decades ago, Siza’s short reflection on a house’s need for care bears particularly heavily on our ill-fitted relationship to the built and natural environment today, that is, on our relationship to the world we have made and the world we inhabit. It is this relationship itself that is long in need of repair and, though widely acknowledged, that is not being tended to as one would a home.

I cannot get past the fact that any *designer* who throws that phrase around matter-of-factly, as in “of course form follows function”, comes out as a complete ignoramus. An ignoramus who's not just repeating an 1896 “law” without any clues as to what it means but who also, most poignantly, demonstrates to possess no knowledge of what has happened in design and architecture since Sullivan and Adler contributed to inventing the high rise building and, by extension, much of the world we live in.

In the framework of The Nature of Order Webinar, we will hold a series of lectures discussing aspects of the four books and evaluating Alexander's theoretical and practical contributions.

Contemporary architects are, however, increasingly engaging with ornamentation. The zenith was Grayson Perry and Charles Holland of FAT’s fairytale House for Essex (p64), but it does not serve as an indicator because the involvement of an artist has allowed an enhanced engagement with ornament until it surpasses mere decoration and becomes embodied in the architecture in a way that architects do not allow themselves to do. Think of FAT’s old work: the ornament is all contained within a surface - a facade - which allowed them to separate out the (Modernist) architecture from the (kitsch) superficiality of the elevation. Like Venturi before them, their ornament allowed them to have their ornamentally iced cake - and eat the Minimal Modernist sponge underneath.

When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr has called this particular self-deception, “The doctrine of salvation by bricks.”

The past century of architectural history can be understood as a continual diminishing of the architect’s domain of expertise, which has been fragmented away and delegated to a vast body of adjacent specialists —  structural consultants, glazing consultants, energy consultants, lighting consultants, acoustics consultants, security consultants, waterproofing consultants, to name a few — whose necessity is demanded from often already bloated budgets, and whose number grows exponentially with the increasing scale of any given project. 

Under these conditions, architects themselves seem to have little left from which to derive their own disciplinary legitimacy. Our only domain of authority that so far remains relatively unscathed by this fragmentation seems to be our supposed ability to subordinate the chaos of material, labor, and business to a delicious and delicate mirage of meaning. One way we construct this mirage is through detail.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries architects not only paid attention to internal arrangements, but subordinated the designs for the exterior to them. The usages of life dictated the arrangement and the arrangement suggested the form of the building. This was the dominant principle in times of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Anxiety and alienation is the modern condition. The point of architecture is to constantly remind you of it. I feel anxious. I want buildings to make you anxious!

The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853.

The Stones of Venice examines Venetian architecture in detail, describing for example over eighty churches. Ruskin discusses architecture of Venice's Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, and provides a general history of the city.

On the night of May 10, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. Having dwelt and served for more than forty years in the late Chamber, and having derived very great pleasure and advantage therefrom, I, naturally, should like to see it restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity.

SUBTĪLITĀS (latin; noun f., 3rd):
fineness of texture, logic, detail; slenderness, exactness, acuteness; sharpness : precision

Buttresses, Ruskin writes, are structures against pressure: a cathedral’s walls want to fall outward, for example, pushed aside by the relentless weight of the roof. But this gravitational pressure can be stabilized by an exoskeleton: a sequence of buttresses that will prevent those walls from collapsing outward.

However, Ruskin points out, there is a similar kind of pressure from the waves of the sea. Think of the curved hull of a ship, he writes, which is internally buttressed against the “crushing force” of the ocean around it. It is a kind of inside-out cathedral.

Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them.

The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own."

It’s popular to point out that our phones never appear in our dreams. I’ve always believed this is because our devices frame our reality so comprehensively that we imagine we live inside them, and only in dreams do we escape the physical constraints that break the illusion…In physical space, despite our best efforts, the screen always ends somewhere. And like our dreams, virtual reality also promises a screen-free reality, with the frame sufficiently expanded. But the Sphere suggests a different possibility: We love the screens themselves, so much that even within our virtual worlds we’ll still build new screens to look at.

Both a book and a MoMA exhibition of the same name by Bernard Rudofsky originally published in 1964. It provides a demonstration of the artistic, functional, and cultural richness of vernacular architecture.

In 200 enlarged black-and-white-photographs, he showed various kinds of architectures, landscapes, and people living with or within architectures. Shown without texts or explanations, the visitors were just confronted with imagery that showed indigenous building traditions, which were very much at odds with the ideas of architectural modernism which had been promoted through NYC MoMA's Philip Johnson in his famous 1932 exhibition "Modern Architecture. International Exhibition".

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art.

This brilliantly engaging book may actually be one of the first to describe and discuss what might be architecture’s true value at this pivotal point in our own history: seeing that everything is connected, and artfully hosting that complexity, before constructively plotting routes towards clarity, pinned up on broad civic, ethical foundations.

So Architects after Architecture, as the title suggests, is not about buildings. Or at least not always, not directly. Buildings are simply one of the ways that this complex yet constructive sensibility might exert itself, but they are certainly not the only way, nor are they always the most potent – as muf’s Liza Fior makes clear here, when she says “the answer to a brief is not necessarily a building.”

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

In today's architectural practice, light is regrettably often treated merely as a quantitative phenomenon; design regulations and standards specify required minimum level of illumination and window sizes, but they do not define any maximum levels of luminance, or desired qualities of light, such as its orientation, temperature, color, or reflectedness.

Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.

Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."

In this episode, we talk about the work of architect, builder, and design theorist Christopher Alexander. Joining us are two of Alexander’s former students, Susan Ingham and Chris Andrews. They talk about their philosophy of architecture and their program, Building Beauty, which offers a post-graduate diploma in architecture based around Alexander's ideas.

Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself.

We look at the collective outcome of millions of decisions made by thousands of individuals and give it a name. A mixture of shared beliefs and aesthetics and traditions and a collective nous emergent from the behaviour of those in the city and their actions. We might as well call it the soul. And even if you're not Calvino, or Neil Gaiman, you ascribe a soul to those cities.

Souls of course are hard to talk about these days. They’re invisible, and rather gauche to discuss in polite company. Jung used to talk about the soul as granting meaning, linking us to the divine, leaving the dead matter as an artificial abstraction.

But we do talk around it a lot. Modern architecture lacks style and beauty and soul. Modern literature seems to live in the shadow of the greats from the past. Poetry is not the same, as is philosophy in so many ways. Not just in an individual’s output, the golden ages are gone. The very idea of a job seems to no longer have the meaning it once did. The culture is devoid of the human connection and too into screens.

We even say it about organisations. Google lost its culture, Facebook isn't what it used to be. The government as a whole has lost its soul. The institutions that helped us reach the civilisation we live in seem to have lost their lustre.

You don’t have to believe all of this, I sure don’t, but the fact that they are felt constantly and needs to be refuted regularly is evidence of our constant yearning for something.

Reading Design is an online archive of critical writing about design. The idea is to embrace the whole of design, from architecture and urbanism to product, fashion, graphics and beyond. The texts featured here date from the nineteenth century right up to the present moment but each one contains something which remains relevant, surprising or interesting to us today.

In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.

The ability to significantly extend the functionality of the product via firmware upgrades feels like it‘s increasingly possible to reveal new devices from within the existing device. It’s almost as if one simple firmware upgrade had me sensing that battery life had just increased, that there were additional functions, that I felt like I had a whole new iPod. The physical aspects of the product—control wheel, four navigation/select buttons, screen and a couple of ports—are abstract enough to enable improvements by simply remapping new elements of the software.

In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

In other cases, the limitations on material reduction have more to do with building form. Most buildings, for instance, are rectangles that contain a series of rectangular rooms, because of the many benefits of this sort of arrangement. A rectangular room is easy to use (since you can push furniture flush against the walls), easy to build, packs tightly together against other rectangular rooms, and so on. Technically circle or sphere-shaped buildings would be more materially efficient (requiring less material to enclose a given amount of space), but while in some cases you see this (such as with pressurized storage tanks or the brief fad of octagonal houses in the 19th century), in general the material savings is not worth the added construction complexity, cost, and loss of convenience.

With architectural elements, we see the same general phenomenon, where further material reductions come with performance tradeoffs. In general, thick, heavy materials feel better than lighter, flimsy materials, and all else being equal people prefer the former to the latter. This is one of the reasons that drywall substitutes like vinyl on gypsum have had limited appeal, and why people still want tiled bathrooms even though fiberglass or acrylic are probably superior from a pure performance perspective.

For the burglar, every building is infinite.

The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of the neglect of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system.

The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.

Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.

Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis proposes that the differences between the left and right hemispheres are not functional but embody opposing approaches to the world: the left sees an atomized world made of things to be controlled and manipulated for survival; the right sees an interconnected world of wholes with which it is deeply related. McGilchrist observes that in recent centuries, there has been an increasing shift in the West towards the left hemisphere’s approach…Alexander observed that today’s built environment is an expression of our civilization seeing the world as a giant mechanism made of parts rather than an indivisible whole.

We began as a platform to collect and spread the most important information for architects seeking to build a better world. Today, we are an ever-evolving tool for anybody who has a passion and determination to shape the world around them, including the 13.6 million readers that visit ArchDaily every month.

I wanted students to see where a built space takes away some freedoms — enforcing the moderation and contentment that mitigates all-screens-all-the-time, for example — and thereby opens up other freedoms. A no-laptops policy means you can’t get a certain kind of work done, but it does mean everyone present will be a little more eyes-up-and-talking, or maybe absorbed by a book or notebook. The activities will be at the speed of the body, one to another. Is it nostalgic and precious? Maybe. But it’s not the only café in town to make this move, and I think there’s some signal there. Faro started out with no-laptops only on weekends, and the policy was welcome enough to make it a daily norm.

...I want architecture students to see that the flexible, modular, all-purpose and all-choices box of a room isn’t always what’s called for. It sounds right — surely your client wants a space that could be anything you need it to be — but unprogrammed space is often tractionless, characterless. A city should contain a whole panoply of richly imagined and specific spaces, containers built with interior features for freedoms and limits alike. McPherson calls us to a life with “enhanced autonomy”— a life with choices that are also informed by our loyalty to the given, unchosen world — what we might just call living with obligations. I’d like to see designers take a renewed look at limits in their partnership for civic goods: rules that constrain and liberate.

Spolia, the Latin word for ‘spoils’, are defined as architectural fragments taken out of their original context and reused in a different context; essentially, pieces of structures transplanted into different structures. An example of unintentional usage of spolia is the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (modern-day Bodrum in Turkey). Following its burial due to an earthquake, both the Knights of St John and the Turks, who later settled in the region, viewed the former monument as a convenient source of construction materials, using spolia to build a castle and houses, respectively.

As teachers of architectural design, Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore have attempted to introduce architecture from the standpoint of how buildings are experienced, how the affect individuals and communities emotionally and provide us with a sense of joy, identity, and place. In giving priority to these issues and in questioning the professional reliance on abstract two-dimensional drawings, they often find themselves in conflict with a general and undebated assumption that architecture is a highly specialized system with a set of prescribed technical goals, rather than a sensual social art historically derived from experiences and memories of the human body. This book, an outgrowth of their joint teaching efforts, places the human body at the center of our understanding of architectural form.

Body, Memory, and Architecture traces the significance of the body from its place as the divine organizing principle in the earliest built forms to its near elimination from architectural thought in this century. The authors draw on contemporary models of spatial perception as well as on body-image theory in arguing for a return of the body to its proper place in the architectural equation.

One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.

Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.

The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.

In response to their growing sense of insignificance, some architects have tried to regain a sense of power through what can best be described as mysticism. By importing arcane ideas from unrelated disciplines—such as contemporary French literary theory (now outdated) —by developing illegible techniques of representation, and by shrouding their work in inscrutable jargon, designers are creating increasingly smaller realms of communication, in order that they might inhabit a domain in which they possess some degree of control. Nowhere is this crisis more evident than in the most prestigious architecture schools.

In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm.