Art, like a chemical reaction, can transmute one experience into another.

Treat your life like an experiment

The whole area needed to be re-planned. The buildings intended for the cemetery needed another slot in the plan; perhaps the density of the campus as a whole needed to change. To correct for these changes properly, it would have been necessary to draw an entirely new master plan. But of course a new plan was not drawn. There was neither money nor e

Adaptive life re-enters the building when it becomes too cheap for speculation. Turnover refreshes, but it also erases.

Everything about money and buildings says they are expected to live only a brief time, typically 30 years. Most mortgages go for just 25 or 30 years, and so the asset life comes to match the finance period. Just when you own it, you have to replace it.

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

presence wins

“The problems of “art” as architectural aspiration comes down to these:

• Art is proudly non-functional and impractical.

• Art reveres the new and despises the conventional.

• Architectural art sells at a distance.

Architect Peter Calthorpe maintains that many of the follies of his profession would vanish if architects simply decided that what they do is cr

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Asimov

What does it take to build something so that’s 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 already there?

Chris Alexander