Last July I read a book about the Great Depression. In it they described a carnival tent, kept at arm's length from the others, where men would gather at night. And they would peer through a gauzy curtain to watch a woman lie on a fainting couch and await the coming dawn. The men could not make out her face, or even if she was truly beautiful, but

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

"The Big Bang may have been a large cosmic rebound (or "Big Bounce"), in which a contracting universe reaches the maximum density allowed by the quanta, then rebounds and begins to expand. In the case of a black hole, it is just the star rather than the entire universe that bounces, but the physics is similar: at extremely high density the quanta a

“All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity; they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time.”

• Anaximander

“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

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

Numbers, techniques, and predictions are useful for suggesting, testing, confirming, and putting discoveries to use. But there is nothing technical about the content of the discoveries. The universe does not revolve around the Earth. All the matter that surrounds us is just made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons. There are one hundred billion

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Asimov

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.

“Form ever follows function” (Louis Sullivan) contra positioned with “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” (Churchill)