The Concrete Oasis

The architecture of a civilization is always in communion with its technology. Its effects are deeper than just the immediate appearance of buildings: the process of technology colors everything about how a culture interacts with the world. In the early 20th century, the mathematical rationalism of inventors and engineers intermixed with the wealth... See more

It is the kind of building that when entered can make you feel infused with the opportunity of a world very different from the one you used to know. This is the essence of a futurist architecture. It is the ethic to make a building that convinces people they are living in the future.

Architecture is not an economic commodity that can be corrected by market forces, nor an engineering problem that can be honed towards an optimal solution. Architecture is a spiritual ethic, one that both shapes and is shaped by the ambient zeitgeist of the society it stands in.

Repairing this ethic is a task that defies any straightforward approach. Solving it is not a matter of devising elegant theories or highly specified plans, but instead observing what stirs within when you encounter a piece of architecture.

But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more precarious. The reason we dislike contemporary architecture is because it fails to achieve this essential purpose, to, as the architect Antonio Sant’Elia put it, “freely and audaciously harmonize man with his environment”.

What Le Corbusier understood about architecture is that it must always confront the present. The need for shelter is deeply ingrained in us, that sense of “being at home” that we can always intuit when we feel safe in the place we’re residing. But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more ... See more