Architecture

What keeps you returning to architecture?

I’ve talked about architecture for a long time. I feel like it emerged out of questions I used to have — or answers I used to find — in the city. I used to want to write about the city all the time and a lot of my books take place in cities. Then I used to talk about the sentence as a city, as a space to... See more

Alexander is inspired by how design occurs in the natural world. "Things that are good have a certain kind of structure," he told me. "You can't get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you've got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That's why they have the qualities

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Favelas, spontaneous architecture

Rio is not known as the safest city. There are favelas 4 situated on the hillside. Yet there is a lot we can learn from them.

The architectural design of favelas is not planned. For decades, people helped each other with constructing the unit next door (on a whim it seems!), resulting in a complex and intricate... See more