("JP")

Words are a lossy medium for describing rich, multidimensional ideas.

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more

Monk’s intimate, exhaustive and poetic improvisations pioneered new languages of modern jazz and helped birth bebop as a seminal art form. “And then there was the silence. There is nothing more daunting and mysterious. We flood silence with chatter, we fill it with noise or notes rather than let it reveal what it knows or just let it be,” wrote... See more

I’m thinking about how malleable the world is, and how easy it is to forget that. The world has, many times throughout history, reconfigured itself around strong visions.

Our desires, motivations and behaviors are constantly being shaped by incentives and systems we aren’t even aware of. So much genius and money has gone into a metaphor that... See more

For those willing to wade into messy, illegible reality and consider what exists outside their simplified maps, there is a reward awaiting you: the illegible margin.

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

Stewart Brand ties the concept of "subconscious milieu" with architecture in his book "How Buildings Learn" by emphasizing the importance of designing buildings that are responsive to the needs and experiences of the people who inhabit them. He advocates for creating environments that consider the social milieu and the sensory experiences of the... See more