("JP")

While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an essay called “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman—itself one of the best and most consequential architectural texts of the past decade (download the complete PDF).

The outcome of these visionary projects, as described in detail by Scott, is nearly always a complex but dead system. A city void of life, with empty streets, unused buildings, unhealthy forests, poorer people. The high modernist visionary falls victim to their overconfidence, and skips over building the simple systems that work first.

What we want... See more

I don’t know about you, but I often feel a deep exasperation when I examine just how much my life contributes to the destruction of the earth. I travel by airplane every few months. I buy things that come in plastic packaging. Most of my clothes were produced with synthetic dyes. To try and understand how my individual actions might affect the... See more

The basis for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions,” writes Erich Fromm in The Art of Being. He refers often to awakeness, to making conscious what is repressed. To not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing, but looking, watching. You can do this anywhere, with anything.... See more

But presence also means permanent availability without any promise of compensation. It is related to the function of zero hour contracts in other sectors, even though motivations for availability are not the same. In the age of the reproducibility of almost everything physical, human presence is one of the few things that cannot be multiplied... See more

Janice Min embraces more with less

"It's not about how big you can get, but the discipline of how small you can stay."