Keane Moraes

The magic is in falling in. Burning the bridges. Sinking the boats.

Some things in life you only get if you're all in .

Beyond a muscle, writing also acts as a membrane —something that straddles our inner and outer worlds.

This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive.

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”.

. The Rotumans did not see children as people who needed to be brought up - they did not need to be helped along by adults - but were more akin to some kind of dogs. They sniffed out what was useful and valued in the culture, and then they devoured it.

Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time.

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.