“
Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)
“
Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
I love that your house plans for you to get muddy. Like it's in the architecture.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Landline)
“
A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.
”
”
Léon Krier (The Architecture of Community)
“
Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
”
”
Andrew Vachss (Mask Market (Burke #16))
“
Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.
”
”
David Graeber
“
the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing—unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms—is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.
”
”
Caitlin Moran (How to Build a Girl)
“
Before these buildings were buildings, they were just the skeletons of them. Before they were skeletons, they were cross-beams and girders. Metal and glass and concrete. And before that, they were construction plans. Before that, architectural plans. And before that, just an idea someone had for the making of a city.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
Great artists need great clients.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.
”
”
Kevin McCloud (Kevin McCloud's 43 Principles of Home: Enjoying Life in the 21st Century.)
“
What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.
”
”
Meghan Daum
“
In town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.
”
”
Tom Turner (Landscape Planning And Environmental Impact Design (Natural and Built Environment Series))
“
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)
“
In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.
”
”
Léon Krier (The Architecture of Community)
“
He is fascinated by their lack of conventional hierarchy or structure and loves how the forces of capital have subverted plans to control and order space.
”
”
Graham Owen (Architecture, Ethics and Globalization)
“
So far, the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing—unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms—is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.
”
”
Caitlin Moran (How to Build a Girl)
“
Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s. Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all of her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader. She read everything she could find: trash, classics, time tables and the grocer’s price list. Some
”
”
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
“
I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197
”
”
Daniel Libeskind (Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter)
“
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.
”
”
John Updike (Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism)
“
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
A smart city is an intelligent town that provides enormous possibilities for human growth through art, culture, social, architectural, economic, political, environmental, and scientific flowering with the optimal mix of nature, technology, humanity, and arts.
”
”
Amit Ray (Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity)
“
Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.
”
”
Ben Aaronovitch (Broken Homes (Peter Grant, #4))
“
In the absence of centralized decision-making, Hebrard's town plans for Indochina had no equivalent in France itself. This is because territorial development can only be thought out and implemented when political power is strong and decisions are in few hands, as was the case during the French colonial period.
”
”
Helen Grant Ross (Building Cambodia: 'New Khmer Architecture' 1953-1970)
“
The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, '
as she points out the window past me
into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories
whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, '
the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? '
and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,
the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, '
I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born
and before his grandparents' grandparents were born.
I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place
then nothing would need to be saved.'
But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice
back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out
another little piece of her country's history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time
somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.
”
”
Sherman Alexie
“
Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it’s better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.
”
”
Charles Stross (The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files, #2))
“
For a brief period of time the American electric-sign industry looked beyond its most immediate market and collaborated with store designers and architects in creating a style which became known as 'stream-line.' Later it became known as 'American Déco.' Whatever it was called or will be called in the future, it represents in terms of neon a thrust away from isolated signage toward an area of architectural ornamentation in which signage is but one element in an overall plan. — Rudi Stern
”
”
Philip Di Lemme (American Streamline: A Handbook of Neon Advertising Design)
“
It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city
”
”
Janet Frame (Scented Gardens for the Blind)
“
Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.
Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.
”
”
I.M. Pei
“
an open-plan multilayered interior like something M. C. Escher might have come up with after bingeing on too many copies of Architectural Digest,
”
”
Ellery Lloyd (The Club)
“
Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.
”
”
China Miéville
“
One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.' For both architect and patron, it's an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz's core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers' collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project's parameters are laid out.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)
“
When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.
”
”
Tom Turner (City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning)
“
There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.
”
”
Georgius Agricola (DE RE METALLICA [TRANSLATED FROM THE FIRST LATIN EDITION OF 1556])
“
Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
“
The ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star. A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England's pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence. It works as a place to watch baseball
”
”
Martin F. Nolan
“
There is a significant hereditary contribution to ADD but I do not believe any genetic factor is decisive in the emergence of ADD traits in any child. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment.
To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. Which of multiple potentials become expressed biologically is a question of life circumstances. Were we to adopt the medical model — only temporarily, for the sake of argument — a genetic explanation by itself would still be unsuitable. Medical conditions for which genetic inheritance are fully or even mostly responsible, such as muscular dystrophy, are rare.
“Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” Huntington’s is a fatal degeneration of the nervous system based on a single gene that, if inherited, will almost invariably cause the disease. But not always. Dr. Hayden mentions cases of persons with the gene who live into ripe old age without any signs of the disease itself. “Even in Huntington’s, there must be some protective factor in the environment,” Dr. Hayden says.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
To increase density in a rat population and maintain healthy specimens, put them in boxes so they can't see each other, clean their cages, and give them enough to eat. You can pile the boxes up as many stories as you wish. Unfortunately, caged animals become stupid, which is a very heavy price to pay for a super filing system!
”
”
Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension)
“
Seventy percent of US companies now use open-plan offices and hot desking in the hope that these free-form physical structures will provoke free-form thinking. This architectural determinism isn’t entirely convincing—there’s plenty of evidence that people find open workspaces noisy, distracting, and impersonal. Walking through several such workspaces recently, I couldn’t help but notice how hard everyone was working to simulate privacy. Plugged into headphones, surrounded by stacks of books and temporary dividers, defensiveness was more evident than openness. Architecture alone won’t change mindsets and tearing down physical walls won’t demolish the mental silos that trap thinking.
”
”
Margaret Heffernan (Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes (TED Books))
“
Toutefois, l'architecture musulmane connaît également un plan concentrique, celui du mausolée recouvert d'une coupole. Le prototype de ce plan se retrouve aussi bien dans l'art byzantin comme dans l'art asiatique, où il symbolise l'union du ciel et de la terre, le soubassement recangulaire correspondant à la terre et la coupole sphérique au ciel.
”
”
Titus Burckhardt (Sacred Art in East and West, 1st Edition (Wisdom Foundation Series))
“
When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase. The Glass Castle would have solar cells on the top that would catch the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity for heating and cooling and running all the appliances. It would even have its own water-purification system. Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans and most of the mathematical calculations. He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms. All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he’d start work on our Glass Castle.
”
”
Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle)
“
What is known and what is unknown is always relative because what is unexpected depends entirely upon what we expect (desire)-- on what we had previously planned and presumed. The unexpected constantly occurs because it is impossible, in the absence of omniscience, to formulate an entirely accurate model of what actually is happening or of what should happen.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief)
“
It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks ‘modern’; ergo, Japan is supremely modern.
”
”
Alex Kerr (Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan)
“
When we think of an institution, we can usually see it as embodied in a building: the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Sorbonne, the Treasury, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kremlin, the Supreme Court. What we cannot see, until we become close students of the institution, are the ways in which power is maintained and transferred behind the walls and beneath the domes, the invisible understandings which guarantee that it shall reside in certain hands but not in others, that information shall be transmitted to this one but not to that one, the hidden collusions and connections with other institutions of which it is supposedly independent. When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power, or of potential or actual violence. Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to believe that the home is a private place. Perhaps we imagine row upon row of backyards, behind suburban or tenement houses, in each of which a woman hangs out the wash, or runs to pick up a tear-streaked two-year-old; or thousands of kitchens, in each of which children are being fed and sent off to school. Or we think of the house of our childhood, the woman who mothered us, or of ourselves. We do not think of the laws which determine how we got to these places, the penalties imposed on those of us who have tried to live our lives according to a different plan, the art which depicts us in an unnatural serenity or resignation, the medical establishment which has robbed so many women of the act of giving birth, the experts—almost all male—who have told us how, as mothers, we should behave and feel. We do not think of the Marxist intellectuals arguing as to whether we produce “surplus value” in a day of washing clothes, cooking food, and caring for children, or the psychoanalysts who are certain that the work of motherhood suits us by nature. We do not think of the power stolen from us and the power withheld from us, in the name of the institution of motherhood.
”
”
Adrienne Rich (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution)
“
The scientific principles that man employs to obtain the foreknowledge of an eclipse, or of anything else relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean, it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass, it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth, it is called land surveying. In fine, it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown.
”
”
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
“
We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.
”
”
Steven Johnson (Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt)
“
...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776?
”
”
Frank Lloyd Wright (A Testament)
“
There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
To achieve these goals [of making good landscapes}, there is but one necessity: when preparing and approving plans for new places, or spending money on old places, we must look beyond the confines of each and every project. Gazing at these wider horizons, we shall see that development projects are initiated by specialists who have been imprisioned within "closely drawn technical limits" and "narrowly drawn territorial boundaries" (Weddle 1967; vii).
”
”
Tom Turner (Landscape Planning And Environmental Impact Design (Natural and Built Environment Series))
“
Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle. The space had been
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Abaddon's Gate (Expanse, #3))
“
We don't like inconveniences [...] Ignored inconveniences accumulate, rather than disappear. When they accumulate in sufficient numbers, they produce a catastrophe—a self-induced catastrophe, to be sure, but one that may be indistinguishable from an “act of God.” Inconveniences interfere with the integrity of our plans—so we tend to pretend that they are not there. Catastrophes, by contrast, interfere with the integrity of our whole stories, and massively dysregulate our emotions. By their nature, they are harder to ignore—although that does not stop us from trying to do so.
Inconveniences are common; unfortunately, so are catastrophes—self-induced and otherwise. We are adapted to catastrophes, like inconveniences, as constant environmental features. We can resolve catastrophe, just as we can cope with inconvenience—although at higher cost. As a consequence of this adaptation, this capacity for resolution, catastrophe can rejuvenate. It can also destroy.
The more ignored inconveniences in a given catastrophe, the more likely it will destroy.”.
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Jordan B. Peterson (Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief)
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What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future. The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It’s the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.
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Meghan Daum (The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion)
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It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive. I don’t blame children for fleeing those House Beautiful houses, nonshelters, dehumanized, ostentatious, rarely expressing an individual family’s way of life. When I was writing a column for Family Circle I had planned one in praise of shabbiness. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. It all comes back to the fact that we're not asked to be perfect, only human. What a relief it is to walk into a human house!
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May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)
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Petrie found nothing that disproved the pyramidologist's assumption that the Great Pyramid had been built according to a master plan. Indeed, he describes the Pyramid's architecture as being filled with extraordinary mathematical harmonies and concordances: those same strange symmetries that had so haunted the pyramidologist.
Petrie not only noted, for example, that the proportions of the reconstructed pyramid approximated to pi - which others have since elaborated to include those twin delights of Renaissance and pyramidological mathematicians, the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series ...
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John Romer (The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited)
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In the words of an interpreter, he states that the social and imaginative function of cities “is under threat from the tyranny of bad architecture, soulless planning and indifference to the basic unit of urban language, the street, and the ‘ruissellement de paroles’ (stream of words), the endless stories, which animate it. Keeping the street and the city alive depends on understanding their grammar and generating the new utterances on which they thrive. And for Bailly, the principal agency of this process is walking, what he calls the ‘grammaire generative de jambes’ (generative grammar of the legs).
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Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)
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There is danger that someday the farm land will be gone, the Downtown will be deserted, and the middle class living outside the city boundaries. If it is done intentionally, then that is our choice, but if it is allowed simply to happen without purpose, then that is ignorance. Indianapolis contains fantastic elements to become a vital city, but frequently our heritage has been destroyed in favor of cheap development and easy profits. Architects are not perfect, and many chances to improve our city have been lost. They allow the client to build structures without concern for what that building will do to the surrounding environment. The matter of conscience falls prey to the matter of making a living. A desire to improve our quality of life on the part of the client and profession will provide the best solution for all. Readers of this book, be inquisitive, explore your city, question its growth, let your feelings be known if your city is faulty, speak out if it is praiseworthy. Talk to your architects, politicians and developers; they are professionals, but they are also your servants. Use them to make your city better. Enjoy Indianapolis. It is a city to be lived in and can be taken to heart if one tries.
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Rick A. Ball (Indianapolis Architecture)
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When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work.
Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.
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Herbert A. Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial)
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Filippo, on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centering altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centering. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo’s contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible.
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Ross King (Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture)
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Natural materials always cause unforeseeable problems despite the most careful planning. They break and rot and split. Inconsistencies are both their charm and their drawback, which is precisely why the extra precaution of backing the washi paper with plastic made sense. There was no 'right way' except to admit that different views must coexist. In the end, respecting others' opinions, addressing their criticisms and acknowledging problems is the only way to get things done. If building with natural materials is to be saved, it must be accomplished with humility and hard work, not bombast and confrontation. To this day the washi paper at the Hiroshige Museum remains in good shape.
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Kengo Kuma (Kengo Kuma: Small Architecture / Natural Architecture)
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Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.
Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it’s on its last legs.
The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d’amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously.
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Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
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Now that I am almost never the youngest person in any room I realize that what I miss most about those times is the very thing that drove me so mad back when I was living in them. What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.
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Meghan Daum
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No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. Each room has a single bed in the corner, a table and chair. You may bring your laptop but there is no internet access and no telephone. There are books with a body count of zero and no suffering for anyone under the age of eight. A cinema where everything you wanted to see in the last eight years is shown at a time that allows you to have an early night afterwards. And the food, the kind of food you’re pleased to have eaten as well as pleased to eat, is made by a chef, a childless male chef, and brought to your room. You may ask him for biscuits at any moment of the day or night, send your mug back because you dislike the shape of the handle, and change your mind after ordering dinner. And there is a swimming pool, lit from below in a warm, low-ceilinged room without windows, which may be used by one mummy at a time to swim herself into dream. Oh, fuck it, I am composing a business plan for a womb with a view. So what? I’ll call it Hôtel de la Mère and the only real problem is childcare. Absent, children cause guilt and anxiety incompatible with the mission of the Hôtel; present, they prevent thought or sleep, much more swimming and the consumption of biscuits. We need to turn them off for a few days, suspend them like computers. Make them hibernate. You can’t uninvent children any more than you can uninvent the bomb.
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Sarah Moss (Night Waking)
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Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators.
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Zachary M. Schrag (The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape))
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Urban planning is a scientific, aesthetic and orderly disposition of Land, Resources, Facilities and Services with a view of securing the Physical, Economic and Social Efficiency, Health and well-being of Urban Communities. As over the years the urban population of India has been increasing rapidly, this fast tread urbanization is pressurizing the existing infrastructure leading to a competition over scare resources in the cities.
The objective of our organization is to develop effective ideas and inventions so that we could integrate in the development of competitive, compact, sustainable, inclusive and resilient cities in terms of land-use, environment, transportation and services to improve physical, social and economic environment of the cities.
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Citiyano De Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
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Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!”
But really, how can a picture hurt you?
Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction.
Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time.
In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Witness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing.
Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.
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Robert Brown Butler (Architecture Laid Bare!: In Shades of Green)
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The Cistercian monks built simple and harmonious buildings out of the local limestone, with plain colours and few ornaments. The plans involved regular repetitions: the doors, windows and roof vaults wouldn’t vary much, so that the eye would easily find points of reference. Everything felt solid and enduring. Our natural human frailty was to contrast with the immemorial tone of the masonry. The monks were particularly keen on cloisters: covered walkways opening onto a quiet central square around which one could take de-stressing walks even on a rainy afternoon. The abbey at Cîteaux was just one of thousands built with similar intentions over a period of hundreds of years. It’s not an accident that architecture that sets out to create a contemplative and serene atmosphere can easily get labelled ‘monastic’, though in truth there’s nothing inherently religious or Christian about the pursuit of calm. The longing for serenity is a continuing, widespread human need, although the overtly religious background to abbeys and monasteries has an unfortunate association: making calm places erroneously seem as if they were inherently connected to a belief in Jesus. We need to rediscover the search for calm as a fundamental ambition of all architecture, not least for the buildings of our own harried times.
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The School of Life (Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury)
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The most [...] literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett [...] Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent. "[...We see] a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles. From an architectural viewpoint [...] the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange..." Corbett's "solution" for New York's traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism's history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry. Not for the moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates -- as in a quantum leap -- a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive [... Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan] have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational. [They know] that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward.
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Rem Koolhaas (Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan)
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One of the most poignant of architectural metaphors is to be seen in the Holocaust Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind (Figure 107). Its form abounds in sharp points from the plan to the shape of openings. Its cladding in zinc copper titanium alloy adds menace to the razor-sharp edges and angles. The apparently arbitrary positioning of openings in the elevations originate in lines connecting the addresses of Jewish victims of the Nazis across Berlin. Vigorously clashing shapes put the finishing touch to a building which is a most eloquent memorial to the suffering of the Jews in the Second World War. It is the architectural equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica .
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Peter F. Smith (The Dynamics of Delight)
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We talk as a matter of course about ‘reading’ a plan […] but to talk of ‘reading’ a plan is a very long way from claiming that a work of architecture is a linguistic sign.
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Adrian Forty (Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture)
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To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds.
And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas.
Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.
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Darrin M. McMahon (Happiness: A History)
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The Le Corbusian city was designed, first and foremost, as a workshop for production. Human needs, in this context, were scientifically stipulated by the planner. Nowhere did he admit that the subjects for whom he was planning might have something valuable to say on this matter or that their needs might be plural rather than singular. Such was his concern with efficiency that he treated shopping and meal preparation as nuisances that would be discharged by central services like those offered by well-run hotels. Although floor space was provided for social activities, he said almost nothing about the actual social and cultural needs of the citizenry.
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James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed)
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Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material, color, and size, every concession to diversity is likely to entail a corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary cost. If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail.
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James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed)
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Maple Ridge COncrete and Paving
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Vastu shastra is yoga for architecture and by balancing all 8 directions, panch mahabhootas ie 5 elements and energies with in a space a perfect equilibrium of health and happiness may be achieved in homes and work places alike.
Dr. Vaishali Gupta is a Vedic scholar & modern researcher of the science of Vastushastra, with more than 15 years of experience and expertise in the field. Although Dr. Vaishali Gupta has worked in all areas of Vastu but she specializes in commercial and industrial vastu and has a long list of industrial clients in India and abroad. She is a qualified interior designer and has done in depth study of building construction.
This gives her immense understanding of dealing with buildings, plans, elevations & sections etc. and she is known for giving simple yet effective vastu solutions, for homes, offices restaurants, factories etc. She is one of the few Vastu Consultants who take the natal chart of the owner into consideration while giving vastu solutions as she firmly believes that both vastu and astrology go hand in hand.
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Dr. Vaishali Gupta
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He explained that the decadence of architecture had come when private property replaced the communal spirit of the Middle Ages, and that the selfishness of individual owners--who built for no purpose save to satisfy their own bad taste, “all claim to an individual taste is bad taste”--had ruined the planned effect of cities. He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived.
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Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
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Contour and profile ['modinature'] are the touchstone of the architect.
Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer.
Contour is free of all restraint.
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Le Corbusier (Towards a New Architecture)
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To understand the right way to get a project done quickly, it’s useful to think of a project as being divided into two phases. This is a simplification, but it works: first, planning; second, delivery. The terminology varies by industry—in movies, it’s “development and production”; in architecture, “design and construction”—but the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then do.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
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They’re Realistic and Reliable Being realistic and reliable may sound humdrum, but nothing can take the place of this basic soundness. Think of this first cluster of traits as the physical layout of a house; it won’t matter what color you paint the walls if the structure is awkward to live in. Good relationships should feel like a well-designed house, so easy to live in that you don’t notice the architecture or planning that went into it.
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Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
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There’s a reason for that. The government here mismanaged the planning and construction of the Sydney Opera House so badly that the costs and schedule exploded. Little of that was Utzon’s fault. But he was the architect, so he was blamed and fired midconstruction. He left Australia in secret and in disgrace. His reputation was ruined. Instead of being showered with commissions to build more masterpieces, Utzon was marginalized and forgotten. He became what no masterbuilder wants to be or deserves to be. He became a one-building architect.[16] “What you call the costs are not the full costs,” I continued. “Yes, the Sydney Opera House cost a large amount of money, far more than it should have. But the full cost of that building includes all the other architectural treasures that Jørn Utzon never built. Sydney got its masterpiece, but cities around the world were robbed of theirs.” More silence. There are always other costs—costs that never appear on any spreadsheet—when a project spirals out of control. The simplest are what economists call “opportunity costs”: the money unnecessarily burned by bad planning that could have been used to fund something else, including other projects.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
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Now, the plan is the generator, “the plan is the determination of everything; it is an austere abstraction, an algebrization, and cold of aspect.” It is a plan of battle. The battle follows and that is the great moment.
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Le Corbusier (Towards a New Architecture (Dover Architecture))
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The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklonny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body. Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it. "Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables eglises, Moscou la sainte. La voila done enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il etait temps," * said he, and dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and summoned Lelorgne d'Ideville, the interpreter. * "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy
Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was
high time."
"A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor," thought he (he had said so to Tuchkov at Smolensk). From that point of view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of possessing it agitated and awed him.
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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For me, a real breakthrough occurred when I stopped thinking about and defining meat in terms of its animal origin (e.g., chicken, cow, pig), but instead in terms of its composition. At a very high level, meat is really five things: amino acids, lipids, small amounts of carbohydrates, trace minerals, and, of course, water. The animal eats plants and turns them into muscle tissue, or what we call meat. But with today’s technology, instead of using a biological bioreactor (animal), we can harvest those core inputs directly from plants themselves. We can use other systems to assemble them in the familiar architecture of meat.
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John Doerr (Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now)
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By the eighth and ninth centuries, mistrusted by the Christians and neglected by the Germanic conquerors, the baths in the West had fallen into disrepair and were finally abandoned. Extraordinary achievements in engineering, architecture, public health and city planning that stretched from Italy to Britain to North Africa, they mostly lay in ruins for centuries.
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Katherine Ashenburg (Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing)
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An architect can build for the future.
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Anthony T. Hincks
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Architecture should reflect the past and the present with the future in mind.
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Anthony T. Hincks
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Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there's room for almost everything: for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future. And for watching all those evidences of ongoing life crumble in the flash of remembering, in the recurring wave of fresh grief.
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Mark Doty (Heaven's Coast: A Memoir)
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James Aka, a Mississauga resident, adores the city's architecture, from the sleek lines of its modern buildings to the historical charm of its landmarks. Passionate about urban design, James explores Mississauga's diverse architectural landscape with enthusiasm, finding beauty and inspiration in every structure. As an avid photographer, he captures the city's skyline from different angles, showcasing its dynamic evolution. James actively engages in discussions about urban planning and preservation, advocating for sustainable development while honoring the city's heritage. With a deep appreciation for the unique character of Mississauga's built environment, James celebrates its architectural diversity and contributes to shaping its future with his keen eye and passionate advocacy.
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James Aka Mississauga
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Neo-classicism, not just in architecture and urban planning but also in remaking archaeological sites and shaping culture in general, became the colonial technology which was transplanted from Munich, Berlin, and Paris,36 a technology that merged monumentalization with capitalist modernization.
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Raphael Greenberg (Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel)
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I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future…
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Mark Doty (Heaven's Coast: A Memoir)
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Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time.
In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Witness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing.
Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.
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Robert Brown Butler (Architecture Laid Bare!: In Shades of Green)
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Generating a system architecture is not a deterministic process. It requires careful consideration of business requirements, technology choices, existing infrastructure and systems, and actual physical resources, such as budget and manpower.
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Andrew Holdsworth (Oracle9i Database Performance Planning)
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The Easy Render offers the best and high quality Architectural Visualization in London. we have over hindered Artist from the 65 countries which provides the finest quality of work.
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Easy Render
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Architecture Building Blocks. Explain the purpose of Architecture Contracts. Explain the purpose of an architecture definition document. Explain the purpose of the Architecture Repository. Explain the purpose of an architecture requirements specification. Explain the purpose of an Architecture Roadmap. Explain the purpose of the Architecture Vision. Explain the purpose of business drivers, business goals and business principles. Explain the purpose of a capability assessment. Explain the purpose of a change request. Explain the purpose of a communications plan. Explain the purpose of a compliance assessment. Explain the purpose of an implementation and migration plan. Explain the purpose of an Implementation Governance Model. Explain the purpose of an organisational model for Enterprise Architecture.
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Kevin Lindley (TOGAF 9 Foundation Exam Study Guide)
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Urban architecture would be reimagined around atomic survival to ensure a single bomb couldn’t do too much damage. They would be built in new design styles like “coiled rope,” “ribbon,” or “cellular” cities that were low-density, narrow, and composed of small “productive cells” connected by express highways.
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Garrett M. Graff (Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die)
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Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.
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David Livermore (Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success)
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areas, and brilliantly, too. Leonardo is known as one of the greatest painters who ever lived, and many argue he was the greatest artist ever. However, his genius went far beyond the easel and his paintbrushes. His mind could conceive of almost anything, from a beautiful representation of Heaven to graphical illustrations of the human body in a time when there were no such things as CAT scans or x-rays. Leonardo’s lifetime was spent observing and doing so in many different venues. His notebooks were filled with examples of what it means to be human. He looked at life from numerous perspectives and recorded all he saw. From light and shade to perspective and visual perception, from botany and landscape to physical sciences and astronomy, from architecture and planning to sculpture and experiments, from inventing to philosophy, there was nothing that didn’t touch Leonardo da Vinci.
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Hourly History (Leonardo da Vinci: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Painters))