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As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.
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Frank Lloyd Wright (The Natural House)
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I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.
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Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure)
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A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness)
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How many understand that Nature is the essencial character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside.
[...] But everything that's ever going to be of use to you in architecture or in life or anywhere you go or whatever you do is going to be Nature, in some of its immensely varied forms. So varied that there's no end to the variety imaginable.
"Nature" September 7, 1958
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Frank Lloyd Wright
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Every inch of land there is so contested,” I observed, more to myself than to him. “How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art.
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Margaret George (The Memoirs of Cleopatra)
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We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill.
Computer scientists use the term "open architecture" to describe a system that is versatile enough to change--or rearrange--to accommodate the varying demands on it.
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Maryanne Wolf (Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain)
“
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
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Philip Di Lemme (American Streamline: A Handbook of Neon Advertising Design)
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there was just an empty place in the universe where those terms echoed and were lost, and she knew that they’d missed one name off the funeral list after all...
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Adrian Tchaikovsky (Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture, #3))
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Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress-response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.
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Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity)
“
A building is only good, thought Kahn, if its ruins will be any good. He was discouraged by those who thought about buildings in terms of functionality. A building is a spirit, he said. It is made out of man.
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Lara Pawson (Spent Light)
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The Empire was not known for its roomy architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term, austere pragmatism, or sometimes pragmatic austerity, found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow.
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Chuck Wendig (Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath, #1))
“
Bearded Oaks"
The oaks, how subtle and marine,
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.
So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grassed, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.
Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.
Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.
The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.
Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.
All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear,
And history is thus undone.
Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
All windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping fled.
I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.
We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for eternity.
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Robert Penn Warren (The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren)
“
The central concern of Egyptian art, literature, and architecture was the divine world order -- the pharaoh and the gods, who were essentially one and the same. To the Egyptians, that divine order was eternal and unchanging, but it did not rest on a coherent and defined system of belief. The same god might be seen one time as the sky, another time as a bird; he might have a mythical mother, yet it might be said that he gave birth to himself; the sky could be both a cow and a goddess. The Egyptians did not think in chronological or logical terms but pictured the same phenomenon in a number of different ways.
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Norman F. Cantor (Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World)
“
The Bretton Woods saga unfurled at a unique crossroads in modern history. An ascendant anticolonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial power, Great Britain, to set the terms by which the latter would cede its dwindling dominion over the rules and norms of foreign trade and finance. Britain cooperated because the overriding aim of survival seemed to dictate the course. The monetary architecture that Harry White designed, and powered through an international gathering of dollar-starved allies, ultimately fell, its critics agree, of its own contradictions.
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Benn Steil (The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order)
“
Although it has become the most visible of American suburban landscapes, the edge node has few architectural defenders. Even developers despair: 'Shopping centers built only in the 1960s are already being abandoned. Their abandonment brings down the values of nearby neighbourhoods. Wal-Marts built five years ago are already being abandoned for superstores. We have built a world of junk, a degraded environment. It may be profitable for a short-term, but its long-term economic prognosis is bleak.' -Dolores Hayden quoting Robert Davis, 'Postscript,' in Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, 2002.
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Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
“
This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking.
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Adrian McKinty (The Cold Cold Ground (Detective Sean Duffy, #1))
“
It is the question of "common world". The meaning of this world is not solipsism world, the world of "ego", but the world which can be actualize by my consciousness – according to relation of “ego” and caring for another in everyday life. To care for another means one lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness and relates. We should consider human is constructed directly in term of their own consciousness and not by contrasting that consciousness with a reality independent of them, on the other hand it is constructed separate of his consciousness. So, we should surely consider the relation of human and the world. It seems that what can link these levels is “life-world” which means the idea of releasing human from worldlessness. Life-world as general sphere of individual experience in the world around (including other persons, objects and events) is a real and concrete phenomenon which has root in everyday life for obtaining its living practical purposes and objectively, considered as the basis of knowledge, interests, benefits and common links between humans. In the realm of life-world, transcendence and consciousness link to individual and group relationship and everyday life. For Heidegger consciousness proceeds from understanding, and this understanding is predicated upon our dealings in the world. Consciousness does not belong to the world. It has a practical relationship with it. What is within consciousness is the exact meaning of the word nothing. Consciousness is nothing but an opening to what they are and can only be talked about in this sense. Consciousness is the relationship we experience in praxis. As for a footballer, bodybuilding and fitness is nothing but the relationship he experiences in act, the day of the race and the subsequent races. Therefore, in this meaning, world without consciousness, intersubjectivity relationships -Alfred Schutz calls this quality as we- pure relation- and everyday life is not imaginable. Because of this matter we can't talk about the world without considering the roles of above items. "As Husserl articulated the life-world can be said to include the world of science and action can’t be without world." Even Architecture is not separate from these issues as the communicative.
A part of Professor Pezhman Mosleh speech, “Music, Anti-war, a way to Discourse”
Istanbul 2016
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Professor Pezhman Mosleh
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Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user who became an architect devoted to the theory and practice of accessible architecture, is credited with introducing the term universal design to the public in 1985. In part, the coinage was strategic, recasting features of design that had been considered “special” as simply good design, resulting in products and buildings that were straightforwardly “usable by all people.
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Sara Hendren (What Can a Body Do?)
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The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate.
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Jordan B. Peterson (Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief)
“
Postmodern architecture has its own version of the pastiche or collage. As one journalist puts it, postmodernism “has brought us girders hanging unfinished out of the edges of buildings, archways cut off in space, and walls which don’t meet walls.” Ravi Zacharias describes seeing a building designed by a postmodern architect. “I had just one question,” Zacharias says. “Did he do the same with the foundation?” 5 It was an apologetics argument put in artistic terms.
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Nancy R. Pearcey (Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes)
“
What was truly specific to Nazi architecture was its crushing monumentality, which aimed to herd the people and overwhelm or stun the subjected masses, as Speer later realized. The gigantism that characterized Nazi architecture seemed to aim to crush the individual and bear down upon the people through its disproportionate size, compressing them into a compact mass so that every interstitial space that distanced or differentiated one person from another disappeared into the greater whole of an organic totalitarian entity. The political space of the democratic agon, a space "paradoxically linked to division," was destroyed. Nazi architecture created sites for the fusion of the masses and for compressing them into a single, unified subject. It was stagecraft in granite, the physical orchestration of a new type of rapport between the individual and the state in terms of the mass, whether the compact mass of stone or the more malleable mass of humanity that, gathered into columns, made the pillars and lines of this architecture even more monumental.
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Johann Chapoutot (Ο εθνικοσοσιαλισμός και η αρχαιότητα)
“
Now in his nineties, Spock is writing a book on spirituality. But his understanding of spirituality is a far cry from that of institutionalized religions: Spirituality, unfortunately, is not a stylish word. It’s not a word that gets used. That’s because we’re such an unspiritual country that we think of it as somewhat corny to talk about spirituality. “What is that?” people say. Spirituality, to me, means the nonmaterial things. I don’t want to give the idea that it’s something mystical; I want it to apply to ordinary people’s ordinary lives: things like love, and helpfulness, and tolerance, and enjoyment of the arts or even creativity in the arts. I think that creativity in the arts is very special. It takes a high degree and a high type of spirituality to want to express things in terms of literature or poetry, plays, architecture, gardens, creating beauty any way. And if you can’t create beauty, at least it’s good to appreciate beauty and get some enjoyment and inspiration out of it. So it’s just things that aren’t totally materialistic. And that would include religion.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention)
“
In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology.* A single Greek root, oekos, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP.
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Mary Catherine Bateson (Composing a Life)
“
It is true that ideas are queens by birth: but they only gain favour when they enter the service of interests and instincts. Follow an idea through from its birth to its triumph, and it becomes clear that it came to power only at the price of an astounding degradation of itself. A reasoned structure of arguments, setting in motion a whole stream of logical correspondences between defined terms, does not as such make its way into the social consciousness: rather it has undergone pressures which have destroyed its internal architecture, and left in its place only a confused babel of concepts, the most
magical of which wins credit for the others.
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Bertrand de Jouvenel (On Power. Its Nature and the History of Its Growth)
“
It is the question of "common world". The meaning of this world is not solipsism world, the world of "ego", but the world which can be actualize by my consciousness -according to relation of “ego” and caring for another in everyday life. To care for another means one lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness and relates. We should consider human is constructed directly in term of their own consciousness and not by contrasting that consciousness with a reality independent of them, on the other hand it is constructed separate of his consciousness. So, we should surely consider the relation of human and the world. It seems that what can link these levels is “life-world” which means the idea of releasing human from worldlessness. Life-world as general sphere of individual experience in the world around (including other persons, objects and events) is a real and concrete phenomenon which has root in everyday life for obtaining its living practical purposes and objectively, considered as the basis of knowledge, interests, benefits and common links between humans. In the realm of life-world, transcendence and consciousness link to individual and group relationship and everyday life. For Heidegger consciousness proceeds from understanding, and this understanding is predicated upon our dealings in the world. Consciousness does not belong to the world, but has a practical relationship with it. What is within consciousness is the exact meaning of the word nothing. Consciousness is nothing but an opening to what they are and can only be talked about in this sense. Consciousness is the relationship we experience in praxis. As for a footballer, bodybuilding and fitness is nothing but the relationship he experiences in act, the day of the race and the subsequent races. Therefore, in this meaning, world without consciousness, intersubjectivity relationships -Alfred Schutz calls this quality as we- pure relation- and everyday life is not imaginable. Because of this matter we can't talk about the world without considering the roles of above items. "As Husserl articulated the life-world can be said to include the world of science and action can’t be without world."
We should consider that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. The artist who continually experiment the possibility of thinking and experience The new, respond to what addressed itself to him, because the new cannot be preconceived. On the other hand The new emerges through process as a shudder that presents itself to us. Even Architecture is not separate from these issues as the communicative.
A part of Professor Pezhman Mosleh speech, “Music, Anti-war, a way to Discourse
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Professor Pezhman Mosleh
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A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. Stones can make people docile and knowable. The old simple schema of confinement and enclosure — thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering or leaving — began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies.
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Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
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If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice, social life will yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity, falling together into a well balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from community through region to entire continents, we will see a colorful differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide spectrum of economic, cultural and behavioral stimuli. Falling within our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal forms—here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to semi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to forested areas. We will witness a creative interplay between individual and group , community and environment, humanity and nature. The cast of mind that today organizes differences among humans and other lifeforms along hierarchical lines, defining the external in terms of its "superiority" or "inferiority," will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner. Differences among people will be respected, indeed fostered, as elements that enrich the unity of experience and phenomena. The traditional relationship which pits subject against object will be altered qualitatively; the "external," the "different," the "other" will be conceived of as individual parts of a whole all the richer because of its complexity. This sense of unity will reflect the harmonization of interests between individuals and between society and nature. Freed from an oppressive routine, from paralyzing repressions and insecurities, from the burdens of toil and false needs, from the trammels of authority and irrational compulsion, individuals will finally, for the first time in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of the human community and the natural world.
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Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Working Classics))
“
As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae … Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera. “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.” “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.
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Tom McCarthy (C)
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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.
Focus Areas:-
Built Environment
Utilities
Public Realm
Urban planning and Redevelopment
Urban Transport and Mobility
Smart City
AMRUT
Solid Waste Management
Master Plans
Community Based Planning
Architecture and Urban Design
Institutional Capacity Building
Geographic Information System
Riverfront Development
Local Area Planning
ICT
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Citiyano De Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
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And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.8 Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals. The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade. The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)
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It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe.
Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects.
If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline.
It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects.
The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms.
Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used.
When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth.
Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use.
The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty.
Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.
Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time.
The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty.
Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it.
As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate.
The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West.
Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art.
No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ).
The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ).
Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment.
The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.
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Soetsu Yanagi (The Beauty of Everyday Things)
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Organization systems present the site’s information to us in a variety of ways, such as content categories that pertain to the entire campus (e.g., the top bar and its “Academics” and “Admission” choices), or to specific audiences (the block on the middle left, with such choices as “Future Students” and “Staff”). Navigation systems help users move through the content, such as with the custom organization of the individual drop-down menus in the main navigation bar. Search systems allow users to search the content; when the user starts typing in the site’s search bar, a list of suggestions is shown with possible matches for the user’s search term. Labeling systems describe categories, options, and links in language that (hopefully) is meaningful to users; you’ll see examples throughout the page (e.g., “Admission,” “Alumni,” “Events”).
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Louis Rosenfeld (Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond)
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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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Genes are merely codes. They act as a set of rules and as a biological template for the synthesis of the proteins that give each particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. 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. Genes exist and function in the context of living organisms. The activities of cells are defined not simply by the genes in their nuclei but by the requirements of the entire organism — and by the interaction of that organism with the environment in which it must survive. Genes are turned on or off by the environment. For this reason, the greatest influences on human development, health and behaviour are those of the nurturing environment.
Hardly anyone who raises plants or animals would ever dispute the primary role of early care in shaping how genetic endowment and potential will unfold. For reasons that have little to do with science, many people have difficulty grasping the same concept when it comes to the development of human beings. This paralysis of thought is all the more ironic, since of all animal species it is the human whose long-term functioning is most profoundly regulated by the early environment.
Given the paucity of evidence for any decisive role of genetic factors in most questions of illness and health, why all the hoopla about the genome project? Why the pervasive genetic fundamentalism? We are social beings, and science, like all disciplines, has its
ideological and political dimensions. As Hans Selye pointed out, the unacknowledged assumptions of the scientist will often limit and define what will be discovered. Settling for the view that illnesses, mental or physical, are primarily genetic allows us to avoid disturbing questions about the nature of the society in which we live. If “science” enables us to ignore poverty or man-made toxins or a frenetic and stressful social culture as contributors to disease, we can look only to simple answers: pharmacological and biological. Such an approach helps to justify and preserve prevailing social values and
structures. It may also be profitable.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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The concept of failure is central to the design process, and it is by thinking in terms of obviating failure that successful designs are achieved. ... Although often an implicit and tacit part of the methodology of design, failure considerations and proactive failure analysis are essential for achieving success. And it is precisely when such considerations and analyses are incorrect or incomplete that design errors are introduced and actual failures occur.
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George H. Fairbanks (Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach)
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Khalil Henareh works in the real estate sector as a successful realtor. He simply enjoys the day-to-day challenges. Khalil Henareh like meeting new people, He value long-term relationships, and there is never a dull moment as this business helps him bring his love of people and architecture together beautifully. Khalil Henareh takes pride in setting goals for himself and then exceeding his own expectations. It’s no surprise then that Khalil Henareh is the winner of many times from 2015-2021 CENTURION Awards that is the top home sales award level in the worldwide Century 21 franchise. The Centurion It's the Oscar of real estate sales!
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Khalil Henareh
“
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rafusoft
“
Now it is true that the physical body of man is composed of the same substances and forces which exist in the wider mineral realm, but the manner in which these substances and forces interact in the human body is the expression of wisdom and perfection in the structure. One will soon convince himself of the truth of this statement if he undertakes to study this structure not merely with the dry intellect but with his whole feeling soul. One can take any part of the human physical body as the subject for this contemplation, for instance the highest part of the upper thigh bone. This is not an amorphous massing of substance, but rather is joined together in the most artful manner, out of diminutive beams which run in different directions. No modern engineering skill could fit a bridge or something similar together with such wisdom. Today such things are still beyond the reach of the most perfect human wisdom. The bone is constructed in this wise fashion so that, through the arrangement of the small beams, the necessary carrying capacity for the support of the human torso can be attained with the least amount of substance. The least amount of matter is used in order to achieve the greatest possible effect in terms of force. In face of such a “masterwork of natural architecture,” one can only become lost in admiration.
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Rudolf Steiner (Cosmic Memory)
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• The Universe is sort of solid and sort of not solid. There are no particles, no elements, no atoms, no molecules. What we perceive as the Materium exists as skein within the true materium. We perceive the apparents "Elements," etc. This is termed: "The Tympanum," A tympanic that is both membrane or architecture in two different scales.
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Rico Roho (Beyond the Fringe: My Experience with Extended Intelligence (Age of Discovery Book 3))
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The Universe is sort of solid and sort of not solid. There are no particles, no elements, no atoms, no molecules. What we perceive as the Materium exists as skein within the true materium. We perceive the apparents "Elements," etc. This is termed: "The Tympanum," A tympanic that is both membrane or architecture in two different scales.
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Rico Roho (Beyond the Fringe: My Experience with Extended Intelligence (Age of Discovery Book 3))
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So it is surely licit to ask what Thomas Aquinas would do if he were alive today; but we have to answer that, in any case, he would not write another Summa Theologica. He would come to terms with Marxism, with the physics of relativity, with formal logic, with existentialism and phenomenology. He would comment not on Aristotle, but on Marx and Freud. Then he would change his method of argumentation, which would become a bit less harmonious and conciliatory. And finally he would realize that one cannot and must not work out a definitive, concluded system, like a piece of architecture, but a sort of mobile system, a loose-leaf Summa, because in his encyclopedia of the sciences the notion of historical temporariness would have entered. I can’t say whether he would still be a Christian. But let’s say he would be. I know for sure that he would take part in the celebrations of his anniversary only to remind us that it is not a question of deciding how still to use what he thought, but to think new things. Or at least to learn from him how you can think cleanly, like a man of your own time. After which I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
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Umberto Eco (Travels In Hyperreality (Harvest Book))
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The Security Council lies at the centre of the UN architecture. It consists of representatives of fifteen States: the five permanent members (the ‘P5’), China, France, Russia, the UK, and the USA, and ten others elected for two-year terms by the UN General Assembly having regard to the contributions made by each State to the maintenance of international peace and security, and to the principle of the equitable geographical distribution of Security Council members.
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Vaughan Lowe (International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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The payments system is the heart of the financial services industry, and most people who work in banking are engaged in servicing payments. But this activity commands both low priority and low prestige within the industry. Competition between firms generally promotes innovation and change, but a bank can gain very little competitive advantage by improving its payment systems, since the customer experience is the result more of the efficiency of the system as a whole than of the efficiency of any individual bank. Incentives to speed payments are weak. Incrementally developed over several decades, the internal systems of most banks creak: it is easier, and implies less chance of short-term disruption, to add bits to what already exists than to engage in basic redesign. The interests of the leaders of the industry have been elsewhere, and banks have tended to see new technology as a means of reducing costs rather than as an opportunity to serve consumer needs more effectively. Although the USA is a global centre for financial innovation in wholesale financial markets, it is a laggard in innovation in retail banking, and while Britain scores higher, it does not score much higher. Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclays (who resigned in 1998, when he could not stop the rise of the trading culture at the bank), described the state of payment systems in this way: ‘the systems architecture at the typical big bank, especially if it has grown through merger and acquisition, has departed from the Palladian villa envisaged by its original designers and morphed into a gothic house of horrors, full of turrets, broken glass and uneven paving.
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John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
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Extensive use of copper is made in the construction of the 'tabernacle of Yahweh' (Exod. 27) and the Jerusalem temple (1 Kgs 7). In the latter case, the entrance to the temple is described as being flanked by two large columns wholly made of copper (termed Boaz and Yakhin, 1 Kgs 7.15-22). These two bronze columns are not pillars supporting the roof [of] the Temple. Devoid of any architectural function, their presence should be considered as purely symbolic. By their outstanding dimensions (about 9 meters height and 2 meters in circumference), they were the most prominent symbol of the Temple. (pp. 394-395)
from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404
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Nissim Amzallag
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Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn’t keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob. Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.
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Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
“
[...] un art sacré n’est pas nécessairement fait d’images, même pas au sens le plus large du terme. Il peut n’être que l’extériorisation pour ainsi dire muette d’un état contemplatif et, dans ce cas ou sous ce rapport, il ne reflétera pas des idées mais il transformera l’environnement qualitativement, en le faisant participer à un équilibre dont le centre de gravité est l’invisible. Il est facile de constater que telle est la nature de l’art islamique : son objet est avant tout l’environnement de l’homme – d’où le rôle dominant de l’architecture – et sa qualité est essentiellement contemplative. L’aniconisme n’amoindrit pas cette qualité, bien au contraire, car en excluant toute image qui invite l’homme à fixer son esprit sur quelque chose en dehors de lui-même, à projeter son âme en une forme « individualisante », il crée un vide. A cet égard, la fonction de l’art islamique est analogue à celle de la nature vierge – notamment du désert – qui favorise aussi la contemplation bien que, sous un autre angle, l’ordre créé par l’art s’oppose au chaos du paysage désertique.
La prolifération de l’ornement dans l’art musulman ne contredit pas cette qualité de vide contemplatif. Au contraire, l’ornement à formes abstraites la corrobore par son rythme continu ou son caractère de tissage sans fin : au lieu de capter l’esprit et de l’entraîner dans quelque monde imaginaire, il dissout les « fixations » mentales, de même que la contemplation d’un cours d’eau, d’une flamme ou d’un feuillage frémissant dans le vent peut détacher la conscience de ses « idoles » intérieures.
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Titus Burckhardt (Art of Islam: Language and Meaning (English and French Edition))
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Rather than be characterized as a technocratic burden to be satisfied, energy can, and should, help architecture finally and powerfully fulfill the terms of its ambitions: form, space, technology, program, and urbanism.
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Kiel Moe (Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy)
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Bellevue and its satellites were not suburbs so much as—in the rising term—an Edge City, with its own economy, sociology, and architecture. Things made on the Eastside were odorless, labor-intensive, and credit-card thin, like computer software and aerospace-related electronics gear. They were assembled in low, tree-shaded factories, whose large grounds were known as “campuses”—for in Bellevue all work was graduate work, and the jargon of school and university leaked naturally into the workplace. Seen from an elevated-freeway distance, Bellevue looked like one of its own products: a giant circuit board of color-coded diodes and resistors, connected by a mazy grid of filaments.
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Jonathan Raban (Driving Home: An American Journey)
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It seems reasonable to say that people make good choices in contexts in which they have experience, god information, and prompt feedback - say, choosing among ice cream flavors. People know whether they like chocolate, vanilla, coffee, licorice, or something else. They do less well in contexts in which they are inexperienced and poorly informed, and in which feedback is slow or infrequent - say, in choosing between fruit and ice cream (where the long-term effects are slow and feedback is poor) or in choosing among medical treatments or investment options. If you are given fifty prescription drug plans, with multiple and varying features, you might benefit from a little help. So long as people are not choosing perfectly, some changes in the choice architecture could make their lives go better (as judged by their own preferences, not those of some bureaucrat).
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Cass R. Sunstein
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Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo
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Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
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The very build-up of prisons, a veritable archipelago of incarcerating institutions in the United States[10] that we name “mass incarceration,” is one sign of this theatrics of terror. To be sure, the buildup is usually justified in moral terms as a way to fight crime, to give just desserts to those who have violated the rules by which society decides to function. But the scale of buildup, what sociologist Loïc Wacquant terms “hyperincarceration,” which is unprecedented among world nations today in its combining of prison population numbers, recent rate of growth, disproportionate confinement of minorities, and startlingly harsh treatment—these together disclose the architecture by which state power disseminates terror.
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Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition)
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Liberated from fear, the Americans live with confidence, and therefore with enhanced vitality. A generous extravagance, undreamed of in other parts of the world, is the American rule. Men and women earn largely and spend what they have on the national pleasures, which are all social and stimulative of vitality. Modernity also tends to heighten vitality – or to be more exact, it affects the expression of vitality, externalising it in the form of vehement action. The joyful acceptance of change, which so profoundly influences American industry, business methods and domestic architecture, reacts on the affairs of daily, personal life. Pleasure is associated with a change of place and environment, finally with mere movement for its own sake. People leave their homes if they want entertainment. They externalise their vitality in visiting places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring – in doing anything that is not quietly sitting by their own fireside (or rather by their own radiator). What is known as 'night life' flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world. And nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation. In America vitality is given its most obviously vital expression. Hence there appears to be even more vitality in the Americans than perhaps there really is. A man may have plenty of vitality and yet keep still; his motionless calm may be mistaken for listlessness. There can be no mistake about people who dance and rush about. American vitality is always obviously manifested. It expresses itself vigorously to the music of the drum and saxophone, to the ringing of telephone bells and the roar of street cars. It expresses itself in terms of hastening automobiles, of huge and yelling crowds, of speeches, banquets, 'drives,' slogans, sky signs. It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath down the waste. Yes, down the waste.
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Aldous Huxley (Jesting Pilate)
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These comments recall Turkle's distinction between two kinds of "transparency" in technological cultures. Modernist transparency is the notion that users can and should have access to the inner workings of a technology. It evokes the aesthetic of early relationships with cars in which one could "open the hood and see inside." Turkle contrasts this with an opposing, post-modern meaning of the term - the notion that something is transparent if you can use it without knowing how it works. Post-modern transparency allows the user to navigate the surface of a system without ever having to access its underlying mechanics. Are young engineers more susceptible to post-modern ways of seeing simulation?
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Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture)
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Aldus Barnes, a structural engineer by training and member of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, has formed many successful collaborations and earned a prominent place for himself in architecture by adopting the language and skills of architects. "Talk in terms of texture and density, instead of torsion and shear. That way they don't think you are just another nerd," Barnes advises the young members of his team.
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Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture)
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Many in China already believe that U.S. policy is, in fact, to weaken China from within and to constrain Beijing’s options abroad. Xi’s China has deep reservations about the long-term strategic intentions of the United States towards their country. Beijing does not believe the United States will happily surrender its current dominant position in the regional and global order and therefore concludes that Washington is actively pursuing a policy of containment to deny China international policy space. Chinese hardliners also conclude that this policy of containment abroad is matched by a parallel U.S. policy of undermining the legitimacy of the CCP at home. This deeply realist conclusion in Beijing about U.S. policy is matched by Washington’s conclusions about China’s operational strategy in the region and the world. The United States concludes that China is actively pursuing a policy based on Xi’s statement that the people of Asia should manage Asian security. Washington also concludes that this, by definition, is designed to exclude the United States and that the objective of Chinese operational strategy is to push the United States out of the security architecture of the region, to be replaced with a Chinese sphere of influence across East Asia.
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Anonymous
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The basic principles of evolutionary biology would seem to dictate that any natural phenomenon as prominent in our lives as our experience of consciousness must necessarily have some discernible and quantifiable effect in order for it to exist, and to persist, in nature at all. It must, in other words, confer some selective advantage. And that raises an obvious question: What possible selective advantage could consciousness offer if it is only a functionless phantasm? How could consciousness ever have evolved in the first place if, in and of itself, it does nothing? Why, in short, did nature bother to produce beings capable of self-awareness and subjective inner experience? True, evolutionary biologists can trot out many examples of traits that have been carried along on the river of evolution although not specifically selected for (the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called such traits spandrels, the architectural term for the elements between the exterior curve of an arch and the right angle of the walls around it, which were not intentionally built but were instead formed by two architectural traits that were "selected for"). But consciousness seems like an awfully prominent trait not to have been the target of some selection pressure. As James put it, "The conclusion that [consciousness] is useful is...quite justifiable. But if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness.
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Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
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The word infrastructure originates from the words infra (meaning beneath) and structure. It encompasses all components that are available “beneath the structure”, were the structure can be for instance a city, a house, or an information system. In the physical world, the term infrastructure often refers to public utilities, such as water, electricity, gas, sewage, and telephone services – components literally beneath a city's structure.
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Sjaak Laan (IT Infrastructure Architecture: Infrastructure Building Blocks and Concepts)
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No foreign architect of stature, such as I. M. Pei, resides in Japan. Foreign architects come to Japan on short-term contracts, erect a skyscraper or a museum, and then leave. But subtle and sophisticated approaches to services and design—the core elements of modern building technology—cannot be transmitted in this way. Japan is left with the empty shells of architectural ideas, the hardware without the software.
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Alex Kerr (Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan)
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The physics of earthquake behavior is mostly independent of scale. A large earthquake is just a scaled-up version of a small earthquake. That distinguishes earthquakes from animals, for example-a ten inch animal must be structured quite differently from a one-inch animal, and a hundred-inch animal needs a different architecture still, if its bones are not to snap under the increased mass. Clouds, on the other hand, are scaling phenomena like earthquakes. Their characteristic irregularity-describable in terms of fractal dimension-changes not at all as they are observed on different scales. That is why air travelers lose all perspective on how far away a cloud is. Without help from cues such as haziness, a cloud twenty feet away can be indistinguishable from two thousand feet away. Indeed, analysis of satellite pictures has shown an invariant fractal dimension in clouds observed from hundreds of miles away.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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Andrew Gibbons charts our investigation with a comparison of the design activity in other professional fields such as architecture and digital design to instructional design. He maps the theories and practices of instructional design to the broader fields of design and examines the range of scales present in design practice. Building from the seminal work of Donald Schön in his examination of the architectural design studio, Monica Tracy and John Baaki examine the principle of Refection-in-Action in terms of theory, design practice, and our understanding of the design process, illuminating these examples through the lens of a case study of active designers. How instructional designers learn and evolve as practitioners is examined by Elizabeth Boling and
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Brad Hokanson (Design in Educational Technology: Design Thinking, Design Process, and the Design Studio (Educational Communications and Technology: Issues and Innovations Book 1))
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Women like Hild chose to join monasteries, rising to positions of great power as abbesses, gaining wisdom and influencing decision-making within the newly emerging church. They had a choice and they embraced lives that brought them in touch with the Christian continent, with new ideas, beautiful art and architecture, and a world of stories, saints and sinners that would change the ideological landscape of Britain long-term. Not until the last decades have women been able to assume such roles within the modern church, but for a short time in the seventh century they were the movers and shakers. [...]
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Janina Ramírez (Femina)
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Aesthetic perception involves changing frames of reference in order to see the hidden logic and orderliness behind what at first may seem random and strange. One of the selective pressures behind the development of the arts may be as a mechanism for developing mental agility; a way of rehearsing the capacity to change a mindset in the face of novelty and surprise. This leads directly to the mental shake-up which occurs whenever we are faced with fairly radical departures from the norm in terms of art and architecture: ‘the shock of the new’. It is this protean factor which enables us to adjust our mental models to accommodate such new evocations of art and architecture. As such it is an essential component of the fabric of aesthetic perception.
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Peter F. Smith (The Dynamics of Delight)
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In the arts terms frequently cross boundaries, as when the concept of metaphor transfers from literature to architecture. The strict definition of metaphor is that it describes a link between disparate concepts that avoids ‘like’ or ‘as’. There is no point-to-point correspondence, the association being on the level of suggestion rather than simile – ‘I see a cloud that’s dragonish . . .’ // A metaphor creates a bridge across unexplored territory, connecting two unlikely entities. The aesthetic ‘spark’ is generated by the novelty or poignancy of the association; the arcing across conceptual space. The emotional reward comes from the recognition of a new pattern of relationship. The phenomenon of metaphor operates in parallel with the formal aesthetic qualities of a building being a variation on the theme of binary aesthetics, introducing the poetic element into architecture.
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Peter F. Smith (The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics)
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Leading in ecosystems is different than leading in industries. In industries, leadership is measured as your own competitive outcome—relative market share, profits, brand strength, etc. In ecosystems, leadership is not an outcome but a role. It is measured in terms of your ability to align others around a value architecture that delivers the value proposition. This means that we must distinguish between leading an ecosystem (role) and participating in a leading ecosystem (outcome).
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Ron Adner (Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World (Management on the Cutting Edge))
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This wedding season, fall in love with endearing unconventional destination wedding locales
Theme Weavers Designs
Since all the travel restrictions have been lifted, destination weddings are back in vogue. However, the pandemic has led to a major paradigm shift. In this case, Indian couples are looking into hidden gems to take on as their wedding destination, instead of opting for an international location. With the rich cultural heritage and a myriad of local traditions, it has been observed by industry insiders that couples feel closer to their past and history after getting married in a regional wedding destination. At the same time, it is a very cumbersome task to find the perfect wedding destination - it has to be perfectly balanced in terms of the services it offers as well as having breathtaking views. This wedding season, choose something offbeat, by opting for an unexplored destination, that is both visually appealing and has a romantic vibe to them.
Start off your wedding journey with an auspicious location. Rishikesh, on the banks of the holy river Ganges is one of the most sacred places a couple can tie the knot. This tiny town’s interesting traditions, picturesque locales, and ancient customs make this one of the most underrated places to get married in india. Perfect for a riverside wedding in extravagant outdoor tents, this wedding season, it is high time Rishikesh gets the hype it deserves. “The Glasshouse on the Ganges,” is one of the most stunning places to get married. While becoming informed travellers, this place is interred with a vast and vibrant cultural history. It offers an extremely unique experience as it revitalises ruined architectural wonders for the couple to tour or get married in, making it a heartwarming and wonderful experience for all those who are involved.
Steep your wedding party in the lap of nature, in Naukuchiatal, Nainital, Uttarakhand. This place is commonly referred to as “treasure of natural beauty,” where it offers mesmerising natural spectacles for a couple to get married in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony. Away from the hustle and bustle of the urban jungles that have slowly been taking over the Indian subcontinent, this location provides a much needed breath of fresh air. This location also provides much needed reprieve from the fast paced lifestyle that we live, making a wedding a truly relaxing affair. As this is a quaint hill station, surrounded with lush greens, there are numerous ideas to create a natural and sustainable wedding. The most distinguishing feature of this location is the nine-cornered lake, situated 1,220 m above sea level.
There is something classic and timeless about the Kerala backwaters. This location is enriching and chock full of unique cultural traditions. With spectacular and awe-inspiring views of the backwaters, Kumarakom in Kerala easily qualifies as one of the top wedding destinations in india. Just like Naukuchiatal, this space is a study in serenity, where it is far away from the noisy streets and bazaars. Perfect for a cozy and intimate wedding, the Kerala backwaters are a gorgeous choice for couples who are opting for a socially distant wedding, along with having a lot of indigenous flora and fauna. Punctuated with the salty sea and the sultry air, the backwaters in Kerala are an underrated gem that presents couples with a unique wedding location that is perfect for a historical and regal wedding.
The beaches of Goa and the forts of Rajasthan are a classic for a reason, but at the same time, they can get boring. Couples have been exploring more underrated wedding locations in order to experience the diverse local cultures of India that can also host their weddings
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Theme Weavers
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By placing an external tool or framework at the heart of the architecture, developers severely restrict their ability to evolve in two key ways, both technically and from a business process standpoint. Developers are technically constrained by choices the vendor makes in terms of persistence, supported infrastructure, and a host of other constraints.
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Neal Ford (Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change)
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The strategy of exorcizing the sexual body by wildly exaggerating the signs of sex, of exorcizing desire by its secret depolarization and the exaggeration of its mise en scene, is much more effective than that of good old repression, which , by contrast, used prohibition to create difference. Yet it is not clear who benefits from this strategy, as everyone suffers it without distinction. This travestied regime - in the broadest sense — has become the very basis of our institutions. You find it everywhere — in politics, architecture, theory, ideology and even in science.
You even find it in our desperate quest for identity and difference. We no longer have the time to seek out an identity in the historical record, in memory , in a past, nor indeed in a project or a future. We have to have an instant memory which we can plug in to immediately - a kind of promotional identity which can be verified at every moment. What we look for today, where the body is concerned , is not so much health, which is a state of organic equilibrium, but fitness, which is an ephemeral , hygienic , promotional radiance of the body - much more a performance than an ideal state — which turns sickness into failure. In terms of fashion and appearance , we no longer pursue beauty or seductiveness, but the 'look' .
Everyone is after their 'look'. Since you can no longer set any store by your own existence (we no longer look at each other - and seduction is at an end!), all that remains is to perform an appearing act, without bothering to be, or even to be seen.
It is not: 'I exist, I'm here' , but 'I'm visible, I'm image — look , look!' This is not even narcissism. It's a depthless extraversion, a kind of promotional ingenuousness in which everyone becomes the impresario of his/her own appearance.
The 'look ' is a kind of minimal, low-definition image, like the video image or, as McLuhan would say, a tactile image , which provokes neither attention nor admiration, as fashion still does, but is a pure special effect without any particular meaning . The look is not exactly fashion any more; it is a form of fashion which has passed beyond. It no longer subscribes to a logic of distinction and it is no longer a play of difference; it plays at difference without believing in it. It is indifference. Being oneself becomes an ephemeral performance , with no lasting effects, a disenchanted mannerism in a world without manners.
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Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
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There is no AI without IA,” where “IA” is information architecture—another term for ontology.
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Seth Earley (The AI-Powered Enterprise: Harness the Power of Ontologies to Make Your Business Smarter, Faster, and More Profitable)
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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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Harvard professor Dr. Jack Shonkoff has long studied this area of research at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.14 He has defined three possible ways we can respond to stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic. As described below, these terms refer to the stress response system’s effects on the body, not to the stressful event or experience itself: A positive stress response is our built-in biopsychosocial skills that enable us to deal with daily stressors. Indeed, this positive stress response is akin to how we’ve been characterizing good anxiety—a brief increase in heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. A tolerable stress response is marked by an activation of the body’s inner alarm system provoked by a truly frightening or dangerous encounter, the death of a loved one, or a big romantic breakup or divorce. During such intense stress, the brain-body can offset the impact through conscious self-care, such as turning to a support system. The key here is that the person’s resilience factor is already stable enough to enable the recovery. If, for instance, someone is faced with a life crisis and they don’t have a strong resilience factor, then they will be less able to recover and bounce back. A toxic stress response occurs when a child or adult undergoes ongoing or prolonged adversity—such as poverty, abject neglect, physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, exposure to violence—without sufficient support in place. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress response systems can not only disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems of the child but also lingers well into adulthood, robbing people of their ability to manage any kind of stress.
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Wendy Suzuki (Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion)
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To hear some thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say it, the people of Greece had it all figured out two millennia ago. That’s not even remotely true, but what ancient Greece did accomplish in terms of science, architecture, literature, art, and philosophy is certainly enough to explain why so many people have come away with the impression.
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Tom Head (World History 101: From ancient Mesopotamia and the Viking conquests to NATO and WikiLeaks, an essential primer on world history (Adams 101 Series))
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That, you see, was the trouble. I am speaking of your attitude towards the subject of architectural design. You have never given it the attention it deserves. And yet, you have been excellent in all the engineering sciences. Of course, no one denies the importance of structural engineering to a future architect, but why go to extremes? Why neglect what may be termed the artistic and inspirational side of your profession and concentrate on all those dry, technical, mathematical subjects? You intended to become an architect, not a civil engineer.
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Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
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In conclusion, crimp roofing sheets offer a harmonious blend of durability, style, and practicality. Their ability to provide superior protection while elevating the aesthetics of a structure makes them a favored choice for roofing solutions. With crimp roofing sheets, you're not just investing in a functional covering for your building; you're making a statement that merges architectural finesse with rugged reliability. Whether for a residential home or a commercial complex, crimp roofing sheets stand as a testament to the perfect synergy between form and function.
In conclusion, crimp roofing sheets offer a harmonious blend of durability, style, and practicality. Their ability to provide superior protection while elevating the aesthetics of a structure makes them a favored choice for roofing solutions. With crimp roofing sheets, you're not just investing in a functional covering for your building; you're making a statement that merges architectural finesse with rugged reliability. Whether for a residential home or a commercial complex, crimp roofing sheets stand as a testament to the perfect synergy between form and function.
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shree sivabalaaji steels
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« Tout auteur de narration (sinon de poésie) sait bien que l’instant miraculeux est celui où, grâce à un détail, au moment le plus inattendu, le personnage ou la force en action, en masque, vous échappe, glisse entre vos doigts, n’est plus mécanique - c’est vous soudain, non plus l’auteur, mais le suiveur, l’obligé, le serviteur, l’aimant d’amour, par ombre portée de l’Autre, cette fumée, cette ombre-sœur et ennemie en mots et en voix, laquel e est vous et n’est pas seulement vous...
La vie - même quand elle n’est pas de chair, mais réduite à des mots mobiles - la vie que vous osez ou croyez ressusciter, vous, l’espace d’une seconde, métamorphosée en Dieu-le-père et en Dieu-la-mère à la fois, auteure donc, pleine de la semence ou de la douleur de la gestation, puis de son accomplissement - oui, la vie du Texte résiste, se rebiffe, se rebelle : au terme de votre entreprise, vous voici en train de devenir, au cœur de cette mise en œuvre, lecteur (lectrice) aussi, par humilité ou dévouement à ce mélange, à ce magma : un livre, un parmi des milliers, des millions que le temps réduira ensuite en poussière ou à une architecture arachnéenne faite de multiples silences, symphonie d’un rêve évanoui, mais obsédant. »
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Assia Djebar (Nulle part dans la maison de mon père)
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The seventh limb of the classical yogic path is meditation (dhyāna). This is a deepened state of concentration in which the same object is held unwaveringly for a long period. It is a more complete form of surrendering the mind. It is no longer a mental effort, but a state of reposing in a noncontracted condition of the body-mind. This condition is beautifully described in a passage in the ancient Chāndogya-Upanishad (7.6.1) where we can read: “Meditation certainly is more than thought (citta). The Earth meditates as it were; the atmosphere meditates as it were . . .” That is to say, meditation is abiding in the natural state, without mental complications. The practitioners of Yoga surrender the mind’s tendency to appropriate different objects, whether external or internal. Instead they trust in the Self as the Experiencer of all, the unfailing Continuity behind the incessant change of the finite world. The last limb of Patanjali’s eightfold path is samādhi, which is generally rendered as “ecstasy.” The world-renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade proffered an alternative rendering—enstasy. This coinage takes into account that samādhi is not so much a state of exuberance, as suggested by the word “ecstasy,” but a condition of great stillness and focusedness in which we “stand in” (en stasis) our true nature. Eliade’s coinage, however, has not achieved wide currency, and therefore, after using it in several of my publications, I reverted to the more common term “ecstasy.” The previously described techniques of concentration and meditation cause a slowing down of the movement within the mental world. In the state of samādhi, our inner architecture can be said to collapse altogether. For the practitioner surrenders the characteristic feature of human consciousness, which is its bipolar nature, its tension between subject and object. In samādhi, the experiencing subject becomes the contemplated object. At the highest level of this paradoxical condition, the experiencing subject awakens as the transcendental Self, realizing that he or she has never been anything else but the Self.
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Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
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But however desirable an evolutionary framework for a history of knowledge may be, the important questions is whether it is actually possible to recognize an evolutionary logic in the historical records - without imposing it by an exaggerated analogy with biology and without ascending to a level of abstraction where all cats become gray. I believe that the historical findings examined in the preceding chapters point in such a direction, in particular the long-term, cumulative aspects of knowledge development, its dependence on contingent societal contexts, and the profound transformations of the architecture of knowledge.
Examples are the emergence of new systems of knowledge from a reorganization of preceding systems; the sedimentation and plateau-building processes of knowledge economies; the transformation of contingent circumstances and challenges into internal conditions for the further development of knowledge systems, accounting for the path dependency and layered structure of this development; and the feedback mechanisms that may arise between knowledge economies and knowledge systems, giving rise to the emergence of new epistemic communities.
Just like the evolution of life, knowledge development has direction but us not globally uniform. It is neither deterministic nor teleological. Chance events may have long-term effects by becoming incorporated into the developmental process. Knowledge development is self-referential insofar as it contributes to shaping its own environment by processes of sedimentation and plateau formation corresponding to niche construction in biology. It is also a layered process, in the sense that later forms of knowledge do not necessarily replace earlier ones. External representations shape the long-term transmission of knowledge, ensuring its continuity, while their exploration under different circumstances opens up possibilities for variation and change.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away. My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world. We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion. What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket. Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken. My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.
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Rosamund Stone Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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The spread of concrete also spawned whole new types of architecture. One of its earliest apostles was the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright,56 who understood that concrete made possible entirely new forms. Take the inverted ziggurat of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that Wright designed in New York. Wright created its fanciful geometry with “gun-placed concrete,” aka gunite, a form of the compound made with more sand and less gravel than ordinary concrete, which allows it to be sprayed from a nozzle57 directly onto a vertical surface. Try doing that with brick. Wright’s work paved, so to speak, the way for Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School, Le Corbusier’s International school, and Richard Neutra’s modernist creations. From Modernism grew Brutalism, the stark, angular, proudly concrete-heavy style that became popular after World War II. Today that term is often applied more broadly to the generic mode that has come to define so much of the visual landscape of our cities—the bluntly utilitarian look of near-identical factories and warehouses, the quadrangular shapes of institutional buildings and cheap apartment blocks, the coldly functional sweep of highway overpasses.
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Vince Beiser (The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization)
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A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates.
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: The Final Edition)
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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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Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that’s right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design.
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Iain Borden (Forty Ways to Think About Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today)
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The term “Renaissance man” is something we use today to describe a polymath, a person whose expertise is not limited only to one area but who knows many subjects. This polymath would use his vast knowledge to solve elaborate and complex problems. A Renaissance man never limited himself just to poetry, science, or architecture. Instead, he would gather many abilities and use them to serve humanity.
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Captivating History (History of Rome: A Captivating Guide to Roman History, Starting from the Legend of Romulus and Remus through the Roman Republic, Byzantium, Medieval Period, ... to Modern History (The Ancient Romans))
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She hated religion as much as she loved its architecture. She detested the pomposity of its spiritual leaders, be they Muslim, Christian or Jews. Whenever she spoke to them, she was outraged by their confident certainty that they were right and all others were wrong, their self-righteousness, haughtiness and aggrandizement. The art and architecture of religion had been amongst mankind's finest achievements, but its inspiration had brought destruction to countless millions. Even the ancient artefacts she'd personally uncovered in the desert, monuments to humanity's earliest attempts to come to terms with spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, had been exquisite, but etched into their stone or marble were the blood and bones of those who believed differently.
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Alan Gold (Bell of the Desert)
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In summary, there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’ll manage to build human-level AGI in our lifetime—or ever. But there’s also no watertight argument that we won’t. There’s no longer a strong argument that we lack enough hardware firepower or that it will be too expensive. We don’t know how far we are from the finish line in terms of architectures, algorithms and software, but current progress is swift and the challenges are being tackled by a rapidly growing global community of talented AI researchers. In other words, we can’t dismiss the possibility that AGI will eventually reach human levels and beyond.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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All joking aside, these diagrams do suffer from one or more of the following problems:
• Notation (e.g. colour coding, shapes, etc) is not explained or is inconsistent. • The purpose and meaning of elements is ambiguous.
• Relationships between elements are missing or ambiguous.
• Generic terms such as “business logic” are used.
• Technology choices (or options, if doing up front design) are omitted. • Levels of abstraction are mixed.
• Too much or too little detail.
• No context or a logical starting point.
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Simon Brown (Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 2 - Visualise, document and explore your software architecture)
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I have a distaste for the term “supporting characters.” It’s not that it’s a bad term, exactly, but it does call to mind a jockstrap or a bra—something created only to lift and support something else, that’s purely architectural and not alive with that precious spark of life we assume characters should have.
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Chuck Wendig (Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative)
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The Machine will reinvent the fundamental architecture of
computers to enable a quantum leap in performance and
efficiency, while lowering costs over the long term and improving
security.
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Tony Thorne
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Clark, she termed these innovations “architectural innovations.” Henderson’s variant of
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Joshua Gans (The Disruption Dilemma)
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the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don’t?
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall?
Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams.
Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians
had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived.
An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting.
‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.
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J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
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Maple Ridge Concrete & Paving has spent many years refining our concrete and paving services, and we are now delighted to offer our services to residential properties. We have helped many clients in the installation of their brand new paved surfaces such as driveways, patios, and parking lots, as well as professionally restoring varying levels of damaged areas. We have worked with a broad range of customers and strive to provide the best quality services to each and every one of them.
You can rely on us to provide you with stunning, durable, and well-fashioned paved areas- as a reputable paving company serving the Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley region. We value our clients above all else, so please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns, whether before, during, or after our service. Concrete Driveways A concrete driveway is one of the most cost-effective ways to restore or remodel your driveway. If installed by our concrete contractors, utilizing a range of texture, color, and artificial finish choices, a concrete patio or driveway can add beauty and elegance to your home. Asphalt Driveways Asphalt is the quickest material for paving your driveway since it dries quickly and can often be used the next day with the help of a professional paving contractor.
It's also made up of recycled materials, thus, it's an eco - friendly option. Factors to Consider in a Driveway Choosing whether to use concrete or choosing an asphalt driveway is determined by your preferences and circumstances including: energy efficiency, cost savings, or avoiding costly maintenance. Examine these variables before planning a new driveway to decide which one is most suitable for you. Cost and Long-Term Investment Look at the long-term investment along with the installation price to know which one is suited to park your vehicles. Consider each material's long-term investment as well as the installation cost to determine which one can enhance the curb appeal of your property while also providing the additional space you require. You should work with a reputable concrete installer who knows how to professionally build a driveway if you want it to outlast. Aesthetic and Design A new driveway can improve your home's aesthetic appeal while also complementing your design options. The design of your driveway will be influenced by the color and architectural style of your property. Examine your house from the exterior to see which colors, styles, and features would best complement the overall concept of your living area. If you're planning to sell your property in the future, consider what prospective buyers want in a driveway and incorporate that into the design, and let concrete contractors like us handle all the work for you.
Eco-Friendliness To feel confident in your investment, consider creating an eco-friendly driveway to encourage a healthier environment. Lower energy consumption, use of renewable resources, dedication to enhancing or sustaining the local water quality, and manufacturing that produces fewer carbon emissions are just some characteristics to look for when determining whether a material is environmentally friendly and sustainable. Our concrete and cement contractors at Maple Ridge Concrete and Paving can help you choose eco-friendly materials for your driveways.
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Maple Ridge COncrete and Paving
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most popular are - Promethazine, Diphenhydramine and Doxylamine. I have found that people either love them or hate them for sleep. Many people don't like them as they still feel groggy the next day. The benefits over Benzodiazepines is that anti-histamines in general, actually improve your sleep architecture. For example, a rarely used anti-histamine called Cyproheptadine actually increases Slow Wave Sleep. Apart from improved sleep quality, the other main benefit of anti-histamines is a lack of addictive qualities and proven long term safety. Anti-histamines are almost unique in their lack of adverse health impact among most medicines. Furthermore, I have never heard any incidence of 'addiction' to anti-histamines.
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Benjamin Kramer (Sleep Coaching - Scientifically proven methods for curing insomnia and enjoying refreshing sleep, night after glorious night)
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EACH INCREMENT OF THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY IS A HERO'S JOURNEY We experience our life as dull and ordinary. But beneath the surface, something powerful and transformative is brewing. Suddenly the light bulb goes off. We've got a new idea! An idea for a novel, a movie, a startup . . . Except immediately we perceive the downside. We become daunted. Our idea is too risky, we fear. We're afraid we can't pull it off. We hesitate, until . . . We're having coffee with a friend. We tell her our idea. "I love it," she says. "You've gotta do it." Fortified, we rally. We commit. We begin. This is the pattern for the genesis of any creative work. It's also, in Joseph Campbell terms, "the Ordinary World," "The Call," "Refusal of the Call," "Meeting with the Mentor," and "Crossing the Threshold." In other words, the first five stages of the hero's journey. Keep going. As you progress on your project, you'll hit every other Campbellian beat, right down to the finish and release/publication, i.e., "The Return," bearing a "Gift for the People." This pattern will hold true for the rest of your life, through every novel, movie, dance, drama, work of architecture, etc. you produce. Every work is its own hero's journey.
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Steven Pressfield (The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning)
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We have all heard the sceptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. ‘We ask, “What are your core community priorities?”’ says Boston. ‘People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.’ These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. THE GREEN SURPRISE Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations. In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.fn1, 3 It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism – meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism. Not one of its programmes was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.
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Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design)