Brick Architecture Quotes

Every city is a ghost. New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.

Even a brick wants to be something. A brick wants to be something. It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is.

The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

Every city is a ghost. New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel beam, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting.

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.

Vivian’s first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one. The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more. As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders.

To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous. Libraries are very special spaces, spaces where people come together in separate but joint pursuits of knowledge, of learning. Libraries are the heartbeats of communities.

The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description.

The old house had a thousand doors in it. All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red tawny sails; it had flat brick houses - not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs.

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.” —Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture. —Louise Bourgeois

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture. —Louise Bourgeois

You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.

The community of Partageuse had drifted together like so much dust in a breeze, settling in this spot where two oceans met, because there was fresh water and a natural harbor and good soil. Its port was no rival to Albany, but convenient for locals shipping timber or sandalwood or beef. Little businesses had sprung up and clung on like lichen on a rock face, and the town had accumulated a school, a variety of churches with different hymns and architectures, a good few brick and stone houses and a lot more built of weatherboard and tin. It gradually produced various shops, a town hall, even a Dalgety's stock and station agency. And pubs. Many pubs.

Good software systems begin with clean code. On the one hand, if the bricks aren’t well made, the architecture of the building doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, you can make a substantial mess with well-made bricks. This is where the SOLID principles come in.

Not only these were new kinds of stories, they were being told with a new kind of formal structure. [...] The result was a storytelling architecture you could picture as a colonnade - each episode a brick with its own solid, satisfying shape, but also part of a season-long arc that, in turn, would stand linked to other seasons to form a coherent, freestanding work of art. [...] The new structure allowed huge creative freedom: to develop characters over long stretches of time, to tell stories over the course of fifty hours or more, the equivalent of countless movies.

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.

We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.

Why the ancient civilizations who built the place did not use the easier, nearby rocks remains a mystery. But the skills and knowledge on display at Stonehenge are not. The major phases of construction took a total of a few hundred years. Perhaps the preplanning took another hundred or so. You can build anything in half a millennium - I don't care how far you choose to drag your bricks. Furthermore, the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.

Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas came from reading books in the library and Architectural Digest.

Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city's vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station.

Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.

Isn't it also a science, an art form, floating between those categories as the coffin of Mohammed betwixt heaven and earth, a one-off union of all opposing forces: ancient and yet forever new, technical in its layout and yet only operable through imagination, limited by a geometrically rigid space yet unlimited in its combinations, constantly evolving and yet lifeless, cogitation that leads to nothing, art without display, architecture without bricks and despite this, proven in its very being and existence to be more durable than all books and academic works; it is the only game that belongs to all races and all time, and nobody may know which heavenly power gave it to the world to slay boredom, sharpen the senses and capture the soul. Where is its beginning and where its end? Every child can grasp its basic principles, every dilettante can dabble at it, and yet it is capable within its fixed, tight square of producing a special species of master, bearing no comparison to others, people with a talent solely directed to chess, idiosyncratic geniuses in whom just as precise a proportion of vision, patience and technique is required as in a mathematician, a poet or a musician, merely in a different formula and combination.

In America a child can no longer visit the place where she was born a shopping mall stands there instead. In America a grownup can no longer see the school where she learned the art of growing sad a freeway goes through there now an overpass her memories of brick turn to glass the suburb goes from white to black and time speeds up so much she has to stay young forever and reset the clock every five minutes just to know where is there and there is everywhere because she lives in time and not in any space! In our country here the future is in ruins before it is built a fact recognized by postmodern architecture that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted ruins from other times and places! There are no buildings in America only passageways that connect migratory floods the most permanent architecture being precisely that which moves these floods from one future ruin to another that is to say freeways and skyways and the car is our only shelter the architecture of desire reduced to the womb a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!” Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path. “The miracle of America is of motion not regret in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said Let me take the wheel! And others hear voice all the time telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster to throw at the videos the voices of God are everywhere heard loud and clear under the hum of the tickertape and all these miracle and speaking gods are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!” Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.

NOTE: Practice your most effective relaxation techniques before you begin these exercises (refer to Chapter 6 if necessary). People are better able to concentrate when they are relaxed. Listening -Pay attention to the sounds coming from outside: from the street, from above in the air, from as far away as possible. Then focus on one sound only. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from a nearby room—the kitchen, living room, etc. Identify each one, then focus on a single sound. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from the room you are in: the windows, the electrical appliances. Then focus on one sound only. -Listen to your breathing. -Hear a short tune and attempt to re-create it. -Listen to a sound, such as a ringing doorbell, a knock on the door, a telephone ringing, or a siren. How does it make you feel? -Listen to a voice on the telephone. Really focus on it. -Listen to the voices of family members, colleagues, or fellow students, paying close attention to their intonation, pacing, and accent. What mood are they conveying? Looking -Look around the room and differentiate colors or patterns, such as straight lines, circles, and squares. -Look at the architecture of the room. Now close your eyes. Can you describe it? Could you draw it? -Look at one object in the room: chair, desk, chest of drawers, whatever. Close your eyes and try to picture the shape, the material, and the colors. -Notice any changes in your environment at home, at school, or in your workplace. -Look at magazine photos and try to guess what emotions the subjects’ expressions show. -Observe the effect of light around you. How does it change shapes? Expressions? Moods? Touching -When shaking a person’s hand, notice the temperature of the hand. Then notice the temperature of your own hand. -Hold an object in your hands, such as a cup of coffee, a brick, a tennis ball, or anything else that is available. Then put it down. Close your eyes and remember the shape, size, and texture of the object. -Feel different objects and then, with your eyes closed, touch them again. Be aware of how the sensations change. -Explore different textures and surfaces with your eyes first open and then closed. Smelling and Tasting -Be aware of the smells around you; come up with words to describe them. -Try to remember the taste of a special meal that you enjoyed in the past. Use words to describe the flavors—not just the names of the dishes. -Search your memory for important smells or tastes. -Think of places with a strong tie to smell. These sensory exercises are an excellent way to boost your awareness and increase your ability to concentrate. What is learned in the fullest way—using all five senses—is unlikely to be forgotten. As you learn concentration, you will find that you are able to be more in tune with what is going on around you in a social situation, which in turn allows you to interact more fully.

The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable — not to ensure that the house is made of bricks.

They tore down many others to use their superior construction materials, including marble, gold, and silver (traditional Arabic architecture used poor construction materials such as plaster, wood, and brick, evident in Andalusian palaces such as the Alhambra, and this is one of the reasons why Ibn Khaldun claimed that the constructions of the Arabs were not solidly built and quickly fell into ruins).

Hardie Boys- Exterior Millwork Exterior spaces on your property are largely exposed to the elements and that means they have to endure considerable wear and tear. This is why it becomes important to make sure that the structures, features and elements are manufactured by specialists that use high-quality, weather-resistant materials and products. We at Hardie Boys, Inc. are a leading manufacturer of various type of exterior architectural work. Since our inception in 1997, we have moved from strength to strength and created a niche for ourselves in this space. Today, when property owners across the region want any exterior millwork done, the first company they think of is us. Not only do we design, manufacture & install a variety of columns, soffit systems, brackets and louvers and a number of other similar products, but use very unique materials and techniques in making these features. Take a look at how our products differ from standard ones used in these applications: • Longevity- Traditionally, these features are made using materials such as foam, wood, concrete, plaster, brick, aluminum, iron etc. While most of these materials are quite hardy they aren’t always able to withstand the elements well. Wood can rot, while metal can rust and corrode over time; concrete tends to develop cracks when exposed to temperature fluctuations and plaster loses its resilience over time. All our products are made with a unique cellular PVC material which is extremely resilient and lasts for a number of years without any trouble. • Minimal maintenance- When you have exterior structures made of wood, they require specialized treatment and have to be polished or painted with regularity. Metal features have to be sanded and painted regularly as well and concrete needs to be resurfaced when it develops cracks. In comparison, the cellular PVC material we use is low-maintenance and only requires basic cleaning. • Aesthetics- As mentioned earlier, the material we use in exterior millwork is weather-resistant and doesn’t fade or deteriorate as much as traditionally-used materials do. This means the features and installations on your property continue to look attractive and add to the aesthetics and value of your property. • Fast and simple installation-The installation of the features made of cellular PVC is easy and quick. This means the project can be completed within a shorter timeframe and with the least amount of disruption to the daily activities on your property. • Versatility- This material is extremely versatile and can be used in the manufacture of various features and installation. We are also very creative and innovative in our approach and keep adding new products to our existing line of premium products. We are a customer-centric company that focuses on customization; and work very closely with our customers and provide beautifully-designed custom exterior millwork installations that are resilient and durable. While the British West Indies style is what we are more inclined towards, our products complement architectural styles including Dutch West Indies, Florida Vernacular, Coastal, Key West and more. For any more information about our custom designed cellular PVC, exterior millwork, contact Hardie Boys, Inc. on this number- 954-784-8216.

To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous.

But not necessarily! Look, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plain. Dust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnot. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that’s not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that’s always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it.

Lottie understands that the fear she’s found in him is not a new thing. That it’s been part of her father for a while now. If not originally part of his fundamental architecture, then it’s infiltrated him the way termites will devour the frame of a house, leaving only the brick exterior in place.

You have to go to a museum to look at paintings, attend a concert to hear live music, pick up a novel if you intend to read it. These art forms are, in that respect, relatively passive. Architecture, on the other hand, is aggressive: it surrounds us all the time, not just in our homes and offices but in public places. It is ever-present and often forgettable, but even when we aren’t particularly focused on it, it can make us feel better or worse, depending on its quality.

If we hire this maniac, and his architectural skills are on a par with his dress sense, our farmhouse will end up painted bright orange and thatched with pubic hair.

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.

Sharecropping is the dirty little secret at the root of America’s wealth—along with slavery itself. The immense profits generated by the industrious yet impoverished Black “sharecroppers” and “tenant farmers” financed Europe’s and America’s Industrial Revolution, including the building of their railroads, factories, mills, and their entire infrastructure. It is truthfully asserted that the major cities of America and the Western world were “built with bricks of cotton.” Today the debt traps designed to ensnare the working poor and middle class in a lifelong cycle of debt—the high-cost installment loans that charge usurious interest rates of 100% or more, the “payday” loans that charge 400% interest, the extortionate credit card multi-charges, the subprime mortgages with ballooning interest rates, and the home equity loan swindles—are the bastard children of the sharecropping American South. It

and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was

A minister was walking by a construction project and saw two men laying bricks. “What are you doing?” he asked the first. “I’m laying bricks,” he answered gruffly. “And you?’’ he asked the other. “I’m building a cathedral,” came the happy reply. The minister was agreeably impressed with this man’s idealism and sense of participation in God’s Grand Plan. He composed a sermon on the subject, and returned the next day to speak to the inspired bricklayer. Only the first man was at work. “Where’s your friend?” asked the minister. “He got fired.” “How terrible. Why?” “He thought we were building a cathedral, but we’re building a garage.”9 So ask yourself: am I designing a cathedral or a garage? The difference between the two is important, and it’s often hard to tell them apart when your focus is on laying bricks. Sometimes

I'd tell her that recovery would be like the temple: built between an enormous boulder and a cliff's edge. The construction would be perilous, with the laying of every stone risking a drop into the abyss. Her trauma would be the boulder, an unforgiving hard ball within her. It can never be removed. It would never yield, erode, soften. It would take time, and respect for the delicate ecosystem, but she would slowly build something intricate around this boulder. The architecture she assembled encased the boulder, protected it from rolling over the cliff's edge. Every time she needed more building materials, she would have to descend the mountain and carry each brick up. It would break her back, turn her hands and feet hard with callouses, crush her spirit. But when the final tile slotted into place, the painstaking years on the brutal mountainside would be worthwhile in the way the far-reaching views of the landscape from the temple made her catch her breath. She would finally take in the sky and the sea, the colourful boats docked at the harbour below, the verdant rice paddies, and the tiny villages dotted in between the valleys. The boulder and the cliff won't be all she sees any more.

is that every little brick of this temple, every eternal book, every eternal melody, every unique architectural silhouette, bears within itself the compressed experience of this humankind, its thoughts and thoughts about it, ideas about the goals and contradictions of its existence

if the bricks aren’t well made, the architecture of the building doesn’t matter much.

Good architectures are centered on use cases so that architects can safely describe the structures that support those use cases without committing to frameworks, tools, and environments. Again, consider the plans for a house. The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable—not to ensure that the house is made of bricks. Indeed, the architect takes pains to ensure that the homeowner can make decisions about the exterior material (bricks, stone, or cedar) later, after the plans ensure that the use cases are met.

The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.

The house stood high on the peninsula of Vaucluse, three stories tall with a turret on one side. It had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jess's great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the colony of New South Wales, and had been featured in several glossy books about architecture that her grandmother kept open on the display tables in the library. Inside it was entirely unpredictable: unexpected doorways led to hidden staircases that wound around brick chimneys and allowed a person to arrive in a vastly different part of the house from that which they'd left.

Filippo, on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centering altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centering. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo’s contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible.

Augustus himself is reported to have boasted that he found Rome a ‘city of brick’ and left (some of) it ‘a city of marble’. But these architectural developments were often part of a more significant project, to reconfigure the cityscape around the idea of the emperor, to make his presence seem inevitable, even ‘natural’.

The stones in a dome, however, are not only crushed from above but also thrust outward by the pull energy known as “hoop stress,” in the same way as the rubber of an inflated balloon will bulge outward if one compresses it from above. The problem for architects is that stone and brick do not respond nearly so well to this lateral thrust as they do to compression.

Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.

Almost nothing is known of the time between the late Glacial Age circa 15,000 BC and the beginnings of Mehrgarh at circa 7000 BC ... The first period at Mehrgarh has fully-developed domestic architecture based on mud brick ... So while Mehrgarh ... is undoubtedly an early village farming community, there is also a sense that the excavations there have not documented the beginnings of this tradition or the beginnings of food production and domestication in the region. It is certainly nothing like a terminal hunting-gathering site with the intensive collection of cereals, pulses and sophisticated hunting. These people were already farmers.

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.

like the 20th, perched high above Paris. The Parc de Belleville has an unparalleled view of Paris (second only to the view I had from my rooftop apartment), and I could have easily imagined living there amid its rough brick streets and the human scale of the architecture.

Glass ain’t shit when it comes to statement architecture. Fuck glass. Glass is only good for windows. Steel, brick, something solid and dense, that’s what you want your building to be made out of.

The architecture texts, when I could access them, showed beautiful and inspiring buildings, completely impossible because we didn't have pre-stressed concrete or structural steel, in fact hardly any iron because the satellite hadn't found any ore deposits. We had only bricks and lumber but I'd tried to learn what was practical and apply it and now my first building was falling apart on top of me because people who hadn't studied architecture were sure they knew better.

Architect Nels Brick designed this wooden bungalow on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Andersonville in 1914. Notice the wide kitchen windows and the relationship of the kitchen to the dining and living rooms. (Photograph by Mati Maldre.)

When I regained consciousness I was seeing visions. They were architectural. I saw majestic palaces and other grand edifices that were all built out of alphabets. The building blocks of these fantastic structures were letters, as if the world was words, created from the same basic material as language, and poetry. There was no essential difference between things made out of letters and stories, which were made of the same stuff. Their essences were the same. The visions conjured up external walls, great halls, high domes that were both lavish and austere, a Mughal mirror-tiled Sheesh Mahal at one time, and at another a stone-walled place with small barred windows. Something like Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was manifested to me by my unsettled brain, and the Alhambra, and Versailles; like Fatehpur Sikri and the Agra Red Fort and the Lake Palace of Udaipur; but also a darker version of El Escorial in Spain, menacing, puritanical, a nightmare rather than a dream. When I looked closely the alphabets were always present, mirror-glittering alphabets and grim letters of stone, brick alphabets and treasure-letters of diamond and gold. After a while, I understood that my eyes were closed[…]