Good Architecture Quotes

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” —PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

When most people looked at Josie Tyrell, they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. But Michael saw past the mouth and the eyes, the architecture of the body, her fleshly masquerade. Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body's shadow theater. But Michael had to come backstage. He went down into the mines, into the dark, and brought up the gold, your new self, a better self. But what good was it if he was just going to leave her behind?

Sometimes a house wants to be your mother. Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.

Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy. The ultimate goal is to minimize the lifetime cost of the system and to maximize programmer productivity.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

Almost everything we know about good software architecture has to do with making software easy to change

When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I've learned to channel my experiences into them. The last two -- distractions and fears -- are the dangerous ones. They're the habitual demons that invade the launch of any project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible. Let me tell you my five big fears: 1. People will laugh at me. 2. Someone has done it before. 3. I have nothing to say. 4. I will upset someone I love. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind. "There are mighty demons, but they're hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they'll shut down my impulses ('No, you can't do that') and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven't yet, and they're not going to start now.... 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. 4. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you're a good person with good intentions. You're trying to create unity, not discord. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, 'Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.' But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

As an orangutan cannot embrace higher mathematics or comprehend the architecture and operation of a computer, we humans __ so good at loudly proclaiming our intelligence and applauding our own doltish displays of cerebral gymnastics __ cannot begin to understand the true structure and functioning of the Universe.

I’m at architecture school at UCLA.” “Ooooh, I love architects. They have such big buildings.” Oh Lord, let the floor open up and suck me into the ground. Better yet, take Will. “Uh, not all of them are big. Some are quite small. It all depends on the client,” Juan says. “I’m sure yours are very, very big.” “Yeah, well, I’m still in school, so I’m not really building much other than models at the moment.” Poor Juan looks hideously uncomfortable. “I bet you’re really good with your hands, all that drawing and building.

Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.

Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on. Our

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.

I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me. Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time. Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else." "Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.

For a truly great company, the Big Thing is never any specific line of business or product or idea or invention. The Big Thing is your underlying flywheel architecture, properly conceived

The majestic architecture, the cultivated manners, the simplicity of life, the disregard for one's fellow man, the plagues, the rampant corruption, the unmitigated racism, and the uncontrollable violence--all the things our grandparents called 'the good old days'...

Most college students would have deemed it a waste of a perfectly good Friday night, but most students were not in a program with constant stress and regular physical battles, with the possible exception of architecture majors.

What if your company has made a commitment to a certain database, or a certain web server, or a certain framework? A good architect pretends that the decision has not been made, and shapes the system such that those decisions can still be deferred or changed for as long as possible. A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. —Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

An architecture that is not documented, and not communicated, may still be a good architecture, but the risks surrounding it are enormous. —RK

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.

A good architecture will allow a system to be born as a monolith, deployed in a single file, but then to grow into a set of independently deployable units, and then all the way to independent services and/or micro-services.

Some day I'll probably marry a horny-handed son of a toil, and if I do it'll be the horny hands that will win me. If you want to know, I like 'em with their scars on them. There's something about a man who has fought for it - I don't know what it is - a look in his eye - the feel of his hand. He needn't have been successful - thought he probably would be. I don't know. I'm not very good at this analysis stuff. I know he - well, you haven't a mark on you. Not a mark. You quit being an architect, or whatever it was, because architecture was an uphill disheartening job at the time. I don't say that you should have kept on. For all I know you were a bum architect. But if you had kept on - if you had loved it enough to keep on - fighting, and struggling, and sitcking it out - why, that fight would show in your face to-day - in your eyes and your jaw and your hands and in your way of standing and walking and sitting and talking. Listen. I'm not critcizing you. But you're all smooth. I like 'em bumpy.

Everything around you was architected by another person. Whether or not they were aware of what they were doing. Whether or not they did a good job. Whether or not they delegated the task to a computer. Information is a responsibility we all share.

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't. Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at.

Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.

Also, she’d been taught to think that the Parthenon were the right and the good. And rather than that meaning they got to do what they liked, and their actions would be whitewashed as right and good because of who they were, it meant they had to actually do right and good things.

Brutalist architecture was Modernism's angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's devided between 'eyesores' and 'icons'; fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It’s a den of crime and corruption. And it’s a monument to architecture and enterprise. It’s violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they’re all here. The

In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.

I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid. I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts... but in general thoughts too are revealed. Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced over the course of my past life, I was in that instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences, even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy. Perhaps if I took a god look around, I would find the remains of those shits past, and then, triangulating properly, Clarabelle's treasure. But I stopped there. Shit was not my linden-blossom tea, of course not, how could I have expected to conduct my recherche with my sphincter? In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since reawakening. The ways of the Lord are infinite, I said to myself, they go even through the butthole.

During the next few years I wrote a series of Martian pensées, Shakespearean "asides," wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams. The French, like St. John Perce, practice this to perfection. It is the half-poem, half-prose paragraph that runs as little as one hundred words or as long as a full page on any subject, summoned by weather, time, architectural facade, fine wine, good victuals, a view of the sea, quick sunsets, or a long sunrise. From these elements one upchucks rare hairballs or a maundering Hamlet-like soliloquy.

Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question.

Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness. If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creative.

What if the decisions have already been made by someone else? What if your company has made a commitment to a certain database, or a certain web server, or a certain framework? A good architect pretends that the decision has not been made, and shapes the system such that those decisions can still be deferred or changed for as long as possible. A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

On a journey the face of reality changes with the mountains and rivers, with the architecture of the buildings, the layout of the gardens, with the language, the skin colour. And yesterday’s reality burns on in the pain of parting; the day before yesterday’s is a finished episode, never to return; what happened a month ago is a dream, a past life. And at last you realize that the course of a life contains nothing but a limited number of such ‘episodes’, that a thousand and one accidents determine where we can build our house at last – but the peace of our poor minds is a precious good freedom that you should not chase, not haggle over, nor should you bargain for it with the dictators who can set fire to our houses, trample our fields and spread cholera overnight. Appalling uncertainty…? Appalling only when we fail to look it in the eyes. But the journey that many may take for an airy dream, an enticing game, liberation from daily routine, freedom as such, is in reality merciless, a school that accustoms us to the inevitable course of events, to encounters and losses, blow upon blow.

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Dijkstra realized that these “good” uses of goto corresponded to simple selection and iteration control structures such as if/then/else and do/while. Modules that used only those kinds of control structures could be recursively subdivided into provable units.

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. [T]here are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a “neutral” design. [A]s good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact. [S]mall and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior. [I]n many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. Good architects realize that although they can’t build the perfect building, they can make some design choices that will have beneficial effects. And just as a building architect must eventually build some particular building, a choice architect must [for example] choose a particular arrangement of food options at lunch, and by so doing she can influence what people eat. She can nudge.

The Glubs’ house had always looked as if a giant had picked it up and given it a good shake. And it was styled like a sweater your grandmother made: having too much in the sleeve, and too much about the waist, but providing more warmth than any other of your own.

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.

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.

As strange as it may seem, this decision is one of the options that a good architect leaves open. A system that is written as a monolith, and that depends on that monolithic structure, cannot easily be upgraded to multiple processes, multiple threads, or micro-services should the need arise. By comparison, an architecture that maintains the proper isolation of its components, and does not assume the means of communication between those components, will be much easier to transition through the spectrum of threads, processes, and services as the operational needs of the system change over time.

According to Architectural Digest, big mansions surrounded by vast estate gardens and thoroughbred horse farms are really good places to live. According to Town & Country, strands of fat pearls are lustrous. According to Travel & Leisure, a private yacht anchored in the sunny Mediterranean is relaxing.

We would prefer an architecture that is consistent with human feeling, and in which design decisions are based on observation and empirical verification. The bottom line is that buildings have to provide good, healthy environments for human beings, and to inflict the least possible damage to the Earth’s ecology.

The soldier within her was urging her to just kill them. Gun them down, if the physics would even let her. Or keep them up there, closer to where the death was. But she'd been among civilians and Colonials a long time. Also, she'd been taught to think that the Parthenon were the right and the good. And rather than that meaning they got to do what they liked, and their actions would be whitewashed as right and good because of who they were, it meant they had to actually do right and good things. Active virtue, defending humanity and never, ever giving in to the temptation that Doctor Parsefer had strewn in their path when she'd cooked up her perfect vat-born warrior angels. If these angels were ever to fall, we would be such a force for evil in the universe. It was a terrible thing to look into the heart of your culture and know that you were intended for monstrosity and only an active devotion to the good of others would keep you from it, even when those others hated you.

For architects, towns and cities are just big display cases for their work. The fact that the place matters so much more than the building is something else they don't want to know. Making good cities is the last thing on their mind. As the heroic urbanist Jane Jacobs was heard to say, "the most cunningly ignorant people I know are architects.

In the most basic of situations-- when we know what we are doing, when we are engaged with the familiar-- these fundamental tendencies suffice. Our actual situations, however, are almost always more complex. If things or situations were straightforwardly or simply positive or negative, good or bad, we would not have to make judgements regarding them, would not have to think about our behavior, and how and when it should be modified-- indeed, would not have to think at all. We are faced, however, with the constant problem of ambivalence in meaning, which is to say that a thing or situation might be bad and good simultaneously (or good in two conflicting manners; or bad, in two conflicting manners).

Anxious to avoid a repeat of history, Edmund Burke laid out the logic behind the American architecture in a letter from 1791: "Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites [read: flesh]... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Because freedom without self-mastery is a disaster waiting to happen. Saint Augustine said it well: "Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.

How old is she now?” “Oh, she’s twenty now.” She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it’s done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, “See you aroun’, huh?” “Sure, Marianne. Sure.” Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

to take an example closer to home, consider the fact that every few years your body replaces most of the atoms that comprise you. In spite of this, you remain yourself in all the ways that matter to you. One atom is as good as any other if it’s playing the same functional role in your molecular makeup. The same story should hold for the brain: if a mad scientist were to replace each of your neurons with a functionally equivalent micromachine replica, you should come out of the procedure feeling no less your own true self than you had at the outset. By this principle, an artificial system that used the same functional architecture as an intelligent, living brain should be likewise intelligent—and not just contrivedly so, but actually, truly intelligent.

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.

Laura Dillard." It seemed impossible that he could share this with Catherine Marks, but she seemed to object he would. And somehow he was obliging her. "Beautiful girl. She loved to watercolor. Few people are good at that, they're too afraid of making mistakes. You can't lift the color or hide it, once it's put down. And water is unpredictable- an active partner in the painting- you have to let it behave as it will. Sometimes the color diffuses in ways you don't expect, or one shade backruns into another. That was fine with Laura. She liked the surprises of it. We had known each other all during childhood. I went away for two years to study architecture, and when I came back, we fell in love. So easily. We never argued- there was nothing to argue over. Nothing in our way.

It is ridiculous to lay down to people where a thing should stand, design everything for them from the lavatory pan to the ashtray. On the contrary, I like people to move their furniture so that it suits them (not me!), and it's quite natural (and I approve) when they bring the old pictures and mementos they have come to love into a new interior, irrespective of whether they are good taste or bad.

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.

They were asking Cullen to tell them things that Cullen believed he could not tell them. The detectives’ job was to help resolve this paradox for him. They needed to challenge his belief system so deeply that the architecture of his universe failed. Then they needed to rebuild the world into one in which confessing to murder seem like a good option. And the only way to do that was to create a situation where not talking was actually worse.

London is good for two things — excellent Scotch and leaving.I miss them both, especially as I often partake of one while doing the other. I find the company stifling, the streets foul smelling and overcrowded, the houses bland and without architectural merit, and the people banal and filled with their own consequence. No matter how often I leave London, I cannot wait to leave it again. My home is in my explorations. Those always welcome me.

To achieve these goals [of making good landscapes}, there is but one necessity: when preparing and approving plans for new places, or spending money on old places, we must look beyond the confines of each and every project. Gazing at these wider horizons, we shall see that development projects are initiated by specialists who have been imprisioned within "closely drawn technical limits" and "narrowly drawn territorial boundaries" (Weddle 1967; vii).

We try to repress ruins, especially in America, probably because we have little appreciation for failure, ending, and past. We tear down lovely old buildings without enough pangs of conscience to slow us down and consider what we're doing. We construct past architecture, but we're not good at preserving ruins. There's a vast difference between allowing our cities to become ugly through inattention and economic neglect, and allowing ruins to stand in our midst.

Zhou,” Biyu said, when Sabaa paused, “before the Jade Emperor, humans were just like the beasts in the field. We ate, lived and reproduced, but we were going nowhere. The universe is order in all its perfection, stagnant and unchanging. The wars set us free. Free to change, to learn, to adapt, to become more than we were. To do that, we sacrificed order for a measure of chaos, of challenge. It let some people, men and women, do evil, but even that inspired many more to do good. Medicines, writing, music, architecture, all the accomplishments of your Empire came at a high price, but it was worth paying. Tonight we reaffirm that fact. Without the power we grant the Jade Emperor from the realms we represent, we would lose all that we have gained. The universe would reassert its control. Over the years, order would take charge once more and progress would end. Given time, our race would slide back into the beasts we were once. It is something we could not survive.

Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy—willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants. The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don’t like—not the worst of measures—and let the rest go.

When reading the white paper, the first question to ask is: What problem does it solve? In other words, is there a reason for this cryptoasset and its associated architecture to exist in a decentralized manner? There are lots of digital services in our world, so does this one have an inherent benefit to being provisioned in a distributed, secure, and egalitarian manner? We call this the decentralization edge. Put bluntly by Vitalik Buterin, “Projects really should make sure they have good answers for ‘why use a blockchain.

What a lucky girl you are to have this opportunity to live in one of the world's great cities at this most fascinating point in its long, rich history, they had said. Little Becky had known enough not to ask if there was going to be a Banana Republic or a Gap there, or a Tower Records or a Starbucks or a Tweeters or a Blockbuster or a Super CVS or a Saks. Her mother only mentioned museums and concert halls and churches and architecture, so Little Becky was quite sure there was no room left in Prague for anything good to be built.

Which kinds of decisions are premature? Decisions that have nothing to do with the business requirements—the use cases—of the system. These include decisions about frameworks, databases, web servers, utility libraries, dependency injection, and the like. A good system architecture is one in which decisions like these are rendered ancillary and deferrable. A good system architecture does not depend on those decisions. A good system architecture allows those decisions to be made at the latest possible moment, without significant impact.

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.

What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future. The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It’s the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

It's far more rewarding than hard. It's rewarding to set a goal and reach it. It's rewarding to know that you're communicating in a language that makes sense to others. It's rewarding to help someone understand something in a way they hadn't before. It's rewarding to see positive changes from the insights you gather. It's rewarding to know that something is good. It's rewarding to give the gifts of clarity, realistic expectations, and clear direction. It's rewarding to make this world a little clearer. It's rewarding to make sense of the messes you face.

She doesn’t have any terrific talent for acting, but that’s how it appears to go. People don’t do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they’re good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. Anything! It’s a spite. It’s having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don’t need anyone else to do these things for you.

It's hard to decide to tear down a wall, take off the roof, or rip up the floorboards. It's hard to admit when something architectural isn't serving you. It's hard to find the words for what's wrong. It's hard to deal with the time between understanding something is wrong and fixing it. It's hard to get there. It's hard to be honest about what went right and what went poorly in the past. It's hard to argue with people you work with about fuzzy things like meaning and truth. It's hard to ask questions. It's hard to hear criticism. It's hard to start over. It's hard to get to good.

How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of "the modern" wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all.

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.

Natural materials always cause unforeseeable problems despite the most careful planning. They break and rot and split. Inconsistencies are both their charm and their drawback, which is precisely why the extra precaution of backing the washi paper with plastic made sense. There was no 'right way' except to admit that different views must coexist. In the end, respecting others' opinions, addressing their criticisms and acknowledging problems is the only way to get things done. If building with natural materials is to be saved, it must be accomplished with humility and hard work, not bombast and confrontation. To this day the washi paper at the Hiroshige Museum remains in good shape.

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.

A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.

We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the full moon. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have scheduled moongazing appointments. For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence, a ritual known as tsukimi. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings (tsukimi dango) are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene, a feeling thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food.

Yann LeCun's strategy provides a good example of a much more general notion: the exploitation of innate knowledge. Convolutional neural networks learn better and faster than other types of neural networks because they do not learn everything. They incorporate, in their very architecture, a strong hypothesis: what I learn in one place can be generalized everywhere else. The main problem with image recognition is invariance: I have to recognize an object, whatever its position and size, even if it moves to the right or left, farther or closer. It is a challenge, but it is also a very strong constraint: I can expect the very same clues to help me recognize a face anywhere in space. By replicating the same algorithm everywhere, convolutional networks effectively exploit this constraint: they integrate it into their very structure. Innately, prior to any learning, the system already “knows” this key property of the visual world. It does not learn invariance, but assumes it a priori and uses it to reduce the learning space-clever indeed!

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties.

When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.

I will invest my heart's desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me. Although it grieves me that houses are burning, I have fallen in love with freedom regardless, and the entitlement of a woman to get a move on, equipped with boots that fit and opinions that might matter. The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own: the curve of a five-year-old's forehead in profile, and the vulnerable expectation in the hand that reaches for mine as we cross the street. The wake-up call of birds in a forest. The intensity of the light fifteen minutes before the end of day; the color wash of a sunset on mountains; the ripe sphere of that same sun hanging low in a dusty sky in a breathtaking photograph from Afghanistan. In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place. Other people must share this ritual. For some I suppose it must be the path through a particular set of city streets, a comforting architecture; for me it's the need to stare at water until my mind comes to rest on nothing at all. Then I can go home. I can clear the brush from a neglected part of the garden, working slowly until it comes to me that here is one small place I can make right for my family. I can plant something as an act of faith in time itself, a vow that we will, sure enough, have a fall and a winter this year, to be followed again by spring. This is not an end in itself, but a beginning. I work until my mind can run a little further on its tether, tugging at this central pole of my sadness, forgetting it for a minute or two while pondering a school meeting next week, the watershed conservation project our neighborhood has undertaken, the farmer's market it organized last year: the good that becomes possible when a small group of thoughtful citizens commit themselves to it...Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

The critical rules and critical data are inextricably bound, so they are a good candidate for an object. We’ll call this kind of object an Entity.1

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.

A good architecture makes it unnecessary to decide on Rails, or Spring, or Hibernate, or Tomcat, or MySQL, until much later in the project. A good architecture makes it easy to change your mind about those decisions, too. A good architecture emphasizes the use cases and decouples them from peripheral concerns

For example, maybe you like Spring. Spring is a good dependency injection framework. Maybe you use Spring to auto-wire your dependencies. That’s fine, but you should not sprinkle @autowired annotations all throughout your business objects. Your business objects should not know about Spring. Instead, you can use Spring to inject dependencies into your Main component. It’s OK for Main to know about Spring since Main is the dirtiest, lowest-level component in the architecture.

It is far more common to fight your way through terrible software designs than it is to enjoy the pleasure of working with a good one.

Bounded contexts are business workflows, and often the entities that need to cooperate in a transaction show architects a good service boundary. Because transactions cause issues in distributed architectures, if architects can design their system to avoid them, they generate better designs. ........ Building transactions across service boundaries violates the core decoupling principle of the microservices architecture (and also creates the worst kind of dynamic connascence, connascence of value). The best advice for architects who want to do transactions across services is: don’t! Fix the granularity components instead. Often, architects who build microservices architectures who then find a need to wire them together with transactions have gone too granular in their design. Transaction boundaries is one of the common indicators of service granularity.

The diagram in Figure 14.5 shows X, which is a stable component. Three components depend on X, so it has three good reasons not to change. We say that X is responsible to those three components. Conversely, X depends on nothing, so it has no external influence to make it change. We say it is independent.

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.

A shopping cart application with a good architecture will look like a shopping cart application. The use cases of that system will be plainly visible within the structure of that system. Developers will not have to hunt for behaviors, because those behaviors will be first-class elements visible at the top level of the system.

A good architecture protects the majority of the source code from those changes. It leaves the decoupling mode open as an option so that large deployments can use one mode, whereas small deployments can use another.

a good architecture must support: • The use cases and operation of the system. • The maintenance of the system. • The development of the system. • The deployment of the system.

The most important thing a good architecture can do to support behavior is to clarify and expose that behavior so that the intent of the system is visible at the architectural level.

A good architecture will allow a system to be born as a monolith, deployed in a single file, but then to grow into a set of independently deployable units, and then all the way to independent services and/or micro-services. Later, as things change, it should allow for reversing that progression and sliding all the way back down into a monolith.

A good architecture comes from understanding it more as a journey than as a destination, more as an ongoing process of enquiry than as a frozen artifact.

The primary purpose of architecture is to support the life cycle of the system. Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy.

As biological beings, we humans - anchored to our biology - can only experience a thermodynamic arrow of time in one direction but given our rapid technological advances and the forthcoming Cybernetic Singularity, that might change for good. The ultimate effects of future developments may appear quite strange to us, present-day humans, as the emergence of things like personalized 'non-linear' reality and fluid distributed identity could challenge our current biological and cultural assumptions. The resulting 'identity' architectures will transform our notion of personhood and form the kernel of posthuman civilization.

The architectural competition is a future oriented production of knowledge through architectural projects. From that perspective the competition takes on an appearance of futuristic archaeology. The future is being investigated with the support of design—not how it is, but how it could be if the proposals were to be implemented. What is important here is that the proposals contain different modes of solution for the same competition design problem. There is no given answer, no “correct solution”, but instead the potential of alternative good solutions to the competition task at hand. For this reason doubt and lack of certainty is a constant companion in the jury’s examination of the design proposals.

As a child, I was fascinated by construction sites. Later, I worked on them, selling houses. I love the whole idea of building in the literal, and the metaphorical sense. Good writers are good architects and builders - it's all about structure.

What was that about the family investment project?” she asks. “Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. “Not that I expect you to care.” Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen—” “Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily. “In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn’t optimized for it—we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time—we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth—but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.” “You tell ’em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare. “Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take

Is Ronchamp reminiscent of the Ark left stranded on Ararat, or like ‘bits of broken china thrown on top of the hill’? Is the roof like a bird’s wing, or does the whole edifice look like a decoy? Is it an alighting dove or a sitting duck? Good taste bids us to suppress the latter in favour of the former, although the latter is as easy to see.

The Modular, good fable that it is, tells a story about a hidden regulatory agency, but it is not that agency itself.

Architects can always make good use of vacant land, regardless of the horror that brought it into being: it is ruthless being that is supposed to make life possible again.

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.

I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs. Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn't let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax's novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parent's bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked. I'd read something in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story. Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as 'inspiration' or 'having something to tell' and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of the narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas. My second great occupation, or I should say my first, was far more suited to comedy, and at times touched on farce. There was a time in which I fell in love on a weekly basis, something that, in hindsight, I don't recommend. I fell in love with a look, a voice, and above all with what was tightly concealed under those fine-wool dresses worn by the young girls of my time. 'That isn't love, it's a fever,' Fermín would specify. 'At your age it is chemically impossible to tell the difference. Mother Nature brings on these tricks to repopulate the planet by injecting hormones and a raft of idiocies into young people's veins so there's enough cannon fodder available for them to reproduce like rabbits and at the same time sacrifice themselves in the name of whatever is parroted by bankers, clerics, and revolutionary visionaries in dire need of idealists, imbeciles, and other plagues that will prevent the world from evolving and make sure it always stays the same.

Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.

I think passions are a matter of chance. An unfair demand disguised as practicality. The most honest people I’ve ever met were those who didn’t know what to do with their life. I don’t blame them. We deserve to be, like, island people. Computer engineers. What would they call their passion if they were born 500 years ago? Right, then their passion would be architecture. But if computers didn’t exist then, and Jimmy loves programming...writing code... the sound of keyboards... and the specific glow of a computer screen... then you can call him lucky. There’s a good chance many of our passions haven’t been invented yet.

Areas of low complexity or that are unlikely to be invested in can be built without the need for perfect code quality; working software is good enough. Sometimes feedback and first-to-market are core to the success of a product; in this instance, it can make business sense to get working software up as soon as possible, whatever the architecture.

Find What Inspires You Inspiration does not always come to us in a flash. We often have to go in search of it, especially when we feel stuck. Finding inspiration means discovering the things that make you excited—even when they have nothing to do with your art practice. If you go on a trip, you might find inspiration in architecture, landscapes, or traditional patterns found in old cultures. Whatever speaks to you, infuse these visual stimuli from your life into your work. To work through anxieties or find out what ignites your interest, it helps to carry a journal to do daily entries. Maintaining a journal with both written and visual thoughts is a long-standing tradition among artists that helps you ignite creativity and work through blocks. There is no right or wrong way to keep a journal. You can use a book with lined or unlined pages; it can be a written diary with stream-of-consciousness thoughts or a purely visual notebook with pages of drawings. One thing that is helpful, though, is to choose a journal size that is portable, so that you can carry it around with you. Make a habit of writing or drawing in your journal every day. Some days you’ll have only a quick five minutes and other days a whole hour to devote to it. Don’t worry about whether your writing makes sense or your ideas or drawings are any good. Eventually a pattern will emerge that will help unlock your mission as an artist and even identify new avenues for exploration.

Christianity pervades with its leavening power all the faculties of man and all departments of life. It is foreign to nothing which God has made. It is in harmony with all that is true, and beautiful, and good. It is friendly to philosophy, science, and art, and takes them into its service. Poetry, music, and architecture achieve their highest mission as handmaids of religion, and have derived the inspiration for their noblest works from the Bible. Whatever proceeds from God must return to God and spread his glory.

Intuitively, we know that neglect is not good for a child, and abundant evidence from neuroscience helps explain why: neglect during early childhood reduces the frequency of serve-and-return interactions and produces deficits in brain development that are hard to repair. A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalized at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment, and even brain architecture.

The Englishmen in the Middle East divided into two classes. Class one, subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner. He directed men secretly, guiding them as he would. In such frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed. Class two, the John Bull of the books, became the more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that, on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddle-headed self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits. He showed the complete Englishman. There was friction in his track, and his direction was less smooth than that of the intellectual type: yet his stout example cut wider swathe. Both sorts took the same direction in example, one vociferously, the other by implication. Each assumed the Englishman a chosen being, inimitable, and the copying him blasphemous or impertinent. In this conceit they urged on people the next best thing. God had not given it them to be English; a duty remained to be good of their type. Consequently we admired native custom; studied the language; wrote books about its architecture, folklore, and dying industries. Then one day, we woke up to find this chthonic spirit turned political, and shook our heads with sorrow over its ungrateful nationalism - truly the fine flower of our innocent efforts. The French, though they started with a similar doctrine of the Frenchman as the perfection of mankind (dogma amongst them, not secret instinct), went on, contrarily, to encourage their subjects to imitate them; since, even if they could never attain the true level, yet their virtue would be greater as they approached it. We looked upon imitation as a parody; they as a compliment.

The bad architect, addicted to aestheticism, is vexed because a door must be hung on a hinge, and redesigns the latter so that it appears ‘beautiful’ as it performs its function; and by doing this he finds that the door often creaks, jams, and will not open or opens badly. The good architect on the other hand wants the door to open and reveal other spaces, and after having redesigned everything in the building, he does not care if he has to rely on the eternal wisdom of the ironmonger.

But as fuzzy as your lens can seem, setting goals with incomplete data is still a good way to determine if you're moving in the right direction.

But as fuzzy as your lens can seem, setting goals with incomplete data is still a good way to determine if you're moving in the right direction. Uncertainty comes up in almost every project. But you can only learn from those moments if you don't give up. Stick with the tasks that help you clarify and measure the distance ahead.

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.

Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American.” i think this quote means that pickles do not go on barbecue steaks. i agree with it because it represents Americans “He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast.” i think that this quote means that something can be built so elegantly. i disagree because there are always problems.

Manifested in its networks of tithing, collection and supply, the efficacy of this unique culture was reaffirmed at the beginning of every reign when the state machine began to build another pyramid. So the architecture of the pyramid complexes manifests the living systems of that state in good hard stone, and the structures of tithing and supply which had enabled their construction continued to be acted out in dramatic continuation after pharaoh’s death in rites of offering. Like the inhabitants of the early farming settlements, at Abusir, the state system operated within the archaic theatres of life and death. These are the fundamental principles that explain all of the surviving manifestations of the pharaonic kingdom of the lower Nile. It was not a complex system. Though to modern minds its splendidly sophisticated and often enigmatic relics might first suggest the operation of a near-modern state with an elaborate theology, in reality they are a millennial duplication, elegant, consistent and concise, of a single set of rites – the rites of presentation and of offering, on which the state was founded.

It seems to me," he said, "that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only 'Take what you want, says God'; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone's outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that's come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can't afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture--theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth." He didn't sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. "I don't consider this anything to become incensed about," he said, reading my look. "In fact, it shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone. We've taken what we wanted and we're paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man--what's his name? the prime minister--comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television," he added, a little peevishly. "We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.

we owe to it, and to its “super-terrestrial” pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It

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.

This picture shows someone standing next to a broken-down car on the side of a small country road. In this scenario, how many people might stop and ask the motorist if everything is OK? Because it’s a small road in a small community, probably everyone who passes by. However, how many times have motorists been stuck on the side of a busy highway in the middle of a large city and had thousands of cars simply drive by without anyone stopping and asking if everything is OK? All the time. This is a good example of the diffusion of responsibility. As cities get busier and more crowded, people assume the motorist has already called or help is on the way due to the large number of people witnessing the event. However, in most of these cases help is not on the way, and the motorist is stuck with a dead or forgotten cell phone, unable to call for help. An effective architect not only helps guide the development team through the implementation of the architecture, but also ensures that the team is healthy, happy, and working together to achieve a common goal. Looking for these three warning signs and consequently helping to correct them helps to ensure an effective development team.

But good information architecture can do more than just help people find objects and information. It can empower people by making it easier for them to learn and make better decisions.

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.

The Parthenon was 228 feet long by 101 broad, and 64 feet high; the porticoes at each end had a double row of eight columns; the sculptures in the pediments were in full relief, representing in the eastern the Birth of Athene, and in the western the Struggle between that goddess and Poseidon, whilst those on the metopes, some of which are supposed to be from the hand of Alcamenes, the contemporary and rival of Phidias, rendered scenes from battles between the Gods and Giants, the Greeks and the Amazons, and the Centaurs and Lapithæ. Of somewhat later date than the Parthenon and resembling it in general style, though it is very considerably smaller, is the Theseum or Temple of Theseus on the plain on the north-west of the Acropolis, and at Bassæ in Arcadia is a Doric building, dedicated to Apollo Epicurius and designed by Ictinus, that has the peculiarity of facing north and south instead of, as was usual, east and west. Scarcely less beautiful than the Parthenon itself is the grand triple portico known as the Propylæa that gives access to it on the western side. It was designed about 430 by Mnesicles, and in it the Doric and Ionic styles are admirably combined, whilst in the Erectheum, sacred to the memory of Erechtheus, a hero of Attica, the Ionic order is seen at its best, so delicate is the carving of the capitals of its columns. It has moreover the rare and distinctive feature of what is known as a caryatid porch, that is to say, one in which the entablature is upheld by caryatides or statues representing female figures. Other good examples of the Ionic style are the small Temple of Niké Apteros, or the Wingless Victory, situated not far from the Propylæa and the Parthenon of Athens, the more important Temple of Apollo at Branchidæ near Miletus, originally of most imposing dimensions, and that of Artemis at Ephesus, of which however only a few fragments remain in situ. Of the sacred buildings of Greece in which the Corinthian order was employed there exist, with the exception of the Temple of Jupiter at Athens already referred to, but a few scattered remains, such as the columns from Epidaurus now in the Athens Museum, that formed part of a circlet of Corinthian pillars within a Doric colonnade. In the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, designed by Scopas in 394, however, the transition from the Ionic to the Corinthian style is very clearly illustrated, and in the circular Monument of Lysicrates, erected in 334 B.C. to commemorate the triumph of that hero's troop in the choric dances in honour of Dionysos, and the Tower of the Winds, both at Athens, the Corinthian style is seen at its best. In addition to the temples described above, some remains of tombs, notably that of the huge Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in memory of King Mausolus, who died in 353 B.C., and several theatres, including that of Dionysos at Athens, with a well-preserved one of larger size at Epidaurus, bear witness to the general prevalence of Doric features in funereal monuments and secular buildings, but of the palaces and humbler dwelling-houses in the three Greek styles, of which there must have been many fine examples, no trace remains. There is however no doubt that the Corinthian style was very constantly employed after the power of the great republics had been broken, and the Oriental taste for lavish decoration replaced the love for austere simplicity of the virile people of Greece and its dependencies. CHAPTER III

Ask residents of Manhattan what functions the city provides for them, and they will give you an impressive list. Do this for all the various stakeholders in the city, and you will have a pretty good set of requirements for Manhattan. This would be a useful exercise for city planners or for anyone considering starting a business in the city. In summary, then, the fact that not all systems are requirements-driven does not diminish the value of analyzing requirements. Whether we carry out the analysis before or after the system exists, it still has great benefits.

The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives.

What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word.

Laissez les bon temps rouler means “Let the good times roll.” It’s the unofficial slogan of a place that’s a fondue pot full of community, cuisine, architecture, art, nature, and magic.

Having a good set of automated tests for your system allows you to make fundamental architectural changes with minimal risk. It gives you space to work in.

It is usually good to provide people with lots of options, but when the question is complicated, sensible choice architecture guides people in the right directions.

When Mahler went to a composing retreat, she began having an affair with Walter Gropius, the architect who founded the Bauhaus School. I do not really like the Bauhaus School. But if you started dating the founder of an architectural movement, I’d support you and think your choice was great, and I’d pretend to like his architectural movement when we were all hanging out because I’m a good friend. So Alma was an adulteress and creatively unfulfilled—but she was just killing it with her choice of men.

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature’s God in America and China’s Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.

what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don’t have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won’t end up being any good.

But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people's infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don't sense the danger as it's happening, because what's wrong with friendship? Why can't we have friends of the opposite sex--or of the same sex, for that matter--even if we are married? The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony--so long as the "walls and windows" of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass's theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world--that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself--your deepest yearnings and frustrations--and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

On Monday mornings in nice weather, Diana would ask, “Where did you go this weekend, Mrs. Robertson?” She knew we made frequent trips outside London. Other English friends would tell us about their favorite spots, but Diana was not forthcoming with travel suggestions. At the time, I assumed that she might not have seen as much of England and Scotland as we did during that year. Diana enjoyed our enthusiasm for her country--its natural beauty, its stately homes and castles, its history. She must have smiled inside when I would tell her of my pleasure in the architecture, paintings, and furniture I saw in England’s famous mansions. She’d grown up in one! And she would always ask, “How did Patrick enjoy…Warwick Castle or Canterbury Cathedral or Dartmoor?” Patrick was a very good-natured sightseer. In return, I would ask, “And how was your weekend?”, leaving it up to her to say as little or as much as she chose. I would not have asked specifically, “What did you do last weekend?” She would answer politely and briefly, “Fine,” or “Lovely,” maybe mentioning that she’d been out in the country. Of course, I didn’t know “the country” meant a huge estate that had been in the family for centuries. Diana was unfailingly polite but sparing of any details. She considered her personal life just that, personal. She was careful never to give us a clue about her background. If she did not volunteer information, something in her manner told me I should not intrude. She may not have even been aware of this perception I had. I viewed her understated manner as appealing and discreet, not as off-putting or unfriendly. Clearly, Diana did not want us to know who she was. We may possibly have been the only people Diana ever knew who had no idea who she was. We welcomed her into our home and trusted her with our child for what she was. This may have been one reason she stayed in touch with us over the years.

LEDERHOSEN BACK IN THE SUITCASE – THEY WEREN’T MUCH HELP – I’M READY to leave. I started my journey in the most gorgeous of architectures in Jerusalem, and I end it in the most ravished of places, in Jenin. I started with Kings, David and Herod, and I end with Haifa Refugees. When I started the journey I was awed, when I end it I’m dismayed; when I started my journey laughter was my companion, when I end it a tear joins me; when I started this journey hope was my neighbor, when I end it despair stares me in the face. Witnessing the tremendous investments and endless attempts of the Europeans, not to mention the Germans, all geared to undermine the Jews in this land, in Israel, was an extremely unsettling experience. Being showered with love by the Arabs, just because they thought I was an Aryan, a German, was very discomforting. Watching the Jews and seeing how powerless they are, even now that they have their own state, was distressing. If logic is any guide, Israel will not survive. Besieged by hate from without and from within, no land can survive for very long. Miraculously, the Jews have built one of the most sophisticated, intense, beautiful countries of our time, but what are they doing to keep it? They hate themselves, they belie themselves, they are full of fears and many of them rush to get another passport; they want to go back to Poland, to Austria, to Germany – lands where their forefathers were hunted down and killed. And what am I doing? Just the same: I am going back to Germany. Am I a Jew just like them? Am I not Tobi the German? Am I not Abu Ali? My name is, sorry, Tuvia. Goodness of God. What a joke. A joke, I fear, only the Chosen People will truly comprehend. Adios, my sweet cats. You, of all creatures of this land, have a clear and sensible direction: milk and tuna. I am thankful that we met, for you have provided me with companionship in a land I felt so alone in. I am leaving this land, and I am leaving you. You will fare better here. You are Jewish cats, stay with your kind. Enjoy this land, my stray cats, as long as it lasts. I’ll miss you terribly. Shalom.

Romance is good, you know

Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover. Despite

Andy Hertzfeld: The most important thing really is the motivation. Why are you doing what you’re doing? That seeps into the product at every level, even though you think it might not. Your basic values are essentially the architecture of the project. Why does it exist? And in Silicon Valley there are two really common sets of values. There are what I call financial values, where the main thing is to make a bunch of money. That’s not a really good spiritual reason to be working on a project, although it’s completely valid. Then there are technical values that dominate lots of places where people care about using the best technique—doing things right. Sometimes that translates to ability or to performance, but it’s really a technical way of looking at things. But then there is a third set of values that are much less common: and they are the values essentially of the art world or the artist. And artistic values are when you want to create something new under the sun. If you want to contribute to art, your technique isn’t what matters. What matters is originality. It’s an emotional value.

This makes sense, because leaders cannot achieve goals on their own. They need their teams executing the work on a suitable architecture, with good technical practices, use of Lean principles, and all the other factors that we’ve studied over the years.

Shortly after the advent of Louis Philippe, the movement to save France’s architectural heritage began in earnest. One of the more important acts in this preservation campaign occurred shortly after the July Revolution, when the official post of inspector of historical monuments was created; then, seven years later, the Commission on Historical Monuments was established, with Prosper Merimee, the renowned novelist and passionate archaeologist, at its head. Under the auspices of this agency surveys were made of monuments all over France, and requests for funds for restorations were directed to Parliament. At odds with our present notion that a good restoration is a minimal one, the nineteenth-century concept included additions that were in some way in keeping with the spirit of the building. This entailed adding intense polychromy and mural paintings to the walls of many of these newly appreciated edifices.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder. It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were—like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long—at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger. And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air—but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

Good writing is like math: it has logic and structure. It feels solid to the reader: the writer is in control, having taken on the heavy burden of making a piece of writing clear and accessible. It might not follow a formula, exactly. But there's a kind of geometric architecture to it.

Dunbar’s generative conference room meetings remind us that the physical architecture of our work environments can have a transformative effect on the quality of our ideas. The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors, which is one reason so many Web-era companies have designed their work environments around common spaces where casual mingling and interdepartmental chatter happens without any formal planning.

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition

The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with work environments that encourage the architecture of serendipity. Traditionally, organizations that have a strong demand for innovation have created a kind of closed playpen for hunches: the research-and-development lab. Ironically, R&D labs have historically functioned as a kind of idea lockbox; the hunches evolving in those labs tended to be the most heavily guarded secrets in the entire organization. Allowing these early product ideas to circulate more widely would allow rival firms to copy or exploit them. Some organizations—including Apple—have gone to great length to keep R&D experiments sequestered from other employees inside the organization. But that secrecy, as we have seen, comes with great cost. Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations.

If you're lucky you live long enough to see the bad results of your good ideas.

They all espoused a return to preindustrial fabrication methods and a commitment to bringing good design to the masses. Yet they wound up producing objects—even those not made from intrinsically precious materials—that were so labor-intensive that they could never compete with machine-made items that the working class could afford, and thus became luxury goods for the rich.

Performance Tactics on the Road Tactics are generic design principles. To exercise this point, think about the design of the systems of roads and highways where you live. Traffic engineers employ a bunch of design “tricks” to optimize the performance of these complex systems, where performance has a number of measures, such as throughput (how many cars per hour get from the suburbs to the football stadium), average-case latency (how long it takes, on average, to get from your house to downtown), and worst-case latency (how long does it take an emergency vehicle to get you to the hospital). What are these tricks? None other than our good old buddies, tactics. Let’s consider some examples: • Manage event rate. Lights on highway entrance ramps let cars onto the highway only at set intervals, and cars must wait (queue) on the ramp for their turn. • Prioritize events. Ambulances and police, with their lights and sirens going, have higher priority than ordinary citizens; some highways have high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, giving priority to vehicles with two or more occupants. • Maintain multiple copies. Add traffic lanes to existing roads, or build parallel routes. In addition, there are some tricks that users of the system can employ: • Increase resources. Buy a Ferrari, for example. All other things being equal, the fastest car with a competent driver on an open road will get you to your destination more quickly. • Increase efficiency. Find a new route that is quicker and/or shorter than your current route. • Reduce computational overhead. You can drive closer to the car in front of you, or you can load more people into the same vehicle (that is, carpooling). What is the point of this discussion? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: performance is performance is performance. Engineers have been analyzing and optimizing systems for centuries, trying to improve their performance, and they have been employing the same design strategies to do so. So you should feel some comfort in knowing that when you try to improve the performance of your computer-based system, you are applying tactics that have been thoroughly “road tested.” —RK

The measure of design quality is simply the measure of the effort required to meet the needs of the customer. If that effort is low, and stays low throughout the lifetime of the system, the design is good. If that effort grows with each new release, the design is bad. It’s as simple as that.

Be careful about caching in too many places! The more caches between you and the source of fresh data, the more stale the data can be, and the harder it can be to determine the freshness of the data that a client eventually sees. This can be especially problematic with a microservice architecture where you have multiple services involved in a call chain. Again, the more caching you have, the harder it will be to assess the freshness of any piece of data. So if you think a cache is a good idea, keep it simple, stick to one, and think carefully before adding more!

Good architecture in Britain today is as much a matter of administration as ability.

Specific Architectural Topics Is the overall organization of the program clear, including a good architectural overview and justification? Are major building blocks well defined, including their areas of responsibility and their interfaces to other building blocks? Are all the functions listed in the requirements covered sensibly, by neither too many nor too few building blocks? Are the most critical classes described and justified? Is the data design described and justified? Is the database organization and content specified? Are all key business rules identified and their impact on the system described? Is a strategy for the user interface design described? Is the user interface modularized so that changes in it won’t affect the rest of the program? Is a strategy for handling I/O described and justified? Are resource-use estimates and a strategy for resource management described and justified for scarce resources like threads, database connections, handles, network bandwidth, and so on? Are the architecture’s security requirements described? Does the architecture set space and speed budgets for each class, subsystem, or functionality area? Does the architecture describe how scalability will be achieved? Does the architecture address interoperability? Is a strategy for internationalization/localization described? Is a coherent error-handling strategy provided? Is the approach to fault tolerance defined (if any is needed)? Has technical feasibility of all parts of the system been established? Is an approach to overengineering specified? Are necessary buy-vs.-build decisions included? Does the architecture describe how reused code will be made to conform to other architectural objectives? Is the architecture designed to accommodate likely changes? General Architectural Quality Does the architecture account for all the requirements? Is any part overarchitected or underarchitected? Are expectations in this area set out explicitly? Does the whole architecture hang together conceptually? Is the top-level design independent of the machine and language that will be used to implement it? Are the motivations for all major decisions provided? Are you, as a programmer who will implement the system, comfortable with the architecture?

to astrology and its “supra-terrestrial” claims we owe the grand style of architecture in Asia and Egypt It seems that all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands: dogmatic philosophy was such a mask;

Everyday I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative , with the painting of texture, with the timrbres and colors of the staging. With the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas

The perfection of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture is not to be explained by saying that the Cistercians were looking for a new technique. I am not sure that they were looking for a new technique at all. They built good churches because they were looking for God. And they were looking for God in a way that was pure and integral enough to make everything they did and everything they touched give glory to God.

I watch myself in the mirrored walls, veiled, slide down to sit on the floor and dial the reception planner. “Checking to make sure you’ve arranged a place card and seat for Simone.” “Yes,” she says. “I’ve put her with the table you’ve labeled ‘one-offs.’” “Perfect.” I hang up. The doors slide open. The concierge’s voice trails me out of the elevator. “I’ve heard it’s good luck to say a rosary on the morning of your wedding. I have one at my desk if you…” Minutes down the tree-lined road, the groom is being mimosa-toasted in his aunt Henshaw’s home. The cake is in the shape of the lake. In the morning we’ll return to the city. Alone in the room, I switch the channel to a newscast and slide under the folded coverlet. From the shelf of sleep, I hear local news stories. Henrietta has opened a store during an unfriendly economic climate. Despite everyone’s predictions, she is doing well. In global news, in towns around the world, people prepare for different holidays amid varied architecture.

And he won't come any more?" her mother sighed, with reserved censure. "Oh, I think he will. He couldn't very well come the next night. But he has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything—even the habit of thinking he's in love with some one." "Alma," said her mother, "I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him." "Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?" "But it does hurt her, Alma. It—it's indelicate. It isn't fair to him; it gives him hopes." "Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house." "If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her mother, taking up another branch of the inquiry, "that you really knew your own mind, I should be easier about it." "Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and, what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind." "What do you mean?" "I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr. Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up." "What expressions!" Mrs. Leighton lamented. "He let it out himself," Alma went on. "And you wouldn't have thought it was very flattering yourself. When I'm made love to, after this, I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another engaged couple anywhere about." "Did you tell him that, Alma?" "Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I'm not quite so indelicate as that." "I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest." "Oh, so did he!" "And you didn't?" "Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he's very much in earnest with Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he's a painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor. He has too many gifts—too many tastes." "And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos—" "Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so dreadfully personal!" "Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the matter." "And you know that I don't want to let you—especially when I haven't got any real feeling in the matter. But I should think—speaking in the abstract entirely—that if either of those arts was ever going to be in earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at least." "I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he was doing anything now at the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every Other Week.'" "Oh, he is! he is!" "And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very kind—very useful to you, in that matter." "And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I didn't know you held me so cheap." "You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don't want you to cheapen yourself. I don't want you to trifle with any one. I want you to be honest with yourself." "Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I've been perfectly honest with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don't care for him, and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it. If he comes here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of the family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that capacity or not. I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the notion that he's coming on any other basis." Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, "You know very well, Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with." "Then you leave him entirely to me?" "I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment." "He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma. It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better.

More while less, thats good design

By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?

A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

What is WordPress? WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. You can download and install a software script called WordPress from wordpress.org. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a servicecalled WordPress.com. WordPress users may install and switch between different themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Themes: WordPress is definitely the world’s most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like. WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install. It’s good choice for beginners. Plugins: WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available. Each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. WordPress menu management has extended functionalities that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc. If you like this post then please share and like this post. To learn more About website design in wordpress You can visit @ tririd.com Call us @ 8980010210

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).

That was his cover story. Architecture… a job that would take him out of town often and would require long hours and meetings that wouldn’t allow him to answer his phone. Of course, he had to have a good cover. Cell coverage in Hell was spotty.

For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We've got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn't just an option; it's a call to full Christian living. Celebration is worshiping God with our bodies, with the material creation He has set up around us. Celebrating-whether in feasts, ceremonies, holidays, formal worship, or lovemaking-are all part of obeying God's command to "love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength" (Deut. 6:5; Mk. 12:30). We are to show our love for God not just with one portion of our being (the spiritual aspect); we are to love God with our whole body, heart and strength and legs and lips.

We Protestants have replaced some of the grander architectural embellishments with a specific use of music intended to achieve the same end. Consequently, in Protestant circles “good” worship leaders are those who can use music to evoke what other traditions use space to evoke; specifically, a soulish sense of worshipfulness.227 But this is disjointed from everyday life and is inauthentic. Jonathan Edwards rightfully pointed out that emotions are transient and cannot be used to measure one’s relationship with God.228

Energy efficiency is a tactic for slowing the process of overshooting environmental limits, but the urgent work facing our civilization is to use the time we gain to build richer, more resilient kinds of buildings that serve the common good.

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.

And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.

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

When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes. That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.

The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives. We have covered a great deal of territory, including savings, Social

This was how Dinocrates, recommended only by his good looks and dignified carriage, came to be so famous. But as for me, Emperor, nature has not given me stature, age has marred my face, and my strength is impaired by ill health.

First, it’s hard to be optimistic, because the brain’s filtering architecture is pessimistic by design. Second, good news is drowned out, because it’s in the media’s best interest to overemphasize the bad. Third, scientists have recently discovered an even bigger cost: it’s not just that these survival instincts make us believe that “the hole we’re in is too deep to climb out of,” but they also limit our desire to climb out of that hole.

Many software projects get software architects involved only in the design phase, then they move to other projects or the consultation contract ends. How can they ensure that their deliberate architectural decisions have been implemented correctly? Their decisions will be at best good intentions unless they follow-through with them.

It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently “democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the architecture of “background music,” decorators, “good taste.

To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase, and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of a certain of our ideas of a good life.

The intrusion of the concrete continues, proceeding to divide what neighborhood cohesiveness remains into yet smaller increments. The inner loop greatly helps those people commuting from the suburbs, wanting to drive swiftly past the dwelling structures and the people who cannot have the choice of moving to the suburbs. It is in the city where life begins. Our suburbs can only be as good as the heart of the city. When the city’s heart fails, then…

By the end of my first year at the university (1938-39), the history of art professor organized a trip for his students to be sightseeing in Turkey, Greece and Egypt. We were supposed to study especially the Hadjia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, the pyramids in Egypt and the many architectural sights in Greece. The trip was supposed to take place in September, 1939. I had registered for the student trip abroad, in the company of friendly colleagues. As a preparation for the boat crossings, I had a tailor make for me a rain jacket, with a woolen buttoned-in lining. We were supposed to travel by boat from Constan ta, a Black Sea port in Romania. That trip never materialized since World War II broke out on September 1, 1939. The only good that came of these preparations was the jacket, which did me great duty during the war years.

In one set of experiments, for example, researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity. The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop themselves.1.23 It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world. Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

Describing architectures through implementation is akin to constructing a picture of your current or desired soulmate from pictures cut out of US Magazine; the result may paint a good picture of what you have or want, but it in no way describes how it is that the soulmate will meet your current or future needs.

Sweden’s capital is an expansive and peaceful place for solo travellers. It is made up of 14 islands, connected by 50 bridges all within Lake Mälaren which flows out into to the Baltic Sea. Several main districts encompass islands and are connected by Stockholm’s bridges. Norrmalm is the main business area and includes the train station, hotels, theatres and shopping. Őstermalm is more upmarket and has wide spaces that includes forest. Kungsholmen is a relaxed neighbourhood on an island on the west of the city. It has a good natural beach and is popular with bathers. In addition to the city of 14 islands, the Stockholm Archipelago is made up of 24,000 islands spread through with small towns, old forts and an occasional resort. Ekero, to the east of the city, is the only Swedish area to have two UNESCO World Heritage sites – the royal palace of Drottningholm, and the Viking village of Birka. Stockholm probably grew from origins as a place of safety – with so many islands it allowed early people to isolate themselves from invaders. The earliest fort on any of the islands stretches back to the 13th century. Today the city has architecture dating from that time. In addition, it didn’t suffer the bombing raids that beset other European cities, and much of the old architecture is untouched. Getting around the city is relatively easy by metro and bus. There are also pay‐as‐you‐go Stockholm City Bikes. The metro and buses travel out to most of the islands, but there are also hop on, hop off boat tours. It is well worth taking a trip through the broad and spacious archipelago, which stretches 80 kms out from the city. Please note that taxis are expensive and, to make matters worse, the taxi industry has been deregulated leading to visitors unwittingly paying extortionate rates. A yellow sticker on the back window of each car will tell you the maximum price that the driver will charge therefore, if you have a choice of taxis, choose

The Next Time" Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge. Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either. Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems, And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled, Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake, And so many people we loved have gone, And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew How long the ruins would last we would never complain. II Perfection is out of the question for people like us, So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines To flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting, In somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by, And on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down Will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s Take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room. A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin Among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting, The cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies. And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against The silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife. III It could have been another story, the one that was meant Instead of the one that happened. Living like this, Hoping to revise what has been false or rendered unreadable Is not what we wanted. Believing that the intended story Would have been like a day in the west when everything Is tirelessly present—the mountains casting their long shadow Over the valley where the wind sings its circular tune And trees respond with a dry clapping of leaves—was overly Simple no doubt, and short-sighted. For soon the leaves, Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet, Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be This late in the day for us but desire to make amends And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears.