Towards A New Architecture Quotes

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.

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

The house is a machine for living in.

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

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.

The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands. "Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957

To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new morning, in a perpetual revival of our emotional virginity – this, and only this, is worth being or having, to be or have what we imperfectly are. This dawn is the first dawn of the world. Never did this pink colour yellowing to a warm white so tinge, towards the west, the face of the buildings whose windowpane eyes gaze upon the silence brought by the growing light. There was never this hour, nor this light, nor this person that’s me. What will be tomorrow will be something else, and what I see will be seen by reconstituted eyes, full of a new vision. High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight weaves together with bright spots and shadows – you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what [I’ll be] tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

A ceux qui, absorbés maintenant dans le problème de "la machine à habiter", déclaraient que "l'architecture c'est servir", nous avons répondu: "L'architecture c'est émouvoir". Et nous avons été taxé de "poète", avec dédain

Truth to tell, the modern man is bored to tears in his home; so he goes to his club. The modern woman is bored outside her boudoir; she goes to tea-parties. The modern man and woman are bored at home; they go to night-clubs. But lesser folk who have no clubs gather together in the evening under the chandelier and hardly dare to walk through the labyrinth of their furniture which takes up the whole room and is all their fortune and their pride.

An object placed in the center of a room often spoils the room, for it hinders you from standing in the middle

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency? Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority?

The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house.

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth. Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

Nothing truly beautiful without its element of strangeness, nothing whole without its own incongruity, these (Jacksonville-area pioneer house) ruins sand up from the earth in sacred conjunction. These ruins conjoin the earth and the manmade, moving from one to the other and back again. The Browards built their house out of shell and limestone, and limestone forms naturally from the shells and skeletons of miniscule sea creatures over great periods of time. The Browards shaped the earth upright toward the sky. THey shaped it with doorframes and windows and chimneys. THey shaped the earth up around them as a shelter. But shaped earth was always the earth. Now the walls fall back down and join once again the ground, taken over by roots of ferns and weeds and small trees. The house was always the ground, only contained in an upward suspension. The house was always the earth, but brought up into architecture, and now the house that was always the earth crumbles back into the earth and nourishes new green things -- dog fennel and morning glories and palmettoes and cabbage palms and cedars. A true symbol of sacredness of the earth is earth's reclaiming of human ingenuity.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect. The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

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.

Once Bee was settled into kindergarten, Bernadette showed no interest in fixing up the house, or in any kind of work. All the energy she had once channeled so fearlessly into architecture, she turned toward fulminating about Seattle, in the form of wild rants that required no less than an hour to fully express. Take five-way intersections. The first time Bernadette commented on the abundance of five-way intersections in Seattle, it seemed perfectly relevant. I hadn’t noticed it myself, but indeed there were many intersections with an extra street jutting out, and which required you to wait through an extra traffic light cycle. Certainly worthy of a conversation between a husband and wife. But the second time Bernadette went off on the same topic, I wondered, Is there something new she wishes to add? But no. She was just complaining with renewed vehemence. She asked me to ask Bill Gates why he’d still live in a city with so many ridiculous intersections

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

It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.

We will feel conviction about the things we create only if we keep discovering, within those creations, new reasons for wanting them to be that way.

Toward the end of the Second World War, a new consciousness arose amongst the public and policy makers of the Western World. After ten years of crippling economic depression and another five at war, the public demanded something new from their disintegrating urban environments.

Now, the plan is the generator, “the plan is the determination of everything; it is an austere abstraction, an algebrization, and cold of aspect.” It is a plan of battle. The battle follows and that is the great moment.

ROME AND OURSELVES Rome is a bazaar in full swing, and a picturesque one. There you find every sort of horror (see the four reproductions here given) and the bad taste of the Roman Renaissance. We have to judge this Renaissance by our modern taste, which separates us from it by four great centuries of effort, the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th. We reap the benefit of this endeavour; we judge hardly, but with a warrantable severity. These four centuries are lacking at Rome, which fell asleep after Michael Angelo. Setting foot once again in Paris, we recover our ability to judge. The lesson of Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who can resist and can verify. Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life. The Grand Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici are the cancer of French architecture.

Contour and profile ['modinature'] are the touchstone of the architect. Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer. Contour is free of all restraint.

The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society to-day no long have dwellings adapted to their needs; neither the artizan nor the intellectual. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day: architecture or revolution.

The iPhone untethered the internet from the desktop. The energy of the blogosphere was redirected toward faster, mobile mediums. Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram facilitated the transition to mobile. These sites had learned from Facebook’s streamlined profiles and easy feeds. But they diverged from Facebook’s friend-focused model, favoring an open network that allowed users to “follow” anyone they found interesting. This mirrored the subscriber-based model of YouTube as well as the open architecture of the blogosphere. Instead of trying to re-create real-world friend networks online, this new generation of social apps sought to build an audience of friends and strangers alike. At the same time, they took the lessons of the blog era—chiefly, that anyone could build a following online—and expanded upon them.

I looked up sharply, displeased to find Donald’s attention on Catherine, who’d been silent at my side throughout the entire confrontation. She offered him a soft smile. “Can I call a car for you, Mr. Rockford?” His mouth fell open then slammed shut. She’d stumped him with her politeness, and I was quietly amused. Catherine had a way of handling the men I met with on a daily basis. Her manners never failed her, but she had a cutting edge beneath her soft outer layer. “No, you can’t call a car for me, young lady.” “Oh, that’s too bad.” She gestured politely to the door. “If there’s anything else I can do to make your exit easier…” His nostrils flared, and his eyes fell on her belly. “You really want to bring a kid into the world working for a man like this? What kind of mother are you—?” That was enough. I jerked him back by the collar of his sports jacket before he could complete his filthy question and marched him toward the door. He resisted, but the old guy wasn’t much more than bones and paunch beneath his tailored suit, so the little fight he put up was laughable. Once he was on the street and my security team was alerted to keep him there, I rejoined Catherine in the lobby. Her lips were rolled over her teeth, eyes on her feet. “Do you have anything to say, Catherine?” She shook her head. “No. Nothing at all, Elliot.” She held her notebook against her chest, her gaze averted. On anyone else, I might have taken her response at face value and believed she was interested in the uninspired architecture of our new building. But not Catherine. She’d been holding herself back from day one. If I hadn’t been so impressed by the ingenuity she’d shown in making an entirely new outfit from the lost and found box—a discarded cardigan, athletic leggings, an oversized blazer, and a tie as a belt—I wouldn’t have hired her. Not because her résumé wasn’t up to snuff. It had been fine. And it wasn’t because her answers to my questions had been anything less than passable.

To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new morning, in a perpetual revival of our emotional virginity – this, and only this, is worth being or having, to be or have what we imperfectly are. This dawn is the first dawn of the world. Never did this pink colour yellowing to a warm white so tinge, towards the west, the face of the buildings whose windowpane eyes gaze upon the silence brought by the growing light. There was never this hour, nor this light, nor this person that’s me. What will be tomorrow will be something else, and what I see will be seen by reconstituted eyes, full of a new vision. High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight weaves together with bright spots and shadows – you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what [I’ll be] tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

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.

I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

Malachi Constant is one of the richest men on Earth, but otherwise he is a soulless, purposeless individual. Thinking he might learn something to his benefit, he arranges to meet Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord, a New England aristocrat, while traveling in his private spaceship with his dog, Kazak, encountered a temporal anomaly called a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum.” This wrinkle in time allows him to travel both back to the past and forward to the future. Mostly, he and Kazak (a palindromic name) appear only as a wave spiral between the sun and Betelgeuse, materializing on Earth for a short while every fifty-nine days. He prophesizes that Constant will travel to Mars and father a child with Rumfoord’s disdainful wife, Beatrice—certainly not the news Constant wishes to hear, but that is indeed what happens, no matter what else intervenes. There is no avoiding destiny. Likewise, a parallel, humorous subplot is that Earth’s history has been manipulated by extraterrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore. They need a replacement part for a stranded spaceship, and all of human endeavor has been directed toward producing a rounded metal strip with two holes in it. The greatest of humankind’s architectural and engineering achievements—Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, and the Kremlin—are really only messages in the Tralfamadorian mathematical language, informing the spaceship’s robot commander of how much longer he has to wait for the part. To underscore the universe’s ultimate determinism, Constant returns to Earth and makes a remark that he thinks is profound and original—“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”—only to find that it has already been carved on a wooden scroll.59

Miserabilism leads to a mixture of indifference towards the past and hatred of it. This hatred is visible in the architecture and urban planning of Europe since the war. [...] This mania for destruction, often carried out in lesser degrees by the strategic placement of a terrible building that the eye cannot escape (the Tour Montparnasse in Paris is a particularly fine example of the genre), is a symptom of an impotent rage that Europe has been left behind, is not longer in the vanguard of anything. It is also a kind of magical thinking: that by adopting the externals of modernity somehow modernity itself will be achieved and mastered.

Strict formalism and abstraction from reality are undoubtedly the most important, but by no means the only characteristics of the Romanesque style. For just as a mystic tendency is at work alongside the scholastic trend in the philosophy of the age, and a wild, unrestrained ecstatic religiosity finds expression in the monastic reform movement alongside a strict dogmatism, so also in art emotional and expressionistic tendencies make themselves felt alongside the dominant formalism and stereotyped abstractionism. This less restrained conception of art is not perceptible, however, until the second half of the Romanesque period, that is to say, it coincides with the revival of trade and urban life in the eleventh century. However modest these beginnings are in themselves, they represent the first signs of a change which paves the way for the individualism and liberalism of the modern age. Externally nothing much is altered for the present; the basic tendency of Romanesque art remains anti-naturalistic and hieratic. And yet, if a first step towards the dissolution of the ties which restrict medieval life is to be discerned anywhere, then it is here, in this astonishingly prolific eleventh century, with its new towns and markets, its new orders and schools, the first crusade and the founding of the first Norman states, the beginnings of monumental Christian sculpture and the proto-forms of Gothic architecture. It cannot be a coincidence that all this new life and movement occurs at the same time as the early medieval self-supporting economy is beginning to yield to a mercantile economy after centuries of uninterrupted stagnation.

When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland. Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean's cultural patterns - not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone - were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organization were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European landmass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.

Living architecture is a long way from becoming a mainstream practice. Yet the ability to mitigate climate change is of the utmost importance to every architect. In the United States we suffer from a lifestyle that absorbs too much of Earth’s resources within a rampant culture of affluenza. Searching for innovative strategies to help solve our current eco-crisis is vital to human survival. New directions in biological design are a magnificent approach to going beyond survivalist routines. Bio-design is the next step toward a resilient harmony where humankind and nature seamlessly blend.