Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets An Article by Dan Hill & Brian Eno medium.com Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings Unfinished = fertile Artists are to cities what worms are to soil. A city’s waste should be on public display. Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.) Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too. Low rent = high life Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other. Shared public space is the crucible of community. A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants. collectionsurbanismstreetscitieswastegardens
The answer to a brief is not necessarily a building An Article by Dan Hill medium.com This brilliantly engaging book may actually be one of the first to describe and discuss what might be architecture’s true value at this pivotal point in our own history: seeing that everything is connected, and artfully hosting that complexity, before constructively plotting routes towards clarity, pinned up on broad civic, ethical foundations. So Architects after Architecture, as the title suggests, is not about buildings. Or at least not always, not directly. Buildings are simply one of the ways that this complex yet constructive sensibility might exert itself, but they are certainly not the only way, nor are they always the most potent – as muf’s Liza Fior makes clear here, when she says “the answer to a brief is not necessarily a building.” The Best Interface is No Interface architectureconnection
Against the survival of the prettiest An Essay by Samuel Hughes www.worksinprogress.co What has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are. The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us. urbanismarchitecturebeauty