In praise of pastiche An Essay by Samuel Hughes www.worksinprogress.co So: it is perfectly true that contemporary traditional architecture tends to be structurally dishonest. But traditional architecture has always tended to be structurally dishonest. So if this is what makes contemporary traditional architecture pastiche, then most traditional architecture has been pastiche since the faux timbering of the Parthenon. Contemporary traditional architects have most of the great builders of our history as their companions in guilt. architecturetraditionmaterial
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
No Objection to the Moon... An Essay from Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears by Smiljan Radić The deeper unconscious intentions
The deeper unconscious intentions Some time ago, a friend insisted that people should not listen to practicing architects or read what they write. According to him, the lack of logic in our discourse, the incongruity of our words, and the overzealousness in readings brought about by the biographical revision of our work were of little value. In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa approaches it from the opposite direction, but ultimately gives the same advice: The verbal statements of artists and architects should not usually be taken at their face value, as they often merely represent a conscious surface rationalization, or defense, that may well be in sharp contradiction to the deeper unconscious intentions giving the work its very life force. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses designart