The mortifying ordeal of being known A Fragment by Tim Kreider opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. lovehumanity
There it is again Apparently architecture does the same job as set design, "it creates units of environment, atmosphere, or events"—whatever you wish to call them—but with more weight, carrying more material, slower. This is why it can raise the curtain more times and repeat "there it is again" for longer. Perhaps for this and other reasons there are periods in the history of architecture in which stage design or the folly, for example, have been an effective field of experimentation for serious architects. Smiljan Radić, The Circus Follies architecture