construction
Stacking the rails
Stage sets for the eye
With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.
To build a folly
To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
Errors & Crimes
"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."
— Auguste Perret
The Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
A Pattern Language
- Its place in the web of nature
- 9. Scattered Work
- 21. Four-Story Limit
- 51. Green Streets
- 53. Main Gateways
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
On the "Building" of Software and Websites
An Essay by Dorian TaylorI’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
Five barns worth burning
I walked around with a map, penciling in X’s wherever there was a barn or shed. For the next three days, I covered four kilometers in all four directions. Living toward the outskirts of town, there are still a good many farmers in the vicinity. So it came to a considerable number of barns—sixteen altogether.
I carefully checked the condition of each of these, and from the sixteen I eliminated all those where there were houses in the immediate proximity or greenhouses alongside. I also eliminated those in which there were farm implements or chemicals or signs that they were still in active use. I didn’t imagine he’d want to burn tools or fertilizer. That left five barns.
Five barns worth burning.