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  • 21. Four-Story Limit

    Problem

    There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.

    Solution

    In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four stories high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​In every skyscraper​​
    2. ​​It begins with a trip down the stairs​​
    3. ​​Low wooden silhouettes​​
    4. ​​Skyscrapers are frowned upon​​
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • home
  • Poems of an Indian summer

    To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.

    Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
    1. ​​Rand Hill​​
    2. ​​Japanese Death Poems​​
    3. ​​Each ruler commissioned his own garden​​
    4. ​​The Abode of Fancy​​
    • melancholy
    • home
    • death
    • poetry
  • To throw a shadow on the earth

    In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.

    Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows
    • home
  • The Abode of Fancy

    The name, Abode of Fancy, implies a structure created to meet some individual artistic requirement. The tea room is made for the tea master, not the tea master for the tea room. It is not intended for posterity and is therefore ephemeral. The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of & the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    1. ​​Poems of an Indian summer​​
    2. ​​Each ruler commissioned his own garden​​
    3. ​​Ise Shrines, Nagoya, 685–Present​​
    • home
  • The fire of oak logs

    The fire of oak logs which burned day and night for six months became the focal point of our family life.

    ...It is inevitable that the English word "home" cannot be translated directly into French. The nearest equivalent in French is the word foyer, the hearth.

    Lawrence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse
    1. ​​Thermal Delight in Architecture​​
    • home
    • fire
    • family
    • language
  • The housewarming ceremony

    The connection between the life of the fire and the life of the inhabitant is also reflected in the custom of the housewarming ceremony. In contemporary America a housewarming party is given when a family moved into a new house. Perhaps all of the friends and their good wishes are thought to warm the house metaphorically. In traditional cultures, however, the warming is quite literal, for it involves the bringing in, or the first kindling, of the hearth fire, which then creates the proper spirit and sanctity to transform the house into a home.

    Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture
    • home
  • The perverse arrangement of older houses

    The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    • home
  • The pitched roof

    Eisenman: I would argue that the pitched roof is – as Gaston Bachelard points out – one of the essential characteristics of "houseness". It was the extension of the vertebrate structure which sheltered and enclosed man. Michel Foucault has said that when man began to study man in the 19th century, there was a displacement of man from the center. The representation of the fact that man was no longer the center of the world, no longer the arbiter, and, therefore, no longer controlling artifacts, was reflected in a change from the vertebrate-center type of structure to the center-as-void.

    Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman, Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture
    • architecture
    • home
  • I could never live in a house like that

    Mrs. Tanizaki tells a story of when her late husband decided, as he frequently did, to build a new house. The architect arrived and announced with pride, "I've read your In Praise of Shadows, Mr. Tanizaki, and know exactly what you want."

    To which Tanizaki replied, "But no, I could never live in a house like that."

    There is perhaps as much resignation as humor in his answer.

    Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows
    • architecture
    • home

    From Thomas J. Harper's afterword.

  • Secreted

    House and home are two evidently different notions: house is a material, spatial and architectural concept, whereas home is a unique setting and product of the act of dwelling itself. Home is charged with subjective meanings, symbols, memories, and images.

    A home is also a set of personal rituals, habits, rhythms, and routines of everyday life. In every sense of the word, home is an extension of its inhabitant. Consequently it can not be an object of design by an architect; it is secreted, as it were, by the actual act of dwelling.

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    • home
    • architecture
  • Tree, leaf, house, city

    "Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house. A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city."

    — Aldo van Eyck

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    • cities
    • home
  • 20 Minutes in Manhattan

    A Book by Michael Sorkin
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​It begins with a trip down the stairs​​
    2. ​​Thoughts on stairs​​
    3. ​​They are something that has been buried​​
    4. ​​(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living)​​
    5. ​​The grid and its difficulties​​
    1. ​​The Mezzanine​​
    2. ​​Psychogeography​​
    3. ​​Tilted Arc​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • home
    • walking

    Easily one of the most important books I've come across on issues of our urban environment. Could have been titled A Brief History of the City for its density of ideas.

  • At Home: A Short History of Private Life

    A Book by Bill Bryson
    • cities
    • home
  • Homes at Night

    A Dialogue by Todd Hido
    www.lensculture.com
    FE8567BC-B0C8-4E43-B6CB-33E80F14CC64.jpeg

    Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

    Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

    1. ​​[email protected]​​
    • photography
    • memory
    • identity
    • home
  • You're living in your very last house

    A Song by Lo-Fang
    • euphony
    • home
    • age
    • melancholy

See also:
  1. architecture
  2. cities
  3. urbanism
  4. melancholy
  5. walking
  6. euphony
  7. age
  8. death
  9. poetry
  10. fire
  11. family
  12. language
  13. photography
  14. memory
  15. identity
  1. Robert McCarter
  2. Juhani Pallasmaa
  3. Christopher Alexander
  4. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
  5. Thomas J. Harper
  6. Peter Eisenman
  7. Murray Silverstein
  8. Sara Ishikawa
  9. Michael Sorkin
  10. Lo-Fang
  11. Le Corbusier
  12. Bill Mollison
  13. Lisa Heschong
  14. Bill Bryson
  15. Lawrence Wylie
  16. Okakura Kakuzō
  17. Todd Hido