“Come in, make yourselves comfortable. Pull up a chair. I have quite a story for you. Or rather, many stories. Stories about steel girders and structural philosophy, of unexploded ordinance and sandbags protecting the altars of High Gothic Cathedrals. I have stories about the vibrancy of the sidewalk, about the death and rebirth of the street, about how the avenues and boulevards breathe – expanding and retracting in rhythm through the years. I have stories about the city."
This blog is a place for me to try an old type of writing in a new type of atmosphere. I've carved out something of an identity for myself in other places, with other intents. This experiment is something else. It's not intended to be literary or artistic (except that nothing really can't be, anymore), and it's not intended to be personal, as far as anything can be impersonal. This experiment is something else. It's about architecture and it has a vaguely pretentious title: don't let that throw you. I'll explain how that came to be, and all the catastrophic subtext, in the first essay I post. [ - Just kidding! I'll get around to it eventually, and work it into one of these essays... no promises as to when though.]
But yes, you heard right, architecture. The word has developed a sort of copper-coated distaste. We've arrived, at this dawn of the 21st century, at an incredibly fascinating point in the history of architectural practice and theory. The world is rapidly urbanizing, and theories about the city and how to relate to it architecturally are springing up and flourishing with astonishing rapidity. Globalization, post-modernism, new urbanism, third-wave international style, historical revivalism – ideologies clamour for space in the squares, fling cobblestones at each other in a vicious dance driven by entrepeneurs, bureaucrats, financeers. Public, private, ownership, borders, transportation, infrastructure – the very definitions and consequences of these concepts, once stable building blocks of the city, are flickering and shifting. The idea of the city is shifting. The idea of architecture itself is shifting. It's a very exciting time to be building.
I'm extremely fascinated by all of these things – both personally and professionally. This is a place for me (and others, if you would like to contribute) to share some of my thoughts on the practice, theory, and culpability of architecture. The tone will be more academic than some of my other creative projects, but the ideas that I'm trying to address are incredibly lyric. My goal: to pin down the ephemeral core of architecture, to assess and critique the current state of affairs, to try to push through the boundaries of architectural thought towards a new type of architecture.
And what, after all, is architecture?
You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." That is Architecture.
( le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, 1923)
As an introduction, that ain't half bad. Architecture is radical. Architecture is fun. Above all, architecture is no longer serious. So come in, pull up a chair. Don't be shy. Stay and listen for a bit.
