“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, December 4, 2015

I'm Talking about this at Sci-Arc in March

Architects make things that have very obvious temporal parts—those aspects of an object that last, to varying degrees and at all kinds of scales.

Architecture is a place where we think not only about a more or less predictable future, but about the possibility of a future at all: futurality. In this respect, architecture does what philosophy does, in a different key. Making a building and thinking about a building are surprisingly similar, and neither exhaust the reality of a building.

Our ecological age is one in which the possibility of the future has become a question that now haunts us as never before.

Ecological awareness means designing things on a variety of timescales, none of which is the “correct” one. This results in a number of amazing paradoxes. Most notable is that the present doesn't exist! Ecological awareness requires us to think and make and coexist alongside this thought.

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