Somehow water always seems to sneak into buildings. It finds a way and gets in. All it needs is less than a mm gap to penetrate the building. Constantly challenging an architectural work’s ability to provide perfect shelter. Not only an architect must beautifully defy gravity but he also has to beautifully deal with the hostility of different properties of matter such as water.
Representation of a sitting of the Roman Senate: Cicero attacks Catilina, from a 19th-century fresco.
In these culturally and socially degenerate times in which we live in, only a real man has the power to resist the tempting mindless distractions conveniently offered to him via the internet.
He possesses self dicscipline and is capable of putting his smart phone aside from him in order to read through a nice and thick book on ancient philosophy and history all the way to the end so to dissect and learn from the experiences and thoughts of other great men of accomplishment.
“And to make it our aim to seek riches, not from Fortune, but from ourselves.”
– Seneca
Frugality is a mental sickness that goes hand in hand with acquiring riches. One would think that the richer you get the more comfortable and generous you may become. But in reality its quite the opposite.
A life that is well spent is rich of memories and therefore it possesses the illusion that it has been longer. The only reason why older men tell us how quickly life goes by is not because time compresses as we age but because of older men’s inability to remember time spent mostly in their comfort zones, their memories are not as vivid and as strong as they used to be while they were younger. Just like how our hearing deteriorates as we age our memories do as well, and life seems to go faster. The more interesting and exciting things happen to us the more we will remember therefore the longer we will live. During travel or being in love every day is a special day, therefore those who travel or fall in love live longer lives. We can also say that our memories record events based on the intensity levels of emotions such as joy and pain. If i asked you to tell me a story where you experienced extreme joy or pain, you would probably come up with vivid memories. But if I asked you what you did a week ago after work, if you watched a TV show and ate chips on your couch, you probably wouldn’t be able to give me any details.
These series of drawings are perhaps the most architectural drawings done by Picasso in my opinion.
Before an architecture student makes a single click on auto-cad, he must study the human anatomy first, thoroughly. An architect at a young age should be able to understand the proportions and geometries of God’s divine creation before he attempts to create art himself.
All the arts are connected to each other with thin but strong strings, that are hard to see at first, especially for the common man.
A 1684 depiction of Vitruvius presenting De Architectura to Augustus
In order to evaluate the architectural qualities of a building you must first look carefully at contextual matters such as the bulding and zoning codes, the general budget per square meter of construction in that region, and most importantly the culture’s approach towards the built environment. Continue reading
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