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Non-fiction Urbanism

The Aspiration Index

Skylines are a speculator’s dream. Strictly speaking, they are not real things. In the same way that edges are not really there, but merely the points at which an object leaves a beholder’s eye, a city’s skyline is an imagined contour. If I ask you to imagine New York City’s skyline, you will most likely […]

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Non-fiction

Behind Every Person (There Is A Person)

Our Master in City & Technology class is as diverse as can be. We are different ages (23-32), we have different professional backgrounds (agriculture, interior design, fresh graduates to licensed professionals), a dozen languages between us (Mandarin, Arabic, Yoruba, and, you know… English), three-and-a-half religions…… Designing and debating with my new friends is exciting, because […]

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Non-fiction

When DBZ Jumped the Shark

Very rarely do two chapters of my life confront one another directly. Most of the time I pass my days evolving, hoping that things I have done in the past that became pieces of me will just fade into memory and not have to be repeated. But two of the great things about Charlotte is […]

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Non-fiction

What your tennis court surface says about you

Though the ITF recognizes a bunch of different tennis court surfaces, for simplicity I’ve chosen to only discuss the three major surfaces represented by the four Grand Slam tournaments. Scores after every passage are on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. GRASS COURTS: You are a purist. You enjoy tennis the way you enjoy a […]

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Non-fiction

Uncharted Territory dot com

In man’s early years, he had still to occupy the entirety of the globe, on top of which he didn’t even know how much of the world was still unoccupied. Imagine: knowing your territory, but facing a frontier at all sides. How much further does it go? How big would primitive man have imagined the […]

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Architecture Non-fiction

This Will Kill That

Once a year or so, which is as frequently as my pride will concede, an old lesson from a professor pops out of my memory and hits me with a that’s-what-they-were-talking-about! moment. The most recent one came while walking around Paris, the professor was Anthony Vidler, and the lesson was a pantomime of Claude Frollo’s “THIS […]

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Architecture Non-fiction

Why do we gamble for human architecture?

How do you win a design competition? Stand out, right? Present ideas and illuminate things unique to your proposal, right? Don’t trod the beaten path? What do most of us think of when we think “architectural competition proposal”? We think of a single building, viewed from about one hundred feet, with a clear sense of […]

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Architecture Non-fiction

Euclidian, yet mysterious…

There was a time in when the nowiest way to make buildings was with as uniform and white a surface as possible– usually stucco, hand-troweled over metal lath over sheathing, or the like. That modernist style has roots in the Enlightenment, with the sweeping yet abstract paper-projects of architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee, and became the […]

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Architecture Books Non-fiction

Gossiping with architecture

Perhaps it begins with the genealogy of the American landscape… the fact that roughly one third of the country’s population streams over beige prairies and terra cotta mesas towards the two coasts, dropping off windward mountain faces to the edge of the oceans… the fact that those 100,000,000 people have formed some of the largest […]

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Non-fiction

Young Masters, Part I

This is an excerpt from Physics and Beyond, by Werner Heisenberg, published 1971, from a chapter called Science and Religion, of a debate between Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac, titans of 20th century science. …mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other […]