I. The Myth It goes back before COVID forced city dwellers to seek greener pastures. It goes back before white flight. It goes back to the founding of the United States, and the ideological struggle at its heart. It even goes as far back as the evolution of man, from hunter to farmer. It’s a […]
Architecture is a slow profession. Fundamentally, since shelter for human life is best built to last, even the simplest single-family dwelling is complex enough to require the coordinated effort of multiple people, resources from far and wide, and months of planning and building. Any attempt to hasten this inevitably compromises some step in the process: […]
If you haven’t ever had a video game phase, you may find the first half of this essay weedy. If you have had a video game phase but did not come of age in the 1990s, you may find the second half of this essay obvious. If you had a video game phase when you […]
Inspired by a prompt from the Jan Gehl Institute, Charlotte asked me about cities on one of our morning walks. This is what I had to say. CG: How do you make cities for people? IH: Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s enough to say ‘make cities for people.’ You have to make […]
It’s a miracle of psycho-evolution and a sobering truth of human squeamishness that everyone– from hobos to kings, from soldiers to bakers– has their safe mental crevice to crawl into when they defecate. Some remember their parents’ kitchen, some summon the the picture of a deer drinking from a brook, others hum the Bottleneck Blues… Me, […]
I found this piece in an old notebook, dated November 13, 2013. Some like to listen to music at work, some don’t.I had a revelation about what music does in the context of work– I wonder if this is a common opinion– which I think is a more productive analysis.Instead of it being so black […]
I, enjoying a recent wealth of free time, had spent the first three months of 2020 volunteering and engaging with organizations in my community. CSA (distributing vegetables, graphic designing newsletters), Community Board meetings (asking questions about a proposed development, witnessing deliberations on zoning), Habitat for Humanity (building houses, sprucing up schools), Brooklyn Bridge Park (cleaning […]
I: Modernity In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber sums up capitalism with a powerful picture which has stuck in my mind. He sets the stage in the late Middle Ages, which ended roughly around 1450 AD, during which the seeds for our modern financial world order were sown. In that era, […]
I. The Chicago Plan I have written before about the relationship between spaces for production and the spaces for consumption which must both exist in cities. It is a slow dance that has been going on for centuries, and it begs the following question: if there is a slow dance, when does the music change? […]
At the risk of sounding like folks who listen to classical music only to feel sophisticated, Steve Reich is one of my favorite composers. Yes, I know, his isn’t strictly speaking classical music. But he’s certainly embedded in the timeline (to his approbation or not, given that he started out as a bit of a […]