128 THINGS ABOUT THE CITY

Edwin Heathcote

1. Time wandering the streets is never wasted.
2. Creative littering: foam cups impaled on iron railings, cans crushed into fences.
3. The inevitability of dirt.
4. The unimaginably complex choreography of crowds.
5. The feel of cobbles beneath thin soles.
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SKYSCRAPER SEDUCTION / SKYSCRAPER RAPE

By Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden's text analysed the US skyscraper in architectural and popular culture as not only a phallic symbol but a reflection of a male culture using architecture to both impress and oppress. The skyscraper, Hayden argues, combines male fantasies of manifest destiny, economic conquest and social Darwinism alongside the more legible sexual overtones. Read more

THE SYMBOL OF CREATION

By W. R. Lethaby

Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth placed architecture in a context of cosmic symbolism attempting to understand ceilings as skies and pavements as the sea. Here he examines the symbolic role of the egg in architecture as a representation of the creation and origin story and an archetype from universal myth. Read more

CIAO MANHATTAN

By Michael Sorkin

Michael Sorkin, who died this week, a casualty of Covid 19, was the finest writer on architecture of his generation. His critiques could move from being fierce, warm, moving, silly, scabrous, funny and brutal all in one paragraph. This piece is a goodbye from Sorkin to New York as a city of architecture. It is the final essay in his collection, Exquisite Corpse. Read more

THE HOUSING OF THE POOR

By William Morris

...the houses for workers should be built as tall blocks, in what might be called vertical streets; but that need not prevent ample room in each lodging, so as to include such comforts of space, air.' Read more

DESIGN FOR SENSORY REALITY

By Juhani Pallasmaa

In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa suggests that architectural culture has always privileged the ocular at the expense of the other senses. Here, he expands that argument to encompass the whole metabolism, proposing that we literally embody architecture. Read more

PERSUADING IMAGE

By Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton was an artist with an unusual interest in design. He writes here about American design and the consumer, public taste, the role of the designer, the media and society. Read more

NOTES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ‘SITE’

By James Wines

'It is SITE's opinion that architecture is the only intrinsic public art.' James Wines explains here the particular medium of SITE combining architecture, landscape and art into a single entity in which public art is given a function and architecture is given meaning. Read more

DECOLONIZING DESIGN

By Anoushka Khandwala

'With every design choice we make, there’s the potential to not just exclude but to oppress; every design subtly persuades its audience one way or another and every design vocabulary has history and context.' Read more

AFRICAN SPACE MAGICIANS

By Lesley Lokko

Lesley Lokko's text provides a glimpse into one world where architects are magicians of space and another where their work seems to dematerialise completely. The urgent questions are, what is architecture and who is it for? Read more

TOWARDS A RADICAL ECLECTICISM

By Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks was one of the most influential voices in Post War architecture. In this short text, written for the Venice Biennale of 1980 (titled The Presence of the Past), he pleads for a culture of heterogeneity in architecture. Read more

THE TRADITIONAL ENVIRONMENT

By Jean Baudrillard

'The primary function of furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships, to fill the space that they share between them and to be inhabited by a soul.' An extract from The System of Objects. Read more

ROADSIDE AMERICA

By John Margolies

ROADSIDE AMERICA

By John Margolies

On a series of road trips across the US, John Margolies recorded the fading remnants of a culture of roadside architecture which was under threat from freeway building, changing taste and corporate fast food. His photos of the bizarre, the surreal and the often downright brilliant examples of twentieth century popular architecture are credited with giving the development of Post-Modernism a critical boost and giving the culture of architecture a much-needed shot of humour and expression in the 1970s and 80s. See more