Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.
The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint.
All these shearing layers of change add up to a whole for the building, but how do they add up to a whole for the occupants? How can they change toward the humans in them rather than away, as so many seem to do?
Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary. Grand, final-solution buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else. Temporary buildings are thrown up quickly and roughly to house temporary projects. Those projects move on soon enough, but they are immediately supplanted by other temporary projects—of which, it turns out, there is an endless supply.
A building is not primarily a building; it is primarily property, and as such, subject to the whims of the market.
Even flying buttresses on cathedrals were a fix that became a feature.
The older a building gets, the more we have respect and affection for its evident maturity, for the accumulated human investment it shows, for the attractive patina it wears—muted bricks, worn stairs, colorfully stained roof, lush vines.
Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world.
“Our basic argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a building,” says Duffy. “A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.”
He distinguishes four layers, which he calls Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set. Shell is the structure, which lasts the lifetime of the building (fifty years in Britain, closer to thirty-five in North America). Services are the cabling, plumbing, air conditioning, and elevators (“lifts”), which have to be replaced every fifteen years or so. Scenery is the layout of partitions, dropped ceilings, etc., which changes every five to seven years. Set is the shifting of furniture by the occupants, often a matter of months or weeks.
The unit of analysis for us isn’t the building, it’s the use of the building through time. Time is the essence of the real design problem.
It is at the times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow.
Sullivan’s form-follows-function misled a century of architects into believing that they could really anticipate function.
Always try to do the most with the least—with the emphasis on try. You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition.
You are being paid to make decisions, and as far as whether to cut or not, the editor is actually making twenty-four decisions a second: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes!”
An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”; 4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace”—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects “planarity”—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).
The relationship between director and editor is somewhat similar in that the director is generally the dreamer and the editor is the listener.
It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could.
Corita became known as the “joyous revolutionary.”
I think celebrations are always meant to instruct and inspire, to empower people to use their own creative skills through images and ritual to action.
a joy that wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be words.
The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating–whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.
I had a wonderful art teacher, she said. She didn’t teach us how to draw or paint so much as she taught us to care.
It does not matter that this is all familiar territory–the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before.
There are mornings when the sun pours in and the sky is that kind of blue you know you’ve never seen before. And the quality of the white clouds floating and the geraniums blooming indoors and the floor and carpets and all the colors and shapes are new too. These moments are very intense because you can hardly believe that this beauty exists every day when you are going faster or you have your back turned to it.