For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
For one, perhaps The Old One is not interested in getting close to his creations, intelligent or not. For another, it is not obvious that knowledge is closeness.
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness.
Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
The man and woman follow a winding path of small white stones to a restaurant on a hill. Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say?
Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past?
Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
“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.”
A building is not primarily a building; it is primarily property, and as such, subject to the whims of the market.
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?
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.
Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.
Even flying buttresses on cathedrals were a fix that became a feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The relationship between director and editor is somewhat similar in that the director is generally the dreamer and the editor is the listener.