Food for Thought: Road to the Future

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Immortality

Architecture aims at Eternity.

Christopher Wren

Pazzi Chapel

 

Sectional analysis of the Pazzi Chapel

Located with the grounds of the  Basilica di Santa Croce, the Pazzi chapel was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi at the behest of Andrea Pazzi. Construction began around 1441 and was not completed until the 1460s. Brunelleschi's design was based on simple geometrical forms, namely the square and the circle.

Experience

"Between believing and not believing, it is better to believe. Between acting and disintigrating, it is better to act. To be young and full of health means to be able to produce a great deal, but it takes years of experience to be able to produce well"

Le Corbusier

Newgate Prison

Newgate Exercise Yard by Gustave Dore , from London : A pilgrimage, 1872

Planning

While democracy does most things well, I think we need to confront the fact that it does not make the best cities. And that the cities that were great were rather top-down. You know--Paris and Rome, the grid of Manhattan. What would those have been like if there hadn't been some top-down stuff? Every landowner would have done a separate little pod subdivision. That's one of the things that's naive about Americans--extremely naive, I find, as an outsider having lived in places that are possibly less democratic, like Spain. This idea that you have an individual right to do whatever you want with your land is very democratic, but the result is pretty questionable. Unfortunately, it's hard to have a debate in this country about certain things. We talk about bottom-up planning. And by the way, I make my living doing this bottom-up planning. But if you unfilter what people want--they don't want poor people, they don't want income diversity, and they don't want shops anywhere near them and they don't want rapid transit and they don't want streets that connect and they don't want anybody bicycling past their yards and they don't want density. So you can't just do unfiltered bottom-up planning. We need to educate.

– Andres Duany

Sight

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Sir Christopher Wren

Post Boy No. 5244 London 2 March 1723

Sir Christopher Wren who died on Monday last in the 91st year of his age, was the only son of
Dr. Chr. Wren, Dean of Windsor & Wolverhampton, Registar of the Garter, younger brother of Dr. Mathew(sic)
Wren Ld Bp of Ely, a branch of the ancient family of Wrens of Binchester in the Bishoprick (sic) of Durham
1653. Elected from Wadham into fellowship of All Souls
1657. Professor of Astronomy Gresham College London
1660. Savilian Professor. Oxford
After 1666. Surveyor General for Rebuilding the Cathedral Church of St.Paul and the Parochial
Churches & all other Public Buildings which he lived to finish
1669. Surveyor General till April 26. 1718
1680. President of the Royal Society
1698. Surveyor General & Sub Commissioner for Repairs to Westminster Abbey by Act of Parlia-
ment, continued till death.
His body is to be deposited in the Great Vault under the Dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul.