Quotes
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2680 BC and is still going strong almost five millenia later. The Parthenon was errected in 27 BC and is still keepin’ it real more than 20 centuries later. Notre Dame Cathedral was completed in 1330 AD and has been doing its thing without interruption for the past 674 years.
Back in the day when these sturdy symphonies in stone were built, their intended lifespans were measured not in terms of business cycles but in terms of ages. This was back when people really took pride in their work, or at least the work of their slaves, and designed and built not just to fulfill a temporary business need but to forge lasting tributes to the things that really mattered to them, and in the process created symbols that would survive the centuries.
It’s odd that modern civilization is nowhere near as good at building things as our ancient and medieval forebears. Today, most new buildings are designed to have functional lifespans of a mere 25 to 100 years.
The average age of buildings in many cities is plummeting as the old stone stalwarts are torn down or suffer insulting façadectomies, and are replaced with temporary, hastily tossed together squats fashioned of plywood, glass and drywall, rarely designed to outlive their owners.
In many cities, average architectural lifespans are rapidly descending to the level of human lifespans in Somalia or the Congo. As in those sad, sisphusian societies, when there are no wise elders to provide stability, guidance and a sense of connection to the past, the notion of progress disappears and little lasts or improves from one generation to the next.
We must stop designing flimsy, temporary structures that are engineered for obsolescence. We must return to the practice of making buildings that outlast us for centuries and get firmly woven into the DNA of our urban environments. Businesses and governments need need to think beyond the immediate, selfish desires of their shareholders and constituents. Corporate entities and their architects are great at thinking big, but they also need to think long.
Economically and technologically, if not socially, we are advanced enough to build structures that will outlast the pyramids. We should not be repeatedly wasting money, energy and materials building office towers designed to fall apart after 30 years. If every generation left behind useful, sturdy structures for the generations to come, there’d probably be no housing shortage today, and many people would probably feel a greater connection to their environment.
Watching a beloved building being prematurely smashed into rubble is painful, nasty and bad, and we endured it again and again when making this issue. None of the magnificent buildings demolished or gutted while we were making this issue had a chance to celebrate their 100th birthday. Anything we missed or failed to take decent pictures of is gone, though definitely not forgotten.
Ninj, Dying Young, Infiltration, Issue 23, May 2004 -
Finance is everywhere in the cultural imaginary; it represents itself largely on its own terms, a set of appearances that do not correspond to its practise.
John MacIntosh, Finance Aesthetics -
Why would I care? I don’t consume the method, I consume the product.
xQc -
No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it.
Edward Tufte -
To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy.
Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan -
When God rescues your heart from its natural rebellion, and makes it new through your trust in him, your baptism and your following of Jesus, the way this newness works must be through your own decisions, your own thinking things through, your own will power (aided and strengthened at every point, Christians would say, by the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ own spirit).
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
Forgiveness is more like the air in our lungs. There’s only room for you to inhale the next lungful when you’ve just breathed out the previous one. If you insist on withholding it, refusing to give someone the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take in any more yourself and you will suffocate very quickly.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
While the words aren’t a magical formula – the “proper” words could be uttered with no forgiveness transpiring – I am convinced that it matters to utter them. To say “I apologize” or “I forgive you” is to carry out a speech act, not unlike saying “I do” or “I promise”. The words accomplish the thing they say in the saying of them. Just as the Lord says, “Let there be” and reality comes to be, just as the words “I do” or “I promise” bring a new family into existence, so saying “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” seem to reach down into the stuff of the universe and shift it toward something more and new.
Ester Lightcap Meek, Forgiveness -
As for new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error, and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities -
When Jesus desires baptism, he does it as the sole good one, the one without sin, the one who does not need forgiveness, different from all human beings. As the good one, he desires baptism, even though he does not need it for himself, for the sake of those who need it, for the sake of sinners. Precisely because he is the sole good one, he doesn’t allow himself to be separated from sinners; he does not become a Pharisee who wants to claim what is good for himself. The sinlessness, the goodness of Jesus, is attested precisely in his unconditional love for sinners. Jesus goes to baptism not out of penitence but out of love and in this way takes the side of sinners.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditation on Epiphany, January 1940