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A.M.'s avatar

I'm not an architect, but I have long been a self-taught student of architecture. For instance, on my European trips, I tracked around looking at architecture. I sought out Otto Wagner buildings in Vienna, for instance, and well, the majority of my travel pictures are of buildings. I began reading Lewis Mumford about 30 years ago, and I also loved Tom Wolfe's ripping From Bauhaus to Our House along with The Painted Word. I have a visceral dislike of brutalist architecture and when I sought out Communist architecture in Prague, I found it not much different from American apartment buildings in the 70s and 80s.

My point is that architecture is the landscape of the city and it affects every node of our consciousness. It does deal with aspirations, hopes, imagination and pride. It is the statement we make to the world about who we are. I found few things as aspiring as Chartres. Chartres speaks volumes about the medieval world, just as the Place des Vosges speaks volumes about Paris in the 1600s. I've always been extremely depressed by tract homes, McMansions and Jack in the Box and Target stores. They seem to be the overse--these buildings suggest we are disposable.

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Kyle Young's avatar

Celia, you recently asked me what I did to overcome some of my health issues. I replied that it wasn't anyone thing, that it was a process. Part of that process was learning about natural building, the antidote to brutalistic architecture, to build my own cob house.

https://secularheretic.substack.com/p/a-compendium-of-resources-on-natural

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