Posts Tagged ‘christopher alexander’

February 23, 2015

Architecture as if People and the Planet Mattered

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Last week I watched a Peruvian documentary on the lives of local musicians called I’m Still, screened as part of the Portland International Film Festival. It displayed stunning imagery of mountain-top villages in remote areas of the country where indigenous musicians played their violins, harps and guitars and sang folk songs. I was struck by the indigenous architecture of these villages, which comprised of hand-built stone masonry walls and clay tile roofs. They were beautiful buildings built by families generations ago, perfectly scaled to Peruvian human proportions and completely fitting of Puruvian native lifestyles. Moreover, they blended in with…

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Tweet Modernism was king when I went to architecture school back in the late 90s and early 2000s. And the architect’s ego was carefully cultivated through very severe critiques of student work which quickly established who the stars of the class were and who the laggards were. Architecture was all about what we created and how we could impose our vision on the natural world. Professors blathered on with great delight about architects like Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer. These were architecture’s heroes. Nevermind that their urban planning proposals had little to do with the actual human experience and everything…

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