architecture | Wait until next year

Everything you really need, and no more

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The good hotel room is, in fact, the city’s paradigm: it provides everything you really need, and no more. The rest is out there; your dining room the city’s restaurants, your garden the city’s parks, your transport a bus or taxi or hire-car. It achieves in a positive way what so many societies try to do negatively, through commune or kibbutz: it removes the need for useless possessions. Positive, because it offers you a secret private life as well – for the possessions which really matter. How much do you really – really – need to own, continuously? Love, a sense of humour and the understanding which makes conversation into a genuine meeting instead of a pair of blind projections – they take no room at all. A crucifix, pet teddy-bear, half a dozen books take very little. The rest the city can provide, when you want them. That’s it’s job.

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Cathedral Et Chartres

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So much distance is meant by it:
just as with the backdrop of a scene
the world is meant; and as through that scene
the hero strides, cloaked in his action’s mantle: —

so the darkness of this doorway strides acting
onto the tragic theater of its depths,
as boundlessly and seething as God the Father
and just as He transforming wondrously

into a Son, who is distributed here
among many small, almost unspeaking roles,
all taken from misery’s repertoire.

For it’s only (this we know) from
the blind, the cast-out, and the mad
that, like a great actor, the Saviour emerges.

Excerpt from The Portal, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow

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Forum Romanum, for Mr Soane’s Museum

What they say of troubles, that they never come alone, might also be said of the passions. They arrive together, like the Muses or the Furies.

François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

I recently made my way around Sir John Soane’s Museum, the house of the 19th century architect, left untouched since his death. Rather than the curation you would see in a normal museum, I encountered the curation of a home, of a man. Soane was a collector, of art, artefacts, the esoteric. He was also a creator, and so the home is full of his follies and innovations, architecturally and thematically. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 28, 2017

The shortcut

I had not long stepped off the airplane. My ears were still popping, a release of pressure, a rush of clarity of sound. My body was still braced for turbulence. My brain was still telling my body that bracing yourself in such situations won’t do you much good. Here I was walking over the ground I was an hour earlier flying over, descending towards. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 13, 2017

The same thing

Blurred shadow of dirigible, zeppelin

I spend too much time looking at commons images. The images you can use and share without worrying about copyright or payment. They can improve a piece of writing and can sometimes offer an inspiration. They are generally one of the internet’s better rabbit holes, a glimpse into the past but also an alternate history, a motley collection of professional and amateur photography, strange illustrations from stranger books, carvings, engravings, lithographs, screengrabs. A world once there, a world gone, a world never known about.

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