Maya Sorabjee
Alain de Botton believes in the idea of the home: a hopeful, genuine place where we might “slowly re sume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance.” Walter Benjamin also believed in the idea of the home, but thought the opposite: “The private individual,…
Rhythms and amplitudes evoke impressions of soundwaves and their characteristic curves.
There is the cast iron tinge of a Labrouste Reading Room, the glistening interiors of Copenhagen’s B lack Diamond, the Brutalist bibliotheques that once sprouted from the grounds of every second university campus. But on the other end of the spectrum, there are the libraries that are out of sight, limited to the scale of a…
While not an integral part of Japanese building traditions, the courtyard has become increasingly pr ominent in present-day Japan.
Although it was later embedded in a specific philosophical and moral stance towards architecture, th e Brutalist movement originated in a more basic appreciation of the exposed, unadorned appearance of concrete — béton brut. The raw beauty of the building material, championed by Le Corbusier and countless others since, has symbolized not a visual poverty in…