Quotes From Paul Shepheard’s What Is Architecture?

Two dozen pages into Paul Shepheard’s What Is Architecture?, and I love it. Refreshingly unconventional. For instance, the following passage he builds up by telling a story of a sloppy high-rise construction project, where a kitchen gas explosion brought the entire building down like a house of cards.

... a building is a performance [like an opera]: a one-off, never-to-be-repeated performance where the supervisor is like the conductor and the builders … are like the musicians in the orchestra. If the bricklayers and the carpenters and the electricians and the plumbers were trying as hard as the musicians in the orchestra do—that’d be one of contemporary architecture’s problems out of the way. ... Okay, that’s composer—conductor—musicians. It works with the drama, too: author—director—players; and so with architecture, architect—supervisor—builders. Music, drama, architecture, the great arts. Great because they require many people, and great because they correspond to the three states of human existence: facing oneself, facing the other people, and facing the unimpeachable natural world.

It’ll be interesting to see where he takes this.

In his book, his ten books, Vitruvius says that the subject of architecture covers three things: buildings, machines, and time pieces. ... That’s right, time pieces. … Not Rolexes, or Hamiltons, or flip-top hunters in an antique jewelers’ ... When Vitruvius says time pieces, he means sundials. … Think about a sundial you’ve seen. ... Whichever one, it uses the shadow cast by the sun to tell the time, and it’s the shadow that’s important here. The insubstantial shadow … one of the greatest facts of life there is. That’s why Vitruvius includes sundials as architecture.

Daniel Libeskind’s Wedge of Light.

Le Corbusier – a man so persuasive that he signs his letters the crow and nobody laughs at him.

One chapter introduces five architects (fictional or real?):

The last [of the five], most cheerful of them all, plays his poker games with his deadpan, beaming face. “Form has absolutely nothing to do with function whatsoever,” he ays, thinking, of course, of the modernist maxim saying the opposite, form follows function. He says it to wind people up, of course, but what does it make him sound like, a creationist? … The theory of evolution is a beautiful hypothesis, as cold as outer space. It is a theory of form rather than a theory of creation …