If you don't like the world you've been dropped into, then you should build the one

you want. Geoff Manaugh "How can architects reconcile their wish to design a beautiful world and the imperative to create a better place for society?" "To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a whole appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of making spaces for people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes and is based on the vital archetypal needs of human beings as individuals as well as social groups. Lawrence Halprin This book argues that the materialistic and technological alternatives for architecture do not answer satisfactorily to the complex desire that defines humanity. As humans, our greatest gift is love, and we are invariably called to respond to it. Despite our suspicions, architecture has been and must continue to be built upon love. Perez-Gomez "The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the national environment and to the spiritual values of human community." Mumford [T]rue architecture is concerned with far more than fashionable form, affordable homes, and sustainable development; it responds to a desire for an eloquent place to dwell, one that lovingly provides a sense of order resonant with our dreams, a gift contributing to our self-understanding as humans inhabiting a mortal world. Perez-Gomez Architecture can charge the space around it with an energy which can join up with other energies, and influence the nature of things that might come (Smithson, 2001:11). "Forces beyond the architect's control affect architecture's concrete reality, regardless of what was intended in design." - Leatherbarrow On one level, of course, architects are occupied with structuring physical elements, forms, spaces. On another more elemental level, however, architects are occupied with structuring life. It is this surrounding and pervading milieu that gives architecture its purpose, its raison detre, its vitality. - me Architecture, similar to a musical or theatrical event, is not understood as static but rather is situated and occurs in a specific time and place. While it may seem sensible to distinguish two agencies at work in the process of sedimentation whereby architecture accrues and extends history human and environmental forces only their compounded effects give it its proper voice. Leatherbarrow [T]he most pressing task in our time is the description of the ways that better buildings have been oriented or inclined beyond themselves which is to say, otherwise Leatherbarrow Space in architecture is not measured in inches, feet, and yards alone, but also in minutes, days, months, and years. - Leatherbarrow "What does the building want to be?" Kahn Architecture, nevertheless, has limits. When we touch the invisible walls of limits, then we know more about what is contained by them. A painter can paint square wheels on a cannon to express the futility of war. A sculptor can carve the same square wheels. But an architect must use round wheels. Kahn The moment that modernists say You cannot do that, they have exposed Modernisms greatest limitation its unidirectionality.

Monumentality in architecture conveys the feeling of its eternity (Kahn in Zucker, 78). If you see a series of columns you can say that the choice of columns is a choice in light. The columns as solids frame the spaces of light." "At one time, I thought the ideas of towers with big open spaces around them was a wonderful thing, until I realized, where is the bakery shop?" What was has always been. What is has always been. What will be has always been. Mankind cannot make anything." For Kahn, form compliments and enlivens whatever function may be performed in the space. Kahns concern for both natural light and what the space wants to be the first occupants of the architects intervention into the void.