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Группа авторов. What Adults Don’t Know About Architecture
Contents
You’re an architect!
Without quite knowing it, you have designed buildings: you’re an architect!
In other words, you realise that some places are much nicer than others
We want to understand how to get more good architecture into the world
Why is architecture important?
We think that what a place looks like matters a lot
We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. How buildings are like people
Imagine a world in which more buildings speak to us about the nicest things. Why are so many places ugly?
We think we can’t say what beauty is
What is beauty?
Classical architecture followed a recipe, just like one you’d find in a cookbook
People could build lots and lots of buildings that would all match up
An astonishing number of places ended up looking chaotic, muddled and unfriendly
We’re in trouble because we have stopped making very beautiful buildings and places
The recipe for good architecture
Explaining why you like what you like
You have to go from a feeling to an explanation
What did they do here that makes this place nice? What’s the recipe?
We want you to build a beautiful city — not a pretend one, a real one!
The hard (and most important) part is understanding what is best to build
Make your city interesting
It’s helpful to think about why we don’t like both the boring and the chaotic places
You need to have a strong, simple pattern with plenty of variation in the details. Become a team manager
What made them such a great team was the way they played together
The manager gets the players to work well together as a team
In architecture, good ‘teams’ work together to create beautiful places
Make things the right size
The idea of size can help us to describe what we like and don’t like in architecture
Being on a human scale means that spaces and buildings feel like they were designed to fit in with our bodies
There’s nothing wrong with buildings being big. What matters is why they are big
Beauty is important
If you want to make a building big, make sure it has something genuinely lovely and significant to say
Use nice materials
The lesson here is that there is not one particular kind of material that’s automatically better than another
Develop a local style
Is it bad if everywhere looks the same?
Each building tells a story about who lives there and what they care about
People like buildings to look like they remember the past — but also look ready for the future. Make the city lively
This way of living makes us feel isolated and a lot of people get lonely
A lively, compact city
We thought we wanted suburbs but what we really wanted was liveliness
Make all functional buildings beautiful
Beauty might be the key to saving the planet. Repetition is good
A recipe is the best way of confidently making attractive streets and cities
Find places you really like and ask yourself: What’s the recipe here?
Why are houses so expensive?
Is it really buildings that people object to?
The problem is our ideas
Architecture and democracy
We think the idea of democracy could help us to build much nicer cities
Architects want to build things that excite other architects
Make buildings and cities that most people like and to make lots and lots of them
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