Le Corbusier’s influential vision of totalitarian architecture has never coexisted with organic human reality. No single person — no elected official, designer, planner, architect or style-setter — has had a more profound effect on the built environment worldwide than the Swiss-French architect and city planner Le Corbusier. His buildings litter the covers of books and […]
“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” With these famous words, Winston Churchill argued that the House of Commons, destroyed during the Blitz, should be rebuilt according to its original design. The rectangular design of the building, he claimed—in which the opposing sides had to sit facing each other, and changing “sides” meant literally
The Gospel of Architecture Read More »
Years ago when I was deciding what to study in college, one of the dominant thoughts was this: I want to make enough money that I never have to do my own yard work. I settled on mechanical engineering. And soon, instead of making money mowing lawns and pulling weeds as I had for most
Wendell Berry’s Grounds for Hope Read More »
A Week of Celebration I arrived in Milan around midnight the Friday before Thanksgiving, and in my rush to get to my Airbnb (and thanks to my poor mastery of Italian) I took the right bus in the wrong direction, ending up several miles further from the city center. By the time I got into
On Advent and Advertising Read More »
My home of Oregon has always been radical. This summer, though, media attention turned to Portland in a new way. We found ourselves in the national spotlight and unable to tell what was really going on in our own city. After getting in an argument over whether downtown was actually a “war zone,” I decided
Finding the Roots of the Riots Read More »
I stepped in out of the warm June air and took a seat on the leather couch against the window in my local barbershop. Tyson, a dark-haired barber with a red hat, finished cutting the hair of a squirmy blond 6-year-old, then cleaned up, removed the cape, and motioned me over. As he began cutting
Without My Daughter, I’d Be a Partial Human Read More »
A meditation on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line At the beginning of Terrence Malick’s epic World War II film The Thin Red Line, Private Witt, played by Jim Caviezel, is AWOL on an island in the south Pacific, living with a Melanesian tribe. In those people, he encounters something that he cannot necessarily name –
Let Me Feel the Lack Read More »
If you’ve listened much to Sufjan Stevens, you know that his music can tend towards the bizarre. His lyrics draw heavily on mythology of various types. On this special audio essay, Patrick asks “What is Sufjan doing with mythology?” The podcast episode explores music from many of Stevens’ albums, Roman Mythology, Christian traditions, and even
The Myth of Sufjan Stevens Read More »
