a city of mirrors

  Credit: Rick Guidice/NASA      One of the things that has always interested me about design history is tracing back the threads that made the modern world what it is today. There is something fascinating about reading the façade of a building and tracing back its features to a long-forgotten art movement, or listening to the story of how curb cuts came to be on the podcast 99% Invisible (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/). However, it is easy to get so lost in the historical design decisions that changed everything to realize that choices of a similar magnitude are being made every day. And one area that I believe will change the future is the design of living spaces beyond Earth.     Designing on Earth means designing buildings that fit into the patchwork quilt of the built environment. It means designing within a societal structure that has existed for tens of thousands of years. This can be beautiful- there is something poetic about continuing and contributing to a

  © Dover Publications      All across Europe, scrolling vines and metal flowers weave across iron railings and carved doors . Art Nouveau is a movement that is often associated with a brief moment in the past. Yet, if one looks closely, is it clear that Art Nouveau continues to influence and inspire the present and future of the design world.       Originally, Art Nouveau was meant to be the style of the future. Its swirling, vining forms twined through the most forward-thinking architectural works of the time, from the Eiffel Tower cafe to the spires of La Sagrada Familia. It was like it suddenly sprouted from the pavement of the most avant-garde cities of the age. Contrary to this first impression, there was an unseen web of factors behind the popularity of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau exterior of the Pavilion Bleu, a cafe that was located on the Eiffel Tower site for the 1900 World's Fair      Like every design movement, Art Nouveau was a reaction to the particular challenges of

  I don’t remember when I first started reading buildings. In many ways, it was similar to learning to read words, a hidden language of symbols and patterns that gave me a deeper understanding of the world. It was an understanding that I craved. I had been poring over books about architecture for a while before I began to see the words I had read in them spread across the facades of apartment complexes. I began picking out patterns, staring at buildings until I puzzled out why the architect had made them that way. And then, I started writing about what I saw. Architecture is my primary career goal because I have begun to notice, over the last few years, that the built world both reflects and creates the society we live in. The library next to my friend’s house is all warm toned wood and strong horizontal lines because it reflects the Usonian influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was built in this way by an architect who perhaps admired the democratic values the style represented, the

     There is a question that has the power to change the world. The question is:  What status quo does this design maintain ?      The fact is, a society where certain groups are marginalized and oppressed will always result in architecture that reinforces and perpetuates these prejudices. Physical walls divide suburban blocks, separating historically Black and historically white neighborhoods. Hostile architecture forces homeless people out of wealthier areas, where they are viewed as an eyesore. Lack of bathroom access has historically been used as a tool to exclude any group deemed undesirable.       In some ways, exclusive design maintains societal power structures more effectively than laws can. Laws require verbal or written acknowledgment of their injustice. They are inherently confrontational; they say “you can’t do that” or “you don’t belong here.”       Exclusive architecture, on the other hand, says all of these things without saying them at all. If you are homeless and a p

      Recently, I visited Barcelona. What I saw there completely changed my view on the value of Art Nouveau as an architectural style. Before, Art Nouveau seemed like a strange and lovely historical oddity, beautiful but impractical for the modern world. Now, after seeing Art Nouveau bloom and vine its way across facades and banisters, I believe that Art Nouveau, or rather a new  form of it, is the future of architecture. I am working on a longer post on this topic, but in the meantime,  here  is a collection of some of the details that caught my eye.  Facade, Palau de la Música Catalana Metalwork detail Ceiling detail, Casa Batll ó Stairwell,  Casa Batll ó Attic Hallway,Casa Batll ó Glass panel detail, Casa Batll ó  Skylight detail, Casa Batll ó  Rooftop view, Casa Milá   Roof detail,Casa Milá  Gate Detail, Casa Milá  Ceiling painting, Casa Milá Facade, CosmoCaixa Science Museum  Outer wall, Parc Güell

    Once I observed a spaceship building, I couldn't stop seeing them . The Miller Outdoor Theater (above) is aimed directly upwards, poised delicately on a grassy slope like a paper airplane of steel. It is a dream of the future, a form that wouldn't look out of place soaring through the void in a sci-fi.      While this theater is a particularly dramatic example, I began noticing that buildings constructed in the sixties often pointed directly upwards in sharp, angular lines.       What were they reaching for?      This is a question that sent  me into a rabbit hole of architectural research. It all leads back to the sixties.     The sixties began with the first man going to space, and ended with the first astronauts setting foot on the moon. Suddenly, space was a place of strange and infinite worlds that existed beyond the imagination. It was a decade defined by dreaming of far away stars.  So perhaps it makes sense that the built world, too, was looking upwards.     By cont

     All across India, surreal staircases like MC Escher paintings recede into the depths of the earth.      When I first saw an image of a vanishing stepwell, I had no idea what I was looking at. It was a staircase out of a geometric dream, a vertical maze plunging downwards before disappearing into mirror-like water. It didn’t seem real.       Not only are Indian Stepwells real, but they were once both functional and ubiquitous , places for women to refill jugs that they would use to supply the day’s water for their families.      In the absence of aqueducts, many Indian  people relied on a central stepwell as their main water source. The stepwell was dug deep enough that it was below the water table, so the well would never run dry. The steep step-lined walls allow for overflow capacity in the case of heavy rains, preventing flooding. Instead, the water would rise to cover lower levels of stairs while remaining accessible, leading to the name "vanishing stepwells". Stepwel

       How do we design buildings around people?      This is a question that famed architect and proponent of modernism, Le Corbusier, sought to answer with his "Modular Man". Also known as Le Modular , this "man" consisted of a set of proportions and measurements.      At the time, World War II had just ended and reconstruction was taking place all across Europe, which presented architects with the opportunity to reshape the face of Western architecture. Le Corbusier saw this as his chance to revive the Classical tradition of creating buildings based on the golden ratio and human form . Buildings based on Le Modular would have counters at the perfect height, and cabinets that were always in reach.          While the idea of bringing human scale back into design is a commendable one, there was one major issue with Le Modular. That is, namely, that there is no one "human form". The Modular Man was based entirely on the measurements of a six foot tall, mus