a city of mirrors

    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