I feel like I've posted this picture before. So it goes--we humans tend to repeat things, and unlike other creatures, we actually waste time worrying about the implications of repetition. I remember reading once about a philosophical question that is framed in this fashion: Can a person cross a river in the same way twice? The answer is no, because in the time between crossings both the person and the river will have changed. Last night I walked past the entrance to a building that had a sign which read: "Center for Marxist Education." Will Karl Marx get to cross the river again, in some fashion? Perhaps he had his moment of influence, and any residual interpretations will be claimed by another generation as a set of original ideas.
I have an open-ended question. Is architecture really about the organization of ideas? Could it be purely reactionary and expressionistic, bereft of credibility when it comes to justifying the set of choices that go into the planning process? Are there really any objective standards that can be applied to the layout of buildings and spaces? Even a proportional system derived from the human body is unreliable--we're all a little bit different.
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