This morning I was thinking. I didn’t wrote any as I was suppose to. As always when I take myself the time write – or read – times just pass. NOthing happens. I sat in the corner; my writing corner in my library, as I use to call it. Its just two bookcases and the Aalvar Alto chair I got for free but I like them and sometimes I let my eyes move over the backs of the books. Those books I have read makes me remember. Those I still have left. A chance to travel somewhere else. But this morning everything was still. Especially in my head, the silence in my head made everything else seem chaotic.
So what was I thinking? What is architecture? And maybe more important – what aren’t? Architecture is everything. Architecture is nothing. And I think it is the stuff in-between as well. Architecture is the room and the building and the space between the buildings and the moon and the stars in a illuminating sky under an open roof terrace. But does it matter? Architecture is politics and politics is everything. The private is politics. The public is politics. But does it matter?
Could we ever get free? Free from the architecture? Free from the politics? When I was six I started to learn how to read and write. At first there were letters, A, B, C all the way to Z, but as well the extra three Swedish letters Å, Ä and Ö. 15 years later I started architecture school and I started learn how to write again. Pilotis, roof gardens, ground plan, façade, horizontal window. Who is Le Corbusier anyway? All this old men as house gods.
I realize the same way as I can’t pretend I don’t now how to read when I see a sign or a text I can’t pretend I don’t see that the world is designed. I doubt it is design for me (even tho I am a man, white, Swedish, heterosexual, grown up in a villa, my parents got great educations etc etc etc). I can’t pretend that the design doesn’t affects me. My life won’t change with the man who’s elected. Will it always be a man? Anyway I can’t pretend that polltics doesn’t affect me.
Poppe
archandphil 
December 11, 2013 at 8:36 am
Your thoughts on the planned environment make me think of my maybe most intense, paranoiac experience concerning our global visual culture. I was watching the documentary about Helvetica by Gary Hustwit, have you seen it?
This font, which without words and without revolution, suddenly took over, and now enjoys such a prominent position, that no other font ever had before.
I am not sure I recommend you to watch it (can lead to “planning paranoia”), but in response to your question Could we ever get free? I am afraid that the answer is no, not as long as Helvetica has us.