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This flaneur, self-proclaimed bon vivant, was the one who said I could go to grad school. I took the GREs in two weeks in his mom’s well-cooled kitchen, and as we waited, he learned Born and Raised and played it for me. I read Moby Dick because it was his favorite, because we hoped to land on the eastern seaboard, and when we did, we are lobster and tried a clambake, which was gross. Camus and Infinite Jest.

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he was the kind of eyes i wanted since i was ten. green, grey, and a heart marked by books.

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Harnessing plants as bio-sensors allows for distributed sensing without the need for a power supply.

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Focusing upon buildings rather than architects and upon the ways in which space and structure as well as style and surface are produced culturally, socially, economically, and politically, they have instead changed the way in which the history of architecture is written.

All Past Buildings Will Be Deemed Worthy of Study

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The research activity that most interests me involves shortening the lag between societal needs and their reflection in architectural form. Institutions are the intermediary between the recognition of a need and it’s expression in form. There is a built-in inertia in the organization of societal institutions that results in facilities being built for objectives that are often obsolete. Fundamental innovation can take place only rarely within the confines of the normal architectural commission. Architecture is often an instrument that inhabits necessary change in institutions. Because architecture is oriented to solutions rather than problems or results, forms and images tend to be perpetuated long after the reasons that made them that way have changed.

Some Views on Research in Architecture

Sim Van der Ryn

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Thus, the new environmental designer must be someone who has a sense of a new skill, a new kind of production, a sense of the importance of program requirements as well as of the programming schedule, and an ability to combine a knowledge of technology and structure with that of function and beauty. However, without predetermining the nature of that future beauty, we have to fortify students with a sense of the origins of the beautiful, whether they be from environmental and cultural history, or from the natural sciences and the very special aesthetic that the natural world and even the abstract world of mathematics provide. A concern for beauty is, after all, still what distinguishes the environmental designer from others.

Discussion Draft of the College Plan

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Programming these problems may become a profession in itself. The concept of programming itself will have to be enlarged to include the phasing and scheduling of public and private investments.

Discussion Drafts of the College Plan

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… the environmental designer will have to be responsible for the programming of the problem, that is, for developing a set of requirements to serve as a basis for design.

Martin Meyerson and Charles Rusch

Discussion Drafts of the College Plan

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architecture, after all, is made for our use. it is not a free art in that sense… architecture attains it’s highest quality as an applied art. and it is at its most beautiful when things have come into their own, when they are coherent. that is when everything refers to everything else and it is impossible to remove a single thing without destroying the whole. place, use, and form. the form reflects the place, the place is just so, and the use reflects this and that.

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to put in light as if you were hollowing out the darkness, as if the light were a new mass seeping in

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this feeling of the interior as a hidden mass you don’t recognize.

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what it tells me is something about atmosphere… the ability to touch us — to touch me — within seconds of listening. But what it also tells me is that a great deal of work has gone into it, and I find that consoling: the idea that the task of creating architectural atmosphere also comes down to craft and graft. Processes and interests, instruments and tools…

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What do we mean when we speak of architectural quality?… when a building manages to move me. What on earth is it that moves me? How can I get it into my own work?… a building I just love looking at. How do people design things with such a beautiful, natural presence, things that move me every single time.

…One word for it is atmosphere… We perceive atmosphere through our emotional sensibility — a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive. Not every situation grants us time to make up our minds on whether or not we like something or whether indeed we might be better heading off in the opposite direction. Something inside us tells us an enormous amount straight away. We are capable of immediate appreciation, of a spontaneous emotional response, or rejecting things in a flash. That is very different from linear thought, which we are equally capable of, and which I love too…

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kim hong soo