The future starts from belief, not rationalism, and belief is cultivated partly with aesthetics. Progress will come from regaining a grasp on the aesthetics that move us.

It’s easy but disorienting, and it makes the home into a very strange space. Until the 20th century, one had to leave the house for almost anything: to work, to eat or shop, to entertain yourself, to see other people. For decades, a family might have a single radio, then a few radios and a single television set. The possibilities available outside the home were far greater than those within its walls. But now, it’s not merely possible to do almost anything from home—it’s also the easiest option. Our forebears’ problem has been inverted: Now home is a prison of convenience that we need special help to escape.

I thought about all the ways in which I had lived in New York, and all the ways I will keep living in New York. ​ And then again fifteen years later, a similar feeling, but with a different person, and without the drinking, but still with that desire to never stop talking, even though the thing was being said, over and over and over again.

The depth of architectural thinking at work here makes a kiddie-pool seem oceanic. ​ It really is the perfect name, however, not least because it implies a certain emptiness. ​ It is a Vessel for a so-called neighborhood that poorly masks its intention to build luxury assets for the criminally wealthy under the guise of investing in the city and “public space.” ​ Unlike a real neighborhood, which implies some kind of social collaboration or collective expression of belonging, Hudson Yards is a contrived place that was never meant for us. ​ The presence of the elevator implies a pressure for the abled-bodied to not use it, since by doing so one bypasses “the experience” of the Vessel, an experience of menial physical labor that aims to achieve the nebulous goal of attaining slightly different views of the city.

Selection of architectural concepts from various projects.

reasoning about the system should be done recursively on its structure. ​ good software design is ultimately an art. ​ another example of reasoning via an interface. ​ I suspect that interfaces are in fact synonymous with compositionality. That is, compositionality is not just the ability to compose objects, but the ability to work with an object after intentionally forgetting how it was built. ​ can interact in complex ways that block understanding ​ More generally, I claim that the opposite of compositionality is emergent effects. The common definition of emergence is a system being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and so it is easy to see that such a system cannot be understood only in terms of its parts, i.e. it is not compositional. Moreover I claim that non-compositionality is a barrier to scientific understanding, because it breaks the reductionist methodology of always dividing a system into smaller components and translating explanations into lower levels.