tag > Architecture
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The door to the dining area of the Alcobaça Monastery in Portugal, was made narrow so that monks who got too fat were forced to go into fasting.
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": US Department of Health and Human Services
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The Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali: The World's Largest Mud-Brick Structure
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Beijing Zhongshuge Lafayette store. A new bookstore in central Beijing, inspired by traditional Chinese gardens, connected with contemporary moongates to transport one into a flowing space.
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Engawa (縁側/掾側)
The engawa is a traditional Japanese "in-between-space", from a closed corridor connecting rooms in a home to an open space that blends the garden with the interior, allowing for perfect fine tuning depending on weather, season, for warmer winters and cooler summers. In a dense urban area the engawa can be used to surround a courtyard pocket garden of any size, for a private spot of green in the middle of any city. All the rooms are modular, walls can be removed or closed off, windows put in or taken out, half height screens can divide rooms.
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The Ark of Bukhara is a fortress located in Uzbekistan, built 1,500 years ago.
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Staircase in the Château de La Rochefoucauld in France, designed by Leonardo da Vinci, 1516
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By 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of using yakhchāls (ice pit) to create ice in the winter and store it in the summer in the desert. Yakhchāl is an ancient type of evaporative cooler. Above ground, the structure had a domed shape, but had a subterranean storage space.
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Christopher Alexander on Generative Systems
A generating system… is a kit of parts, with rules about the way these parts may be combined. Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them. - Christopher Alexander, 1968, “Systems Generating Systems”
If you want to make a living flower, you don't build it, you grow it from the seed. - Christopher Alexander
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The oldest door still in use in Rome
Cast in bronze for emperor Hadrian's rebuilding, they date from about 115 AD. Each door is solid bronze seven and a half feet wide & twenty-five feet high, yet so well balanced they can be pushed or pulled open easily by one person.
