upcoming thoughts

I just received an urban economics textbook I bought on Amazon a couple of weeks ago. I'm thinking it will help concentrate my thoughts on the "investigating infrastructure" competition being held by princeton architectural press.

i saw thom mayne tonight at the lou kahn memorial lecture. I spent the night wondering why this guy won the Pritzker. My beautiful architect girlfriend thought the same thing. I think some of his work is pretty good - i especially like the madrid housing project and an observatory out in california. Both of them were in white, which is probably the only color broad enough to bear the weight of his frantic aesthetic. I think I don't really like the style - it's dependent on the shock of severe angles and accumulation.

It also bothered me that I couldn't really understand what he was about. Amy said it best when she noted that the one unifying theme of his talk was contradiction. He doesn't like to be classified, and will make statements to keep his status as a moving target. Maybe that's the only strategy that makes sense when, as he noted (and i think correctly) that there are no principles or essences of architecture, only change.