Most architects focus mainly on the big picture of their designs.
A project’s footprint, floor plans, main volumes, and facade are what make a building a building anyway, a structure that can make space for human inhabitants, deny entry to the wind and rain, and stand stable above the groundwater beneath.
In his 1986 book Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski (VEE-told rib-CHIN-ski) gives us his architectural perspective on the cultural and technological innovations that have shaped the idea of “home” from the medieval period to the modern day. In the course of ten chapters that feel like a comfortable stroll through the rooms of history, Rybczynski illuminates an idea that we take for granted in modernity: that home is the place where one is comfortable. In an organization of advocates for better cities, such an idea provokes another one that we are seeking to realize; an idea that we hope our children and grandchildren will take for granted themselves: that a city, too, …
