Jeni Dhodary’s Reviews > The Timeless Way of Building > Status Update

"Almost everybody feels at peace with nature: listening to the ocean waves against the shore, by a still lake, in a field of grass, on a windblown heath. One day, when we have learned the timeless way again, we shall feel the same about our towns, and we shall feel as much at peace in them, as we do today walking by the ocean, or stretched out in the long grass of a meadow."

"Imagine, for example, blue tiles, white fountains, birds nests under the arcades, yellow paint, fresh scrubbed woodwork...The beauty of this place, the quality in it which touches us, the thing which makes it live, is, above all, that it is carefree, that it is innocent."

"The timeless character of buildings is as much a part of nature as the character of rivers, trees, hills, flames, and stars. Each class of phenomena in nature has its own characteristic morphology...And when buildings are made properly, and true to all the forces in them, then they too will always have their own specific character. This is the character created by the timeless way."

"...a town which is whole, like an oak tree, must be unpredictable...This process, exactly like the emergence of any other form of life, alone produces a living order...It cannot be created by decision. It cannot be designed. It cannot be predicted in a plan. It is the living testament of hundreds and thousands of people, making their own lives and all their inner forces manifest. And, finally, the whole emerges."

"Imagine trying to build sentences by shuffling words around on a piece of tracing paper...It is only in the mind's eye, eyes shut, not on paper, that a building can be born out of the vividness of actual experience."

"The real work of any process of design lies in this task of making up the language, from which you can later generate the one particular design...The individual buildings which you make, will live, or not, according to the depth and wholeness of the language which you use to make them with...If it has the power to make a single building live, it can be used a thousand limes, to make a thousand buildings live."

"So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for "the many," their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say."

"We imagine, because of the distorted view of architecture we have learnt, that some great architect created these buildings, with a few marks of the pencil, worked out laboriously at the drawing board. The fact is that Chartres, no less than the simple farmhouse, was built by a group of men, acting within a common pattern language, deeply steeped in it of course. It was not made by "design" at the drawing board."

"To reach the quality without a name, a building must be made, at least in part, of those materials which age and crumble. Soft tile and brick, soft plaster, fading coats of paint, canvas which has been bleached a little and torn by the wind...fruit, dropping on the paths, and being crushed by people walking over it...None of this can happen in a world which lasts forever."

"Although it is true that a unique event can sometimes change our lives completely, it is not too much to say that the overall character of our lives is given by those events which keep on recurring over and over again. And, by the same token, it is roughly true that any system, any aspect of the life of a part of the world, is essentially governed by those situations which keep on repeating there."