It's a mistake staying indoors too much.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Architecture is much too important to leave to the architects. We get fantastic and we get silly ideas, and we aren't willing, as artists, to tear up our work, and so we build it. That's the mistake.
Philip Johnson, “American Architecture Now,” c. 1983
It is a mistake to think that transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, which have not been destroyed, or have only been temporarily put out of action, can be used again for our own ends when the lost territory has been recovered. The enemy will leave us nothing but scorched earth when he withdraws, without paying the slightest regard to the population. I therefore order: All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.
Adolf Hitler, "The Nero Decree," 1945
When you are in your space/time oasis, getting into the open mode, nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. Now if you think about play, you’ll see why. To play is experiment: “What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that? What if…?" The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen. The feeling that whatever happens, it’s ok. So you cannot be playful if you’re frightened that moving in some direction will be “wrong" — something you “shouldn’t have done." Well, you’re either free to play, or you’re not. As Alan Watts puts it, you can’t be spontaneous within reason. So you’ve got risk saying things that are silly and illogical and wrong, and the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you’re being creative, nothing is wrong. There’s no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the break-through.
John Cleese, "On Creativity," c. 1990 (via cleese)
nickkahler reblogged
Most of the mistakes of young authors, aside from those gross violations of syntax which ordinary education corrects, may perhaps be enumerated as follows.
- Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
- Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
- Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
- Ambiguous use of pronouns.
- Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
- Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
- Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
- Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
- Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
- The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
- The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
- False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
- Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
- Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
- The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
- Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
- Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
- Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
- Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
- Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
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I remember how I used to worry; being afraid when I showed something that people wouldn't notice. It's a nice feeling between being caught and being seen. For the quality to be recognized and the mistakes perhaps overlooked. It's a complex thing: something you do in secret and then reveal in public. You can also hide behind it.
Scogin Elam and Bray Inc., Branch Library, Buckhead, GA, 1989
Today, I voted early for the 2012 Elections, and my designated spot for the first time I've voted in Atlanta was the Buckhead Branch Library just off Peachtree Road in Buckhead. The line wrapped thrice around the front sidewalk by the Buckhead St. Main Entrance, and so I had about an hour to really study the principal northern facade. Interestingly enough, where one might expect to see the most fenestration, there is only one window, a small oculus to the east of the entrance. Given this distinction by virtue of solitude, one might suppose this oculus would frame a dramatic view of the interior and exterior. However, on both sides the view is blocked by two separate columns. Knowing the theoretical approach to design at MSME, I contemplated the potential of a passive criticism of views and the relationship between viewing and being viewed, or perhaps continuing the nautical theme from the slate fish / dragon scales on the exterior. Nevertheless, I think this apology may be too abstract and fruitless; I will have to ask Mack or Merrill about it the next time I see them. Either way, I had a wonderful discussion with an elderly lady named Janice Nash about how Men's Restrooms are almost always placed in civic buildings before Women's Restrooms, and sure enough it is true at the Buckhead Branch Library. Here's to designing with Women's Restrooms first!
MVRDV, Twin Towers, Seoul, South Korea, 2011
File under "Architectural Bloopers." I'm actually surprised how much press this building is getting. It seems like another negative interjection of the Spectacle into architecture...