DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

It is those spaces between the buildings where community happens, the piazzas and terraces and stair and “streets,” where students learn to share communal space and which therefore help form them into a community. With students from 60 different countries, TASIS really is a global village. And the hope is that what they learn here about getting along, about making the world a better place, they will take with them when they leave.

The Italians have a compact aphorism for the problem of translation: traduttore, traditore. Translator, Traitor in English. To translate is to betray. This gets at the fundamental problem of accessing texts in other languages (although T. S. Eliot supposedly said he could tell Dante was a great poet reading him in Italian, before Eliot could speak Italian himself). But translations can take other forms, like texts into the visual arts. Or into films.

Historians, inevitably, have a point of view. And it is right to be mildly suspicious of what that point of view is. But there are those scholars who seem (though how can we really know?) to be able to access the past on its own terms, to be able to operate almost like a native in that foreign land where “they do things differently”

Readers were meant to analyze these [narratives], in order to equip themselves with the prudence needed in the active life, and then to emulate or avoid emulating the actions they depicted when faced with similar circumstances.

At some level every culture asserts a view of history that fits its self-perception. And for some time there has been a strong undercurrent of suspicion of history’s value as model or lesson.

If you want to know what’s possible en plein air, stick to the time window.

Classical architecture may be intrinsically elegant, and eloquent, but it is only truly noble if it is put to noble ends.

Today, we either take architecture too seriously, or not enough: in the former case we see it as either the destruction or salvation of society and the environment, in the latter it’s at best mere packaging and at worst shelter.

[I]t has somehow crept into the discourse lately that specific dimensions are in some way meaningful

Architects should stop thinking they have to be pseudo-scientists or technocrats to be taken seriously. Our research is naturally in the realm of imagination, not tabulation.

Leonardo's Vitruvian man, ad quadratum and ad triangulum, the normative Ionic, and the feminine Doric in Rome

Apparently, comic book artists have more integrity than architects.

Not only did I reconstruct the absent architectural form—from the proportions of the exterior order to the shape of the roof—I also imagined what it would be like if it were frescoed and stuccoed...

For my sake as well as for that of my former colleagues and students, allow me to outline what systematic thinking means for architects.

I suppose the word “New” insulates New Urbanism from expectations that it corresponds to the old or pre-Modernist way of making cities and towns.

the Ca’ d’Oro is not composed like a typical, or normative, Venetian palace.

Tradition is a modern idea.

But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. L. S. Maclehose, Dover Publ., 1999, p. 210 I'd like to offer two alternative

Some Good Things that Happened to Cities after the Middle Ages There’s a substantial cadre of urbanists who think of themselves as...

one of the qualities that make Old Master drawings both beautiful and interesting is their pentimenti