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Zaha Hadid, 1950-2016 (Photo Steve Double, taken from ArchDaily) This article asking "what is architecture"  had been almost complete when news about Zaha Hadid's sudden death broke. She had approached that  question so deftly, unafraid, and exuberantly. She created visionary avantgarde drawings that later became three dimensional to touch and walk through. Whether there was a building or not was not her initial concern. In a way she was the incarnation of "The Other Architect", persisting in an architecture world then still dominated by men. Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein (Germany). Hadid's Big Bang. What is architecture?  This question is probably not one that that would keep many people awake at night. Nevertheless, it is interesting how little agreement there is about what it is and what it isn't. Naturally, then, the same uncertainty befalls the architect as well. Notre Dame Cathedral rose window, Paris France An architecture center s...

For millennia architects, artists and poets have tried to find beauty. Deep down they knew that beauty was more than an arbitrary judgment entirely dependent on the view of the observer. But time and again somebody comes up with that old chestnut about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. This can drive one crazy when one makes a living from wrestling beauty from things. The assumption that beauty is random and accidental belittles that effort of designers all over the world since the time of prehistoric cave paintings. Then there are the larger philosophical questions of the subject and object relations in principal (epistemology). Brain wiring, new born (left) and older person (right) visualized by an MRI (University of Edinburgh) Finally, science comes to the rescue by proving that beauty is, at least in part, not random. That it is also not only cultural or social but universal. Experiments show that people across gender, race and cultural divides agree on certain visual prefer...

America's new gilded age with its increasing disparities and growing patchwork of pockets of poverty covering the nation like smallpox (see map) causes thoughts about access or the lack thereof. Not to have access, and the associated lack of opportunity have become chief explanations for systemic poverty. Baltimore's unrest in 2015 is frequently explained by the lack of access to jobs and good transportation to get to where the jobs are.   The map of US poverty Access has become a buzzword.  Access to healthcare (in spite of progress under Obamacare), access to good food, access to good schools, access to information, access to banks. Typically the disparities in access are seen as geo-spatial locational issues. That poor neighborhoods don't have certain facilities is usually seen as a brick and mortar problem of the kind that urban planners know how to solve: Build health clinics, build grocery stores, build better schools, build more transit, build factories, build banks,...

To think about the future requires optimism. Depression can't see a future at all, fear doesn't want to see one, anger laments that it won't be like the past. But as the German novelist and writer Martin Walser recently observed, "there is no presence that isn't crying out for a future". There are at least three strong reasons for planning a future: ethics (things may not remain the way they are), philosophy (the presence is nothing but the confluence of past and future) and physics (the "arrow of time" or entropy is irreversible). So we turn to Baltimore resident, Johns Hopkins Fellow and former Special Advisor for Innovation at the State Department Alec Ross to learn about the future and "how the next wave of innovation and globalization will affect our countries, our societies and ourselves" (book cover), Ross has written a whole book about the future. But he isn't just a blue-eyed optimist writing "the typical techno-utopian fa...

In his latest film "Where to Invade Next?" the filmmaker Michael Moore asks Finnish students and their teacher where Helsinki's best schools are located; he receives blank stares. A teacher finally enlightens Moore that in Finland all schools are the same, which means equally good. ( Finnish student performance usually ranks #1 in international comparisons). No need for parents to shop around for schools before buying or renting a house or apartment. If the schools are equal it should follow that the differences between the Helsinki neighborhoods would also not be nearly as stark as, say, Baltimore, where life expectancy varies as much as 10 years within a few miles. Finnish schools, not being dependent on property taxes, don't have to rise and fall with their surrounding community. By contrast, in the US the fate of schools and the community are intertwined on many levels. One of them financial. The denser and the poorer a community, the less money per student that ...