~ Art and Architorture ~

~ Ian Fleming

We often judge architecture by how innovative it looks. But architecture is not a technology race, it is more centuries and millennia of accumulated knowledge.

Every generation of architects will inherit solutions that have already been tested, use shapes which have already been used. How to proportion a room how to bring in daylight, all that's got nothing to do with technology.

Innovation certainly exists, new materials and new construction methods, but those are not as frequent as we tend to believe.

Construction methods evolved very little from the Roman Empire to the Industrial Revolution.

Today we're also facing environmental challenges and society demands responses.

Understood and agreed.

But I think that the buildings that last in our imagination do so because they embraced their past not because they ignored it.

From Chinese Courtyard House, Parisian Blvd or some village on the hills of the Mediterranean Sea, there is nothing revolutionary, but it is the result of centuries of practice, small accumulated improvements. 

We as architects are not supposed to reinvent architecture with every project. because it turns out accumulated knowledge is what gives architecture its depth and permanence.