Design as materials research: building a cathedral to last 500 years

摘要

Two opposing attitudes shape the built environment of North America: the myth of transience and the myth of permanence. As Mitchell Schwarzer (1994) writes, the former, supported by an enduring faith in progress and the frontier, has meant that 'the vast majority of American built environments are unplanned, haphazard places that grow rapidly and are often as quickly abandoned when times change'. This approach results in what J. B.Jackson (1984) describes as 'a disturbing mobility of people and spaces, a search for adjustment, for change; an incessant making of structures and spaces and communities, an incessant adaptation and remaking of the landscape, resisted by the political landscape when it could no longer be ignored.'