William Whyte on the Joys of People Watching

"Whatever they may mean, people's movements are one of the great spectacles of the plaza. You do not see this in architectural photographs, which typically are empty of life and are taken from a perspective few people share. It is a quite misleading one. At eye level the scene comes alive with movement and color-people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out on crossing patterns, accelerating and retarding to match the moves of others. There is a beauty that is beguiling to watch, and one senses that the players are quite aware of it themselves. You see this, too, in the way they arrange themselves on steps and ledges. They often do so with a grace that they, too, must sense."

-William Whyte in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The last part of that reminded me of perichoresis, a term that the patristics used to describe the Trinity's life of mutual love and indwelling.

40min interveiw with Santiago Calatrava at BBC

(watercolor by calatrava, out of this book)

Check it out. (realAudio or text)

I love interviews, I've been reading a lot of them lately. A lot of interesting things explored in this one:

• metaphor and symbolism in architecture
• biomorphic architecture
• importance of drawing
• his love of Bach

To continue the thoughts of my last post on Calatrava, Leithart pointed out how Calatrava has been criticized for being too natural, too imitative of nature.

Calatrava's architecture is, as he says, symbolic and metaphoric; consciously or not, (and from his familiarity with the Bible, I would guess consciously) part of Calatrava's imitation of nature, (of God's art and architecture) is that it is symbolic and metaphoric, just as trees and mountains are (and they really are) symbolic and metaphoric.


Edit: Also if you're in Dallas, you can check out his kinetic sculpture at SMU, where I heard him speak at my sister's graduation.