With apologies to Jack Kerouac. In Satori in Paris, one of his last books, he describes the Japanese word satori, or sudden illumination, as a “kick in the head.” Précisement! I was sitting in an Uber, being driven down Locust Street. We passed by a building, probably built in the 1960s, a handsome composition in brick and precast concrete trim. Not bad, I thought, at least it’s not just glass, which seems to be the one-note tune played by architects today. A few seconds later we drove by another building, likewise a medical something—we were in a hospital district. This one was older, probably early 1900s, also brick, also with masonry trim—limestone rather than concrete—an unprepossessing example of Colonial Revival. That’s when I had my kick in the head. Both buildings were attractive in different ways, but while the first was an abstract composition governed by geometry, the second contained nuances that weren’t abstract at all. Not because it had shaped moldings, or paned windows, or a pediment over the doorway, but because these were evidence of human, rather than mechanical, choices. A small difference, but it meant all the world.
On Culture and Architecture