Written by Michael Sorkin,
Published in: Michael Sorkin, What Goes Up, London: Verso, 2018.
- The feel of cool marble under bare feet.
- How to live in a small room with five strangers for six months.
- With the same strangers in a lifeboat for one week.
- The modulus of rupture.
- The distance a shout carries in the city.
- The distance of a whisper.
- Everything possible about Hatshepsut’s temple (try not to see it as ‘modernist’ avant la lettre).
- The number of people with rent subsidies in New York City.
- In your town (include the rich).
- The flowering season for azaleas.
- The insulating properties of glass.
- The history of its production and use.
- And of its meaning.
- How to lay bricks.
- What Victor Hugo really meant by ‘this will kill that.’
- The rate at which the seas are rising.
- Building information modeling (BIM).
- How to unclog a Rapidograph.
- The Gini coefficient.
- A comfortable tread-to-riser ratio for a six-year-old.
- In a wheelchair.
- The energy embodied in aluminum.
- How to turn a corner.
- How to design a corner.
- How to sit in a corner.
- How Antoni Gaudí modeled the Sagrada Família and calculated its structure.
- The proportioning system for the Villa Rotonda.
- The rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses.
- The relevant sections of the Code of Hammurabi.
- The migratory patterns of warblers and other seasonal travellers.
- The basics of mud construction.
- The direction of prevailing winds.
- Hydrology is destiny.
- Jane Jacobs in and out.
- Something about feng shui.
- Something about Vastu Shilpa.
- Elementary ergonomics.
- The color wheel.
- What the client wants.
- What the client thinks it wants.
- What the client needs.
- What the client can afford.
- What the planet can afford.
- The theoretical bases for modernity and a great deal about its factions and inflections.
- What post-Fordism means for the mode of production of building.
- Another language.
- What the brick really wants.
- The difference between Winchester Cathedral and a bicycle shed.
- What went wrong in Fatehpur Sikri.
- What went wrong in Pruitt-Igoe.
- What went wrong with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
- Where the CCTV cameras are.
- Why Mies really left Germany.
- How people lived in Çatal Hüyük.
- The structural properties of tufa.
- How to calculate the dimensions of brise-soleil.
- The kilowatt costs of photovoltaic cells.
- Vitruvius.
- Walter Benjamin.
- Marshall Berman.
- The secrets of the success of Robert Moses.
- How the dome on the Duomo in Florence was built.
- The reciprocal influences of Chinese and Japanese building.
- The cycle of the Ise Shrine.
- Entasis.
- The history of Soweto.
- What it’s like to walk down the Ramblas.
- Back-up.
- The proper proportions of a gin martini.
- Shear and moment.
- Shakespeare, et cetera.
- How the crow flies.
- The difference between a ghetto and a neighborhood.
- How the pyramids were built.
- Why.
- The pleasures of the suburbs.
- The horrors.
- The quality of light passing through ice.
- The meaninglessness of borders.
- The reasons for their tenacity.
- The creativity of the ecotone.
- The need for freaks.
- Accidents must happen.
- It is possible to begin designing anywhere.
- The smell of concrete after rain.
- The angle of the sun at the equinox.
- How to ride a bicycle.
- The depth of the aquifer beneath you.
- The slope of a handicapped ramp.
- The wages of construction workers.
- Perspective by hand.
- Sentence structure.
- The pleasure of a spritz at sunset at a table by the Grand Canal.
- The thrill of the ride.
- Where materials come from.
- How to get lost.
- The pattern of artificial light at night, seen from space.
- What human differences are defensible in practice.
- Creation is a patient search.
- The debate between Otto Wagner and Camillo Sitte.
- …..
To read the rest of the list please visit the Reading Design website.