Ljubljana Castle complex standing on Castle Hill above downtown Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It is a key landmark of the town. Originally a medieval fortress, it was probably constructed in the 11th century and rebuilt in the 12th century. It acquired its present outline with an almost complete overhaul in the 15th century, whereas the majority of the buildings date to the 16th and 17th centuries. Initially a defense structure and since the first half of the 14th century the seat of the lords of Carniola, it was since the early 19th century used for various other purposes and today is used as a major cultural venue.

My wife and I visited this destination not knowing its history. What a great surprise to see the combination of the Ancient history (Middle Ages, Baroque period, Contemporary)

with the new modern steel structures interwoven though out this complex. It was a very rich and rewarding experience. This will stay with me as I design new uses for older building.

Chartres Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres, is a Roman Catholic church in Chartres, France, about 80 km southwest of Paris.  This is the very culmination OF ALL THE Gothic architecture, Romanesque architecture, French Gothic architecture, High Gothic. It is the place of greatest energy. If you want to feel the Gothic, the true, go there. It was worth the day spent in every way. You feel it.

Bruges, the capital of West Flanders in northwest Belgium, is distinguished by its canals, cobbled streets and medieval buildings. Its port, Zeebrugge, is an important center for fishing and European trade. History tells all. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site which helps me decide where to travel. Having read all about King Charlemagne and his town, how he helped set up the governance of cities that we still use today, this town had great significance to me. It is also the Venice of the north.

Dalmatian Coast in Croatia there is Split and Dubrovnik. I experienced medieval and Roman architecture along the clear blue waters. I found a photo in a magazine once showing a hidden gem built into a cliff with a great little door. It was along the coast in a small bay. Eating lunch in a small Dubrovnik café watching the boats and water gleaming, there it was. Out of nowhere and I had no way to know the doors location. That is discovery. I love to explore, take in the feeling of the past and transpose it to the future. It fills my soul with new opportunity.

Exploring involves research to know where to go for the senses you want during time off. For me one way is to see photos, movies, magazines and then search them out. The other way is to follow World heritage sites, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

Another is to track books: Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power,

World Pilgrimage Guide, Places of Peace and Power, and others. They give you ideas that others have compiled. Then you get to pick what gets your juices following. You will not be let down. I even pick hotel rooms for their specific views and history without any other information.

As I read about Mies Van der Rohe or Corbusier Universal Housing would be mass produced, more affordable, and honest construction. It would be for the masses as opposed to the richer crowd not following their principals of the future. The future being modern and just, without all the self-fulfilling history or random non rational buildings.

For me it is more the opportunity to develop a system, like Mid Century Modern, that is a Tinker Toy of parts that can be used in many imaginative ways. Building still need to work constructively for humans. The function is most important. The form, personal values, light, spacial energy should all reinforce the human spirit.

How do you do Universal Housing with all this in mind? Study, invent, calculate, imaging that future. Be bold, experiment, engineer, be site selective, work with local and the larger building and planning to develop opportunity. Collaborate using past opportunities to see what works for today. Modular construction shipped to site might be a great option. However you need to look at all the embodied energy used to create and build housing units. There might be a better more cost effective way to achieve your goal.

For now the majority of residential projects I have worked on have been additions, remodels, or re-purposed housing units. Each new project I have worked on has been custom. I study the concepts of Universal Housing, affordable housing, homeless housing, manufactured housing continually. Many big government housing project turn into slums and a few had to be destroyed. This is a very complex issue.

Even Walt Disney could not solve the issue.

As a Student at school I kept hearing that reading and study of the humanities was very important to becoming a good Architect. As an Architect over the last 30 years I have continued to read the old and the new. Culture changes, but not by much. People are people.

So I took up reading Swann's Way by Marcel Proust who lived from 1871-1922 in France.

He is known for his extensive voice on details that he witnessed or dreamed up. I believe it was the age for dreaming. Look at other artists from the period like Wright, Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Van Der Rohe, Gropius,  Gaudi, Aalto, Matisse, Picasso, Klimt, Rodin,  Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Baum , and others. They could see, interpret, and represent in their fields what they saw in their mind. Below are a few excerpts taken in with my context?

• For my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. I alone can discover the truth. More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not exist, which alone cam make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day. But the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I want to try to make it re-appear. I trace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank my first spoonful of tea. I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea.
• What was prized above everything else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction? Or you could just be ignorant of architecture.
• You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.
• All my conversations with friends bore upon actors whose art., all together as yet I had no experience of it, was fist od all its numberless forms in which Art it-self allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor’s tricks of intonation and inflection and another’s the most trifling differences would strike me as being of incalculable importance. I would arrange them in order of talent -- hardening in my brain and hampering it by their immovability.
• I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounded it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it ----
• It’s always proceeded by a zone of evaporation. on the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my being to   the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the bottom of the garden, what was my primary, my innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading ----
• Entrust with the secrete of truth and beauty, things half felt by me, half incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.
• Mobilize all our spiritual forces in a glittering array – open the gates of an unknown world.
• Constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, toward the    discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I moved.
• ---persons arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes, and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was of the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consists in the suppression, pure and simple ----   is I a great measure perceptible only through our senses.
• Impenetrable to the human soul – one’s soul can assimilate ---- the feeling of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening --- every emotion is multiplied ten-fold – dream more lucid and more abiding – sets us free within us all the joys, we are able to distinguish ---
• Happy discovery –
• Some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode into my consciousness --- realizing that the universe contains innumerable elements---
• I was so filled with happiness, that I felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of its obsession with the steeples and the mystery which lay behind them, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.
• Its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value, he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound.  – a world of inexpressible delights --- slow       rhythmical movement --- toward a state of happiness --- yet prices – change of direction—fresh movement -=-=- rapid, fragile, melancholy, incessetnat6, sweet, with it toward new vistas----passionate longing – image of a new beauty which deepens his own sensibilities’ –pursuit of ephemeral satisfaction---
• The immeasurable keyboard – millions of keys of tenderness. Of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one different from the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when awakened in us the emotion corresponding to the awakened emotions corresponding to the theme they have discovered.
• Face the eye of reason – explicit --- so original a force, preserve the memory – conception of love and happiness = our notion of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions’ wherewith our inner temple—
• Decorated with works of art calculated by their designer to gladden the eyes of whoever may ultimately sleep therein, the subject being in keeping with the locality and surroundings of the house for which the rooms are planned.
• Besides, nature, by virtue of all feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less it bore the imprint, the more it offered for the expansion of my heart.
• Alternation of images had effected a change of front in my desire, and as abrupt as those that occur in music – a complete change of key in my sensibilities. Simple atmospheric variations—
• A leaf torn from another chapter in the interpretation of the calendar of Happiness—
• It all depends on the exclusive changes of the seasons and the weather.

I was eating at a Persian restaurant, the Wish Dish Café, and I got to talking with the host. He was telling me about a book that really affected him. It was about the history of Kings in Iran. As we talked about Stoic responses to life and training he said I should read the book. I bought it.

I am still amazed that history repeats itself. The sages say the same things after having lived life.

Here are some passages for the direction in life.

• Do not chase worldly goods and wealth. It is much better that a man avoid harming others as he lives on the Earth.
• When you are made King, adopt the humility of a slave.
• All that remains from us is our deeds. So, deviate not from the path of the righteous.
• Only the unwise pass their time without reflection.
• For the glory of having fought is greater than the disgrace of having been beaten.
• Sedate your passion and temper your greed.
• Rain in the demon of excess in the world and only in the path of justice proceed.
• The future is no more real than the wind.
• Be generous and resist the temptation of wealth.
• The point is to live in the light of reason while we are alive.

Many of the points sound familiar. See past posts from architects and stoics.

Know what is important in life, especially as you age and see what really is important to you.

Peace to all and live with a steady hand.