A Place of My Own

Nigel’s new home is at eatlego. Do not miss the promising beginning of his blog, or his beautiful lomographs.

Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own: the Education of an Amateur Builder has been set as required reading for the first year Architects. Alan gave me a copy of the book when he recruited me as one of the first year’s studio tutors. In this excerpt Pollan talks of how postmodernism opened an architectural Pandora’s box:

No longer driven by the exigencies of program or site or client or material or method of construction, the architect was now free as a sculptor, poet, or literary theorist, and he could enlist any set of metaphors or intellectual vocabulary he liked to drive his design. This might be architectural history, but it could just as easily be Boolean algebra, Chomskyan linguistics, inside jokes, conceptualism, cubism, pop culture, and, of course, deconstruction.