Buildings outlive us: memory set in stone

Look around: almost every building in which your life unfolds outlived those who built it — and will outlive you. Architecture is the only art we live inside. And unlike a book, it cannot be closed.

We build for strangers from the future

Whoever laid the foundation of an old cathedral knew he would not see it finished. He worked for the grandchildren of his grandchildren — for us, people who were strangers to him. Herein lies the quiet grandeur of building: it is always a letter to the future written with one’s hands. In raising a house, a school, a bridge, a person answers a question he rarely says aloud: what will I leave to those I will never meet?

The city teaches in silence

Winston Churchill once observed a simple and slightly frightening truth about buildings. We think we shape space to fit us — and then it shapes us for decades. A cramped yard without trees, a blank wall, a square without a bench teach a person a certain attitude to life and to one another — silently, every day, more surely than any sermon. A beautiful and humane city is not a luxury but a form of respect for those who will live in it.

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
— Winston Churchill

My opinion: how we build today is a letter that will be read by people we will never know. Cheap construction meant “to last fifteen years” tells our descendants: we did not think of you. A house built to last centuries, with a tree in the yard and a bench by the entrance, says the opposite. We do not choose whether we will be remembered. But we do choose what the space will be like in which we are remembered.