Economics of innovation (redux)

Peter Thomson on design and business.

permalink

Strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants & mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.

Weeds and grass and wildflowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness.

Nature has a non-euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.

Peter Thomson's blog »