Essay - No Topic Given —No Topic Given the True Function of...

No topic given —No ***** given The true function of architecture is to provide shelter for people and *****ten, to borrow from Woody Allen, their pets. (I refer to ********** great sardonic phrase about man killing ***** food, ***** often for a bever*****ge as well.) The truth is, however, that modern architecture—***** practiced by v*****ionaries such ***** Le Corbusier—seemed to have little ***** do with the essential needs and desires of human for their lives. It had more to ***** with the forms that make up the universe and the engineering that would allow man to recreate them in other manners than nature had done and use them to some purpose or other.

***** is difficult to think ***** ***** C*****busier's soaring forms, looking ***** like clouds or stripped down landf*****ms, could have had less to do with *****ity than sawed ***** pieces of lumber intersecting at right angles and making what we know as houses. But it is so. Houses grew from that which humans could make ***** their own hands. And those things ***** ***** perch on a l*****ndscape *****, when houses first came into being, could not be manipulated by humans. Indeed, until the un*****able happened—an earthquake or volcano or tsunami—man was ***** much aware that there was an interaction between the malleable earth and the structures he erected to protect himself from wind ***** rain, if not fire.

While 'modern' buildings might try to be natural despite ***** abstractions, mimicking at times the forms found in earth forms, in fact, they have very ***** connection to the tec*****nic material of the earth. Going to the top ***** a gl*****ss tower in an elevator gives one no sense of the formation ***** the earth; battling beetles in the old timbers of ***** 1879 house does. Indeed, there are few children who have not tried to 'dig to Ch*****a' in their backyards. There are few people who have not picked up an arrowhead ***** the woods *****d wondered what the landscape looked ***** when Native Americans built *****ir very land-based ***** in the piney woods.

***** and landscape are inextricably linked. When that link is severed, as it was by Le Corbusier and the entire Bauhaus, for example, a great deal ***** content is left out of ***** result. When dealing with a huge boulder on the landscape, the connection to the ice sheet that dumped it ***** lost if ***** boulder is simply moved and a **********, cantilevered castle in the clouds is built through ***** magic of engineering ***** chem*****try. The possibility of wondering ***** whether Lewis and Clark might ***** passed by that rock is denied the inhabitants, who will never ***** *****re was a magn*****icent rock on the site. Using it as an anchor to the l*****scape for lives and longings, dreams and distresses is impossible, too, under those conditions.

A new ***** takes into account both the engineering discoveries, from mechanical to chemical, and ***** landscape itself. It is possible to properly anchor