Omnivoracious, the Amazon.com editors' blog, has just posted a relatively long interview with BLDGBLOG about The BLDGBLOG Book – and I think it turned out really well, in fact. If you're new to BLDGBLOG, or if you simply want to know more about the motivation behind this site or The BLDGBLOG Book, then it might be worth checking it out.
From Franz Kafka to prison break films, haunted house novels to the effects of weathering on high-tech materials, Norse myths to Los Angeles traffic jams, artificial glaciers to the overlooked spatial opinions of private parking attendants, the interview really seems to run the list of things I've been trying to focus on here.
A brief excerpt:
- For instance, what do janitors or security guards or novelists or even housewives – let alone prison guards or elevator-repair personnel – think about the buildings around them? What do suburban teenagers think about contemporary home design, when their own bedrooms are right next door to their parents – or what do teenagers think about urban planning, when they have to drive an hour each way to get to school? These sorts of apparently trivial experiences of the built environment are often far more important to hear about than simply learning – yet again – how a certain architect fits him- or herself into a self-chosen design lineage.
So perhaps we should stop talking to Frank Gehry and start interviewing valet parkers in Los Angeles – or crime novelists, or SWAT team captains. They all have an opinion about the built environment, and about the way that cities function, but no one tends to ask them what those opinion might be.
