The home next door was inspiring. But we need fewer like it.
Next City op-ed: Our current crises demand more than small-scale ecologically-conscious architecture. For the good of us all, we must make our cities and towns more dense.
The first thing I noticed about the neighboring property was, in retrospect, its least interesting feature. My wife and I had swapped our Barcelona apartment for a Costa Brava bungalow for two weeks. Nearly every day we walked from our lodgings to the town’s sandy beach, each time passing by this strange compound.
What caught my eye was a skinny pine. The two-story house’s bulky concrete balcony had been cast with holes to allow the tree to remain in place, untouched. It was the kind of detail that announced this was a house of import, one designed by an architect with something to say.
Yet this was hard for me to square with the boxy and plain structures themselves, which were covered in what looked like dull-brown stucco. I found them, to be honest, a bit ugly. Brutalist, as a visiting friend observed. Plus the property was thick with skinny pines and underbrush, native vegetation overrunning every square foot. So much so that, at first, I didn’t realize there were actually two separate buildings. Overgrown and untended, I thought.
But for some reason I could not stop thinking about the property. For the fortnight we stayed in Llafranc, the Costa Brava beach town of our home exchange, I walked by those houses and they they ran through my mind. It was not for lack of architecture to consider. Each day’s walk took us past scores of properties, from hotels to villas to apartment buildings. There were white-washed Mediterranean classics and modernist cubes. Some were beautiful, others dull, many unremarkable.
As I took more walks, exploring beyond Llafranc and the neighboring towns into undisturbed nature, I finally…
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A House Called Tomorrow | excerpt
When you as a child learned to speak, It’s not that you didn’t know words— It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many, And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own. From those centuries we human beings bring with us The simple solutions and songs, The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies All in service to a simple idea: That we can make a house called tomorrow. What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day, Is ourselves. And that’s all we need To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
– Alberto Ríos, Poet Laureate of Arizona
Read in full at poets.org.
Gratitude
This newsletter is a collective project. Thanks to my eternal editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate. In the issue two months ago, I neglected to mention that I owe my photo in The Guardian to the help of Scott Paterson, who runs the fascinating Field Report newsletter.
All errors are mine alone.