adasatstudios:

Having an office in one of the oldest inhabitable areas of Amman is very cool. Jabal al-Weibdeh is a very old and heritage-filled part of Amman that I personally love. It’s far away from all the modern-ness of the new cities. The architecture in it reminds me a lot of Beirut and Cairo, the way middle-eastern cities should be. On a regular basis I take walk-breaks from work and walk around to get some exercise. I always see these pathways and little tunnels that I have no idea where they lead to or if anyone lives there or something. So I decided to make this photo-essay persay about those. All the images were taken with my iPhone 4S.

"It is commonly assumed that architecture would somehow be degraded if it were too closely associated with commerce - a misconceived attempt at framing architecture as a purely artistic activity that has done no good at all. Limiting architecture to a formal exercise denies its vital role in the construction of economics."

enochliew:

Kowloon Walled City

A Japanese team was able to document the city in cross-section before it was demolished in 1993.

(via landscapearchitecture)

"Don’t explain. People only hear what they want to hear."

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as a sorry state as the souls who live under tyranny."

"First of all, I was influenced by old buildings. I looked at them, people built them. I don’t know the names, and I don’t know what it was … mostly very simple buildings. When I was really young, not even twenty years old, I was impressed by the strength of these old buildings because they didn’t even belong to any epoch. But they were there for one thousand years and still there and still impressive, and nothing could change it. And all the styles, the great styles, passed, but they were still there. They didn’t lose anything. They were ignored through certain architectural epochs, but they were still there and still good as they were in the first day they were built."

"Dystopias should be insurgent. They should force readers to question who they are, what their society is like, and what they take for granted. A good dystopia will illuminate the horrors right before our eyes, and one can hope that if it does its job well, it will create empathy and humanity in world that is sorely lacking."

"Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can."

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"