Archigram’s Walking Cities, Koolhaas’s Parc de la Villette, Mies van der Rohe’s Project for an Office Building in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, Boullée’s Newton’s Cenotaph, Le Courbusier’s Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants and Sverre Fehn’s Royal Theatre in Copenhagen are all examples of unrealised projects that have influenced the world in different ways. Never built, but still representing significant contributions to the development of the discipline, of cities and of society.

This has been for me an extraordinary pleasure because it means a certain misuse of Euclid is dead. Now, of course, I think that Euclid is marvelous, he produced one of the masterpieces of the human mind. But it was not meant to be used as a textbook by millions of students century after century. ….I don’t feel that Euclid is the way to start learning mathematics. Learning mathematics should begin by learning the geometry of mountains, of humans. In a certain sense, the geometry of…well, of Mother Nature, and also of buildings, of great architecture. (via)

“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color.

Update: I looked at the petition this morning to see how big it was already, and I was interested to note a few of the names already down; Hugh Pearman, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Louisa Hutton, Carme Pinós, Alain de Botton were just a few of the more notable names, interestingly they form a diverse set of viewpoints but all call for the saving of Robin Hood Gardens. I noted a few bloggers names down too.

It is what it is: An attractive and diverting repository for a massive load of horseshit. And, well, let’s be realists: That load of horseshit’s not going away anytime soon. Might as put it somewhere that it’s out of everyone else’s way. The Creation Museum manages that well enough. (via whatever)