Tuesday, August 20, 2019

the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built

“Imagine... a Yestermorrow architecture, imaginative enough and large enough to enclose everything in a single structure... that lures, calls, leads, and pulls you from one area to the next.
...Imagine... an art gallery enclosing a museum, enclosing a library, enclosing a university, enclosing a theater. Five concepts, five environments, five ways of seeing life. Each circling, each rounding the other.
...Why a theater at our architectural core? Well, isn't life one drama topping another? Isn't everything theater? 
...Try to imagine any human activity that does not finally shape itself into vivid metaphors spoken, acted, taught. 
...stepping through from circle to circle, what would we find?
...An architecture, in sum, it seems to me, as marvelous as those rounded self-encircling nautilus shells found along the shores of our seas. Easy to build? In the mind, yes. With glass, brick, stone, and mortar? Difficult. And expensive. 
...What a pomegranate experience. What an incredible womb... Will it be built between now and the century's end? ....can it be the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built to warm our minds? I say it can be done. I wish it to be so.”
– Ray Bradbury, excerpts from "Yestermorrow Place" [1988] 
in Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures, Capra Press 1991, p 77-80.