I was revis­it­ing this excel­lent intro­duc­tion to archi­tec­ture today to com­pare it with F.L. Wright’s essays . One of my favorite things about archi­tec­ture is how it mar­ries math­e­mat­ics and logic with art and human­ity. But it wasn’t always this way. Bot­ton writes:

“The prin­ci­ples of engi­neer­ing may have bru­tally con­tra­dicted those of archi­tec­ture, but a vocal minor­ity of nineteenth-century archi­tects nev­er­the­less per­ceived that the engi­neers were capa­ble of pro­vid­ing them with a crit­i­cal key to their sal­va­tion — for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was cer­tainty. The engi­neers had landed on an appar­ently impreg­nable method of eval­u­at­ing the wis­dom of a design: they felt con­fi­dently able to declare that a struc­ture was cor­rect and hon­est in so far as it per­formed its mechan­i­cal func­tions effi­ciently; and false and immoral in so far as it was bur­dened with non-supporting pil­lars, dec­o­ra­tive stat­ues, fres­cos or carvings.”

–Alain de Bot­ton, The Archi­tec­ture of Happiness

This idea of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion by reduc­ing beauty and util­ity into the same struc­tures is fas­ci­nat­ing to me. In my last post I quoted Wright speak­ing about “use­ful things” and I think this is what he was talk­ing about.

I often times find myself con­sid­er­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ties between archi­tec­ture and web design. Both medi­ums are inter­ac­tive, per­me­able, and require the mar­riage of style and func­tion. I won­der who I am, the archi­tect or the engi­neer? The graphic artist or the devel­oper? Great design­ers are both.