Reviews and Comments

One time, on a long road trip with my brother through the middle-of-nowhere-California, we got to talking about some really deep stuff. I remember portions of that conversation vividly, because it was the first time I realized, or admitted, that I did not really know how to love. Not just someone. Anyone, really.

This has followed me around my whole life, so I suppose I was attracted to the title of this book, because someone was finally going to tell me how it worked.

Spoiler alert: it's not a guide. It's not a self-help book. But it's encouraging in the way you read any story where you see a version of yourself in the hero. We are very different people, with dissimilar personal histories, this author and I, but we share commonalies: a pragmatic, almost scientific take on the nature and the progression of love and a rejection of empty platitudes; a desire to understand how institutions around love formed for economic or political gain; a suspicion that the love stories we tell ourselves and to each other are convenient lies. If there's an audience for this book, it's because most of us need to be reminded there's no such thing as the one true path for falling in love, and whether you've dated a million people or zero, no one really knows what they're doing. We just like pretending that we do.

I'll come back and put down more thoughts as I have them, but this book contains great examples of two tenets about innovations in general:

1. There are no truly original ideas, or as Kirby Ferguson puts it, "Everything is a Remix" - no innovation occurs in a vacuum. All innovation builds on what came before. (cross reference the notion of the "adjacent possible" - or Stamen's slogan, "the next most obvious thing") In particular this book makes the point that some of these adjacent possible things are not an obviously predictable effect of the cause, yet when you look back in history, the connection is undeniable. (e.g. the printing press created literacy which created the need for glasses which created innovation in lens making which led to the creation of microscopes and telescopes.)

2. And following from the last point, once something is "possible," it is rare for one lone genius to come up with the next thing. Usually, at that point in history, there will be many people who independently come up with the same innovation. This is one way to show that cause and effect, because the sudden proliferation of the same innovation could not have occurred with the earlier thing existing.

TODO: (SPOILERS)
List all the interesting connections that are talked about in this book

The book starts rough — there are odd turns of phrase, derivative constructions throughout (one early chapter all but started by quoting from a dictionary definition of a word), and enough metaphorical explanations using abstract generalizations that sound just plausible enough to be true (like the distinction between kings and sorcerers, or the description of everyone’s favorite bartender). There’s just enough there to make me question whether the author had enough editing and fact-checking at his disposal during the writing of the book, but some of the stuff he says are thoughts similar to my own:

At any rate, there were no jobs for “architect” as I understood that term. It occurred to me that over the last generation, while a bunch of smart people anguished over the distinction between “architect” and “designer” and “intern architect” or “interior architect,” someone stole our damn name.

Once we’re past the first third of the book, Cesal really finds his rhythm talking about the different sorts of architecture that could (but doesn’t) exist. The writing starts to pick up dramatically, becoming a much more concisely argued premise. Cesal’s voice is an important one in post-post-modern architecture, but having been through it some part of my career, I remain jaded that any change will come from within the practice itself. If architecture changes, it won’t happen internally and it will only be slightly affected by outside pressures, like the economy; it would take an entire army of very smart, former architects, who have left the industry and re-entered it for the singular goal of disrupting the old guard into extinction.