Something and nothing

A place means a million things. So feel free, go for it, have fun! The one thing making places should not mean is the kind of misery that a housing or office development has often imposed upon the hapless in the complacent conviction that “something is better than nothing.” That is a truism, an obvious truth disguising an insidious and underhand twist. Nothing is inconceivable. Anything is better than that. It is precisely the architect’s job to prove that it is easy to do a hell of a lot more than something, if something merely builds a hell. Architecture celebrates wealth and should not reduce life to hell on earth, to something merely better than nothing.