All Sealed Up And No Place To Go – But It Wasn’t Always That Way

“Contemporary architecture has erected innumerable barriers between inside and outside, building and nature. It’s there and we’re here, and that’s that. It wasn’t always so. Access to light and air were starting points and first principles of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, rights instead of accidents. Until air conditioning and tinted glass made them seem passe, sunscreens, deep windows and natural ventilation were standard features, as though architecture itself were a living, breathing thing.”