I count three kinds of human settlement. There is the camp. A temporary bulwark against the elements. All it takes is a firepit and people huddled around it. Assembled and reassembled as the community moves. Hunter-gatherers on the move, pastoralists and their goats and their sheep, German tourists in their FKK camps on the Adriatic. […]
My hometown of Tolmin has fewer than 4,000 citizens. Lausanne, in Switzerland, has 140,000 (and shops that close earlier than in Tolmin). In both towns, people live in large single houses or small apartment blocks. This is the way people live throughout the Alps. You could take a paysan from Pully, plop them in Ptuj, […]
In 1999 we went on a school trip and I saw architectural models by Jože Plečnik. Some of them were never built, only dreamt. Here was fantasy made wood, and sometimes stone and glass and steel. I was seventeen and I wanted very much to be an architect. Father got wind of this. Not surprising, […]