A House is a Machine for Living in

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces.

Clare House, Bow, Tower Hamlets, E9

That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.

Marble Hill House, Richmond Road, Twickenham, TW1

But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: “This is beautiful.”

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's Barbican Estate, Barbican, City of London, EC1A

That is Architecture. Art enters in.

Dolls House, Hollytrees Museum, Colchester, Essex, CO1

From Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923)

This Side of Paradise

I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.

Barbara Rich's Angel Wings, Liverpool Road, Islington, N1

Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.

Battersea Park, Battersea, Wandsworth, SW11

I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult.

Colchester War Memorial, Cowdray Crescent, Colchester, Essex, CO1

One thing I know. If living isn’t seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

From F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920)

On Photography

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker…

Sherford, Taunton, Somerset, TA1

…reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno…

Victoria Park, Tower Hamlets, E3

…the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.

West Stockwell Street, Dutch Quarter, Colchester, Essex, CO1

Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy…

The Faraday Effect, Trinity Buoy Wharf, Tower Hamlets, E14

…the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque’.

Shoreditch High Street Station, Wheler Street, Tower Hamlets, E1

From Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977)