Bigness idea

• • • • • • • • • • • • Architecture, throughout history, has been weighed by a ‘contextual’ magnitude and standardized ‘dimensions’ of length, breadth, depth, or height. The measure of architecture, back then, initialized from the floor and ended at the ceiling, surrounded by the four walls. But, then and now, architectural movements put in new ideas that imbibed enough curiosity to cut across these walls. These are the few significant times when ‘contextuality’, ‘scale’, and ‘space’ were not just dealt with as perceivable terminologies but stood for something more than what met the eye. In recent times, the renowned Dutch architect S, M, L, XL. The idea of ‘Bigness’, which dwells in its pages doesn’t preach to radically “redefine” the scale and measure of architecture, but rather “define it rightly”. Midway through the interview ‘Thinking big’ (by John Rajchman), one is ascertained that S, M, L, XL aren’t chronological and aren’t organized by defined typologies or clustered into public and private projects. Instead, they ascend across various scales and sizes. And going up this ladder, we are introduced to the right idea of ‘Bigness’. ‘Bigness’ is not about the dimensions but rather the ‘parameters’ that the given Architecture stands for. The idea is to make Architecture stand for something ‘bigger than what the built form’s façade and interior speak of, and everything ‘beyond’ – which one might not be able to see, but can always perceive. A large number of works in prac...

Back when the world seemed bright and ambitious—another century, it might have been—I managed to convince myself, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that what I really needed in my life was an assistant. This was December, the month when traditionally I can no longer outrun the clerical tasks that have stalked me since the middle of the year. I had weeks of crinkled receipts to expense: the year-end tax on negligence. I was halfway through the process of contesting the charge on a vaccine shot that my insurance company had refused to cover, and I had to transcribe hours of interviews before I could begin to write—the only use of my time which generates an income. As a moonless night wore on, filled with snacking and monsters, I futzed with the formulas in my sad expense spreadsheets and knew that these were hours of life I’d never get back. In the matter of assistant-having, I was not (as Titian might have said of Venus) without models. My introduction came the first time I answered a peer’s e-mail and realized with a start that we were not alone. “Julianne can help us find a time,” my correspondent wrote. Who? But here was this unknown person in the CC field, suddenly at my side like an attendant bearing Q-tips in a German men’s room. I felt betrayed and then, immediately, envious. Tuesday or Wednesday? Why didn’t I have one of these e-mail lurkers? I reflected for a moment and remembered that I couldn’t afford one. This made me doubly a loser. People usually get ...

Louis Brandeis, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court exactly 100 years ago, was America’s greatest critic of bigness since Thomas Jefferson. Denouncing big banks as well as big government as symptoms of what he called a “curse of bigness,” Brandeis was determined to diminish concentrated financial and federal power, which he viewed as a menace to liberty and democracy. He is also the Jeffersonian prophet who has been most consistently vindicated. The “people’s lawyer,” who predicted the stock-market crash of 1929, was a ferocious critic of economic and political consolidation in an earlier age of “too big to fail.” More than any other Supreme Court justice, he shows the importance of translating values of privacy and free speech in an age of technological change. So why hasn’t Brandeis been invoked more frequently in the U.S. presidential election? Candidates from Sanders and Clinton to Ted Cruz have criticized big banks. Citizens on both sides of the aisle, from Tea Party conservatives to Feel the Bern progressives, have questioned the idea of “too big to fail.” Brandeis would seem to be a natural icon for this moment in American politics, yet politicians today rarely draw on his legacy. Part of the reason may be that Americans live in a Hamiltonian world—and not only thanks to the hit musical. Liberals and conservatives today attack either big business, like Sanders and Clinton, or big government, like Cruz, but not both. By contrast, Brandeis was the leader of a Jeffe...

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