Materials are so essential to our physical experience of a place that to disregard them—to ignore the coldness of steel, the dumb strength of concrete, the sympathy of wood, whose temperature never startles—is to throw away a great deal of architecture’s expressive power. Is the nature of that power linguistic? Certainly my shingles signified specific things to my mind (“New England,” for example), but they also addressed my senses more directly, with their aroma, their delicateness, with the impression they gave my hands of wanting to be layered and woven for strength. It seemed to me you
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