“Nature is hard to overcome,” we read in Walden, of all places, “but she must be overcome.” This, according to Le Corbusier, is architecture’s first principle and purpose: to defy time and decay. That, and to wrest a space from nature to house all those things we value—books, conversation, marriage—that nature has no place or use for. A good foundation, these three and a half feet of concrete interposed between me and the damp, hungry ground, is how we start.
