Allure of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent Designing and Appreciating Architecture as Nature

'Readers of this book will be introduced to a rather rare sort of intellectual honesty together with an author's concern for the concrete reality of architectural works. Rumiko Handa exposes and then overcomes the current tendency to view the building that exists in fact as equivalent to the one that exists in the mind: all-of-a-piece, flawless, and lasting. Examples from both Western and Asian architecture are adduced to provide persuasive revisions of concepts of authorship, longevity, and the building's participation in the natural world. Offering a new sense of architecture's endings, this book allows us to imagine new beginnings.' - David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania