“You can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s a familiar phrase with a fine philosophical pedigree and whose ramifications are continuously being dealt with. The phrase is attributed to Heraclitus, an ancient Greek whose name is sometimes supplemented with the epithets “the Obscure” and “the Weeping Philosopher.” The world is always in flux, ever changing. The water which makes the river – rather than a lake – is by nature always different – so, too, is our lived experience. Heraclitus agreed with his other ancient Greeks that the world was made of basic elements: water, air, earth, and fire – a Captain Planet cosmology, if you will. But for Heraclitus, the really fundamental element was fire because it is so active and alive, changing everything with which it has contact. So, up your lighter, as they say, and feel this fire. And try to hide from that nagging suspicion that the more things change the more they stay the same…

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      The West, meaning Europe, was a really crappy place to live for the millennia-and-a-half (roughly) between the fall of the Romans and the Renaissance, especially when you compare the state of European life during the dark ages to the life elsewhere on the planet.  Architecturally (again roughly), it was all about churches and castles.  Churches and monastic centers meant to solidify and eternalize the dominance of the Christian religion, and served as the infrastructural hardware requisite to homogenize European identity generally in a time of feudal competition between insular communities.    Defensive castles, rarer than churches (though no less important), served to ensure that the rich people didn’t get killed every time a barbarian horde decided to invade. The contemplative and stoical Romanesque, coupled with intellectual, geometry-obsessed Byzantine architecture, piggybacking on religion and utilizing a more or less standard cannon of rules concerning construction and design, provided a stylistic unity for Europe roughly until the dawn of the 2nd millennia.  The Gothic mode intensified the brooding, introspective aspect of European architecture, until the relative opulence of the Renaissance resuscitated a certain levity and exhibitionist confidence in European structures. The idea is that when life sucks it becomes all

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