BLIND EMPATHY?

The Queensland government has been the first government in Australia to ban the phrase:

'From the river to the sea’ is being outlawed in Queensland. How will the slogan’s ban work, and will it be challenged? – see: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/05/queensland-pro-palestinian-phrase-ban-river-to-sea-laws-ntwnfb?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other 

One might wonder why the clumsy name of this bill - Fighting Antisemitism and Keeping Guns Out of the Hands of Terrorists and Criminals Amendment Bill 2026 - might not have alerted the politicians to its inherent unfortunate awkwardness both in its expression and implementation. Were all participants involved in passing this law blinded by their enthusiasm to be seen to do something to stop the madness of extremists, a strategy that only appears to stimulate ever more crazy extremes that bring the banned statement to the attention of a greater public?

When first heard - or was it read? - the ‘From the river to the sea’ phrase meant nothing unusual.  One originally thought that it might be a community fun run, for such events do have similar titles:

City to Bay, in Adelaide

Bridge to Brisbane, in Brisbane;

Jetty to Jetty, at Clontarf, Queensland;

City to Surf, in Sydney;

Beach to Beach, in Sydney;

Sutherland to Surf, in Sydney;

Pub to Pub, in Lancefield, Victoria;

(see runguides.com).

Why not River to Sea?

Now, with the passing of this bill, one lives under the threat of being challenged, if not incarcerated, by being heard to utter the phrase that could naively suggest fun times, if someone interprets the words as being offensive. It seems that dealing with the extremities of antisocial tactics keeps everyone on edge, literally and metaphorically. Making new laws is one way to manage these matters, to try to change actions; the other more subtle approach is for societies to memorialize these awful times, to preserve the memory of the horror for recognition, respect, and deterrence.

Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum, Lithuania.

designboom.com has recently published details of a new Jewish museum in Lithuania.

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/lithuanias-lost-shtetl-jewish-museum-takes-shape-as-a-gleaming-clustered-village/. The text explains:

The museum has been realized in honor of a village and its Jewish community that vanished in August 1941. It draws its meaning from the execution of 664 residents in nearby forests and from the disappearance of a culture that had shaped the town for generations.

The project has been conceived as a memorial park. . . . where the architects have assembled a cluster of abstract houses with hip roofs. Each volume approximates the scale of a single family dwelling. Together they form a compact settlement that suggests a village, or ‘shtetl’.

The horrors of these terrible acts are on display for all to see, remember, and learn from in this interesting project.

Palestine Museum, Edinbrurgh.

Map of Palestine showing lost villages, PME.

It was on the visit to Edinburgh’s Palestinian Museum - PME, (see: https://www.paih.org/europes-first-and-only-palestinian-museum-opens-in-edinburgh), that one was first confronted with a large map of Palestine placed on the floor that illustrated the villages that have vanished; more than 600 were identified. The symbolism of trampling over this country was not missed as one respectfully attempted not to step on the graphic presentation. When seeking out this map online on a later occasion, one discovered some differences in the number of villages that were destroyed, with figures of 400, 540, and the like, with the AI summary safely suggesting that the figure was ‘400 to 600.’ One map in Wikipedia came with an itemised schedule of ‘around 400’ named villages, so one could conservatively say that at least 400 villages were razed, along with the disappearance of a culture – see:

A very IMPORTANT MAP showing the massive destruction of Palestinian villages and cities (English) - Palestine Remembered

https://share.google/e5T0KFQVNiwYMphxQ

Comprehensive Map of Depopulated Palestinian Villages from al-Nakba : r/MapPorn

https://share.google/0poTJKb7Z5aMc4UL0

Muslim Players. - Historical map of Palestine before 1948

https://share.google/iqMbqMsy30NypPN8D

A map of Palestine from 1926, published in Germany. The orange spots are Jewish settlements. : r/MapPorn

https://share.google/TBzESshTF0mTHQxvk.

List of towns and villages depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war

There seems to be a great discrepancy in the remembrance of loss. One Lithuanian village generates a new museum; 400 villages get forgotten, with very few special museums being built to record and remember these clearances. International remembrance seems to concentrate of other events, with the proliferation of Jewish museums and laws that place a ban on speech that would remind the world of these terrible times in Palestine. Might any reference to the number 400 soon be banned?

Traditional Palestinian dress - PME.

PME.

Palestinian child's drawing - PME.

Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin.

One does have to wonder why atrocities experienced by one group are remembered in numerous major museums across the world - lest we forget - while this group perpetuates similar horrors on others, with the world only wanting to legislate against honest protest about this situation which is labelled 'hate speech,’ as though one has to 'love' the horror exposed by all the museums that is now being repeated. It is a position enforced by laws identifying such action as antisemitism, etc., when a reasonable person might see things differently, otherwise, and understand why ‘the river to the sea’ can be a meaningful, heartfelt cry, a lament remembering horrid, shocking suffering and loss that lingers as a yearning for home – see: Peter Read, Returning to nothing: the meaning of lost places, Cambridge University press, 1996.

Palestinian child's drawing - PME.

Traditional Palestinian dress - PME.

PME.

When the world can recognise the terrible trauma of one village, why can it not see the same horrors in the loss of at least 400, and the awful events that continue today? Surely we build museums to remind us never to repeat these atrocities, not to act as text books to help train others to accomplish future similar events – lest we forget how best to achieve these shocking outcomes? Will we ever learn?

Palestinian child's drawings - PME.

PME.

PME.

P.S.

One of the most subtly powerful, poignant statements on this matter comes in the form of a beautiful CD compilation with title: Lullabies From the Axis of Evil: see - https://open.spotify.com/album/2frqkUilqtnBGqINQmyrLQ and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lullabies_from_the_Axis_of_Evil.

Washington Post: "The most thought-provoking musical statement made this election year just might be a CD of heartbreakingly beautiful songs for babies." . . . for everyone to ponder.

Gaza.

BUCKY’S DOME & MEMORY

It is known as the Fly’s Eye Dome. Designed in 1965 by Buckminster Fuller, this over sixty-year-old concept still looks as fresh and ‘high tech’ today as it did in the 1960s. It is an elegant structure that still engages the eye with its clever intrigue, its organic organisation, where a set of standard panels bolt together to form a spherical dome covered with clear lenses – the bubble forms that give it its name.

The AI Overview presents us with the summary:

AI Overview

R. Buckminster Fuller designed the Fly’s Eye Dome in 1965. It was conceived as an "autonomous dwelling machine"—a portable, sustainable home featuring fiberglass panels with circular openings (oculi) designed for solar energy and water collection. While designed in 1965, prototypes were developed later, with production in 1979/80 and 1981. 

Key details regarding the design:

• Purpose: To create affordable, lightweight, and sustainable, self-sufficient housing.

• Structure: Known as a "Monohex" dome, constructed from fiberglass, it was designed to be easily transported and assembled.

• Design Influence: The openings, or "oculi" were designed to look like the lenses of a fly's eye, allowing for light and ventilation.

• Prototypes: Before his death in 1983, Fuller produced three prototypes of varying sizes (12, 24, and 50 feet).

The dome, that has become ‘historic,’ a relic of the past, was recently brought to one’s attention by the news item that reported that one fly’s eye dome had collapsed under the weight of the snow: Iconic Buckminster Fuller Sculpture Collapses Under Heavy Snow - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/snow-smashes-buckminster-fuller-sculpture-2749337. North America has been experiencing some extreme weather:

• Heavy snow has caused the collapse of Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York.

• The structure is one of just five extant versions of the historic structure, which the architect envisioned as a model for low-cost, portable housing. 

• The organization plans to repair or rebuild the structure, and will fundraise to cover the costs.

The historic blizzard that struck the East Coast on Sunday into Monday has claimed at least one art historical victim: a Buckminster Fuller fiberglass structure that collapsed at Long Island’s LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

While the collapse is concerning, being one of just five extant versions of the historic structure, structural failures are always interesting to review as they highlight the weakness in an assembly. Here one can see the line along which the stresses concentrated and failed. It is the transition zone between the base of the sphere and its domed top surface – the plane at the centre of the dome parallel to the ground surface it stands on.

The interesting detail in this image is the extra bracing that has been installed at all of the bolted junctions – twin rods/ties that connect the rims of the circular voids. These read as struts that bridge the link and connect to the oculi, but are probably members that can be in tension or compression depending on the various stresses causing the distortions. One wondered why these props might be there, as they are not in the original design: see – https://designdistrict.com/stories/the-dome-deconstructed. What might Buckminster Fuller have had to say about this addition to his work? Was it the lack of the stiffening that the missing infills might have provided that necessitated these extra pieces?

This failed, strutted dome at the LongHouse Reserve did not have any closures on the ‘eyes,’ leaving one to wonder exactly how the snow might have accumulated on the remaining structure to cause the catastrophic failure. There appeared to be more voids than solid areas to collect the falling snow, so what might the problem have been? The question is: did the extra struts act as snow retainers in the same way that the snow rails on a roof hold the snow mass to act as insulation? Might the structure still be standing if the extra pieces had not been added?

One wondered why this framing had been fitted. Could it have been over-cautious local bylaws that insisted on the added support? Had other domes failed? The AI Overview suggested the answer with the usual pragmatic-sounding, 'matter of fact' certainty that these statements have:

AI Overview

Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome features external bracing to enhance structural integrity, allowing the lightweight, portable structure to withstand high winds, snow loads, and extreme weather. These braces, often part of a re-engineered system, provide necessary rigidity to the fiberglass panels, ensuring durability and stability. 

Key reasons for the external braces include:

• Structural Reinforcement: The dome is a "thin-shell" structure, and external bracing adds essential support to the lightweight fiberglass, crucial for withstanding extreme environmental conditions.

• Hurricane Mitigation: Modern, re-engineered versions of the dome include reinforced, externalized support structures to meet specific, high-velocity wind codes, such as those in South Florida.

• Design Integrity: While the dome relies on its triangular geometry for strength, the external components help maintain the form and structural, load-bearing capacity. 

The Fly's Eye Dome, designed around 1965, was intended as an affordable, portable, and self-sufficient home. The design focuses on "doing more with less"—using minimal materials to create maximum space and strength, which sometimes requires external strengthening to handle real-world loads.

Did this extra bracing prove to be the problem here with the extreme weather? One might never know, as there are many other questions that need answering.

Looking at this dome once more brings to mind the swinging sixties with its enthusiasm for ideas and excitement for theories, interests that seem to have faded today into an intrigue with morphing and mangling to create AI’s bespoke best astonishment with things sloping, twisted, stepped, and skewed. There was a rigour to the sixties that was experimental in one way, but committed, truly seeking something in the ‘other,’ searching for meaning with an integrity of intent. Sullivan’s form follows function might have stimulated this approach, but interest grew into the search for embodied qualities in architecture that came to be seen as involving space. Sigfried Giedion wrote the influential Space, Time and Architecture in 1941, (Harvard University Press), and Bruno Zevi wrote the classic Architecture as Space in 1948, translated and published by Horizon Press, New York in 1957. Meaning was seen to be embodied in this space; this evanescent nothingness of form was seen to be held as ephemeral substance in its surrounding vacancy. Aldo van Eyck took matters a little further, including experience in this intellectual interpretation, noting the change most succinctly in his phrase: place not space - (in the inspiring Team 10 Primer: Alison Smithson, MIT Press, 1974) - embodying the totality of experience, not just the thoughtful appreciation of an abstraction structured as a void. Architectural studies developed this theme, and reached out into archaeology and semiotics, even engaging with tradition in the idea of an architecture without architects, (Architecture Without Architects Bernard Rudofsky, Museum of Modern Art, 1964), suggesting a native, naïve, natural meaningfulness, with design method studies bringing other matters into play with the aim of attending to these interests: but who cares about method today?

Architectural texts were published regularly, raising and addressing theories and concepts – e.g. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Robert Venturi, Museum of Modern Art, 1966; and Body, Memory and Architecture, Bloomer and Moore, Yale University Press, 1977 – in a way that leaves us looking at a great void today, a hollowness, with our publications being more picture books for coffee-table admiration with boastful reviews than experimental, considered hypotheses exploring ideas. Bucky’s dome brings it all to mind once more with its rigour – the desire to involve and be involved in concepts and ideas for their integral resolution and natural wonder, rather than to be entertained with the presentation of expressively different options to ponder, with the only struggle being the task of finding references in shallow explanations for these quirky, bespoke forms inspired remotely by the new mysteries of AI or CAD.

There is meaning in Bucky’s dome, an inner wholeness, a necessity that still stimulates and reverberates with its rigour, all driven by Bucky’s searching mind, his clear rationally reasoned concept with its inherent, functional beauty. Fiddle with this and one gets a collapse. Was there evidence of failure seen at some time that might have prompted the additional pieces? Was it like Wright’s Falling Water balcony that sagged and required clever engineering to stabilise it; or was this a matter of complying with rigid, conservative regulations? Might it simply be climate change, with unexpectedly large quantities of snow being dumped in the new extremes of weather?

Whatever it might have been, the failure has raised memories of the past that leave one wonder about where we are today; where we might be going; and what we have lost. While the structure of form drove Fuller to resolve his pursuits with a natural ease and elegance, today, over sixty years later, we know and care little for this, dealing only with the form of structure, appearances rooted in their AI beginnings that ‘think’ very little about architecture as experienced space or place, by body or memory, or of any complexities and contradictions. The amazement lies in the mysteries and attractions of the morphing, nowhere else; just where meaning might be located and how it could be made manifest is an irrelevance.

THE LIST

Asking AI about books on architectural theory today, we get the usual unequivocal, ‘wise guy’ summary and schedule that includes Bachelard’s 1958 book; Alexander’s 1977 publication; Ching’s 1979 tome; Pallasmaa’s 1996 study; and Zumpthor’s 2006 ponderings, with the latter now being twenty year’s old. It is interesting to note that Venturi’s Complexity study is fifty this year:

AI Overview

Modern architecture theory books focus on sustainability, human-centered design, and the digital, with key titles including A Theory of Architecture by Nikos Salingaros, Adaptable Architecture by Schmidt and Austin, and The Architecture Concept Book by James Tait. These works, alongside classics like Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin, emphasize sensory experience and environmental responsiveness.

Here are top architecture theory books and resources relevant today, divided by focus:

Contemporary Theory & Practice

• A Theory of Architecture

   by Nikos A. Salingaros: Provides a, scientifically-grounded framework for design focusing on human needs, rather than style.

• Adaptable Architecture

   by Robert Schmidt III & Simon Austin: Examines how to design buildings for longevity and sustainability.

• People-Centered Architecture

   by Milton Shinberg: Focuses on designing based on human perception and practical, user-focused research.

• The Architecture Concept Book

   by James Tait: A guide to creative strategies, practices, and design approaches.

• The Pocket Universal Principles of Architecture

   by Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski: A guide to 100 essential concepts, methods, and relationships in design.

• Is Architecture Art?

   by John Macarthur: Explores the intersection of aesthetics, science, and art in contemporary practice. 

Essential Contemporary & Modern Theory

• The Eyes of the Skin

  : Architecture and the Senses by Juhani Pallasmaa: A crucial text on phenomenology and sensory experience in design.

• Thinking Architecture

   by Peter Zumthor: A, personal reflection on the thought process and atmosphere in architecture.

• Elements of Architecture

   by Rem Koolhaas: A, detailed analysis of the fundamental components of buildings.

• Modern Architecture: A Critical History

   by Kenneth Frampton: A definitive,, study of the development of modernism. 

Foundational & Conceptual

• A Pattern Language

   by Christopher W. Alexander: A seminal work on community-driven design and spatial organization.

• The Poetics of Space

   by Gaston Bachelard: A study of how spaces, (like homes) affect human psychology and memory.

• Architecture: Form, Space, & Order

   by Francis D.K. Ching: A fundamental,, visual guide to architectural principles. 

Key Themes in Today's Theory

• Sustainability & Adaptability: Focusing on, energy efficiency, lifecycle, and sustainable materials.

• Human-Centered/Psychological: Understanding how, spaces affect behavior and emotion, with, roots in, phenomenology.

• Digital & Algorithmic: Exploring, how technology is changing, design methods and, spatial perception.

• Context & Urbanism: Analyzing, how buildings fit into, larger, urban, contexts.

•