Arata Isozaki's City in the Air

A post on Archdaily describes the theoretical urban design work of Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 2019. This design called for large support and service columns to support developments in the air, spreading in all directions at a height of 30 meters and above.

While this design recalls, in my mind, the work of Le Corbusier, the way in which Isozaki writes about this plan is very much rooted in an appreciation of ruins and building cycles, and is influenced by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II:

"Future cities are themselves ruins. Our contemporary cities...are destined to live only a fleeting moment. Give up their energy and return to inert material. All of our proposals will be buried. And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted. That will be our Future."

He contrasted the ruins of his childhood with those of ancient Greece and Rome; while those ruins were formed over centuries, his environs were destroyed in a moment of obliteration. 

Shadow Makers

Stephen Kite's 2017 book, Shadow Makers: A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture, aims to show the important role that shadows play in architecture. He traces the role of shadows in primitive shelters, looks at the way Gothic architects used darkness to bring out emotional responses to architecture, how reveals, cornices and texture can make a facade more interesting, and of course gives a lot of attention to the 20th century master of shadows, Louis Kahn.
In his chapter about Gothic architecture, Kite includes a section about Ruinenlust (p.130-136). He describes how Tintern Abbey was at the time "one of the most iconic monastic ruins in the world." Tourists would travel by boat down the River Severn, where the picturesque landscapes were highlights by ruins. Once the sun set, the voyagers would enter the ruins to experience sublime terror by moonlight or torchlight. This aesthetic influenced Gothic literature as well. Kite quotes Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: 

"An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with new terror." 

Internal View of Tintern Abbey, in South Wales, 1801-5