by Alexander Freeling. There’s an ancient story about three entrepreneurial lads who come into possession of a cloak one evening and decide to sell it at the market. Perhaps they came into possess...
by Alexander Freeling. What does it mean to be perfectly proportioned? Is it possible? The biologist JBS Haldane wrote about species “being the right size.” What he meant was that in nature, the ...
by Alexander Freeling. The machines do not work as intended. They are always on the border of total breakdown, held together more by ingenuity than mechanical integrity. “As time goes by, one beg...
by Alexander Freeling. Who needs a uniform? What does it mean to adopt one? And what connects people who dress the same? These questions were on the minds of entrants to the Swedish Royal Patrio...
by Alexander Freeling. Taste is complicated. In different contexts, it’s a physical sense or a social grace, something you feel immediately and certainly, or something you learn bit by bit over y...
by Alexander Freeling. Any job done well is a pleasure, but sporting achievement distills that pleasure into a kind of beauty. What looks like work to the rest of us is closer to inventive play ...
by Alexander Freeling. I speak today of a secret vice. Rarely admitted, but relentlessly practiced. “The sin that everybody commits.”* No, not that one. A distinctly modern sin, made for (and per...
by Alexander Freeling. How do buildings resist gravity? Or, for that matter, strong winds, weathering, tectonic shudders, and the seasonal heat and ice? The modern answer has two parts: a scienc...