We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired…Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

We must change life,’ the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of ‘situations’ — defined in 1958 as moments of life ‘concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary...

(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) …project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion.

The cosmetic is cosmic.

Parks, plazas, gardens, and rooftops are culture-producing places, not merely place for retreat. Sidewalks and bridges become ends in themselves instead of just a means of getting from one place to another.

Architecture is shaped by human emotions and desires, and then becomes a setting for further emotions and desires. It goes from the animate and inanimate and back again. For this reason it is always incomplete, or rather is only completed by the lives in and around it. It is background.

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible,...

Les cités idéales étaient une pensée sociale en trois dimensions.

Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents...

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

Martin explains that working with architects in the Arup SoundLab has led to improved collaborations: ‘We can relate to architects much better. If we are brought on board at the ideal time, which is if we are brought on board at concept, we can sit with the architect and say…this is what you have to...

These comments recall Turkle’s distinction between two kinds of “transparency” in technological cultures. Modernist transparency is the notion that users can and should have access to the inner workings of a technology. It evokes the aesthetic of early relationships with cars in which one could “open the hood and see inside.” Turkle contrasts this with...

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

the most important part of design is finding all the issues to be resolved. The rest are details

For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called “kosmos,” that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales…from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds,...

Don’t fight forces, use them.

The starting point for the master bedroom was the architecture. We reorganized the whole space, and we knew that we were going to paint the woodwork in that room pink, which is quite unusual, but if you go back to the 18th century, they actually did that.

There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture.

Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.

Kilstelėjusi akis išvystu artėjant katedrą. Stabteliu su nuostaba, tarytum šį pastatą matyčiau pirmą kartą gyvenime. Juokingi mes – keliaujame tūkstančius kilometrų, kad patirtume kažką stebuklinga: kelias nuvirtusias kolonas, apgriuvusią tvirtovę, išblukusią freską, kurią būtina apžiūrėti, nes apie ją rašo kiekvienas kelionių vadovas. O į tuos stebuklus, kurių kampą kasdien apeiname, net nebepakeliame akių.

I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.

The businessmen could see the technology, finishing and architecture used.

It may well be that what we have hithertounderstood as architecture, and what we arebeginning to understand of technology, areincompatible disciplines. The architect whoproposes to run with technology knows nowthat he will be in fast company, and that inorder to keep up he may have to discard hiswhole cultural load, including the professionalgarments by which...

The need to house the dead was the first impulse of architecture. And so the need to house the dead is a useful way of talking about one’s past life……..in fact the personal details of the age was gathered together and symbolized by the passing of the last Queen Empress.

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.

The word house didn’t begin to do justice for the white and gray structure in front of me. I actually had to tilt my head back to see all the way up to the roof.

I don’t know who you are,” she thought, “but whoever you are, you’re one hell of a player.

We think that Windows 2000 is the right architecture, but it is a complex product that likely will have some level of bugs and refinement that will have to occur after it is initially deployed.

While for critics of sprawl the generic signifies a loss of local identity and connection to place, for Koolhaas it represents an opportunity for reinvention and fantasy free from nostalgia or provincial habit. He admires the generic’s accessibility, impermanence, economy of imagination, and malleable lack of authenticity or moralizing agenda.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at / New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in...

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that’s why they like him.

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist’s pride and the Philistine’s vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

We’re looking mainly at renovating Webster and Main streets while taking advantage of the historic architecture.

What is a staircase, but a corridor improved by elevation?

Why should the entire architecture of agreements in nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, and its cornerstone, the 1972 ABM treaty, be put under threat?

Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture.

There has been no regular architecture since Sir William Chambers – the public taste corrupted by the Adams, I am obliged to comply with it.

It was built when public architecture mattered, … Now, it would be called wasteful spending.

I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are...

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.- All right, then. – Roark got up, he took a long ruler from...

A house can have integrity, just like a person,’ said Roark, ‘and just as seldom.

Di bulan April 1978, di Aiglemont, Gouviuex, Prancis sebuah seminar diadakan oleh Aga Khan untuk membahas arsitektur Islam. Banyak pembicaraan menyesali hilangnya “ciri Islam” dalam kota dan bangunan baru di Timur Tengah kini. Hanya seorang ahli sejarah dari Turki, Dogan Kuban, yang memenangkan debat itu dengan mengingatkan, bahwa “arsitektur adalah sebuah profesi yang berorientasi kepada...

Indeed, “brute force” solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches… and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that,...