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.

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.

The cosmetic is cosmic.

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.

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.

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...

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 businessmen could see the technology, finishing and architecture used.

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.

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...

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

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 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.

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

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

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

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall.The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.

Even a brick wants to be something.A brick wants to be something.It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick… wants to be something more than it is.It wants to be something better than it is.

In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate.

We depend on computers when we ourselves haven’t mastered the principles behind what we are asking computers to design. Glenn Murcutt – A Singular Architectural Practice page 16

Nomadom je postao onda kada je o omjeru ljepote počeo razmišljati kao o ljubavnom odnosu između dvaju dijelova u kojem se suprotnosti privlače upravo magičnom snagom, a isti omjer jednako gospodari i arhitekturom i prirodom.

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.

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.

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.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.

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,...

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...

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