Book of quotations

Book of Quotations

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours”

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller

“To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to “bricolage”: “Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’” (p. 17). The French verb, “bricoler,” has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The “bricoleur” performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from “odds and ends.” He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society.”

- Janine Mileaf on Levi-Strauss, “Science of the Concrete”

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks”.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

“..art lies somewhere between magic and science because it balances structure and event. This discussion, however, seems particularly based on assumptions, such as “to understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts” (p. 23) and is therefore difficult to pin down. He identified three modes of art, each of which emphasizes a different mode of communication: Western art stresses the model, “primitive” art stresses the materials, and applied art stresses the user.

The translation of an object into art or representation requires a quantitative reduction, as in size or number of properties. This simplification makes the thing able to be grasped “at a glance” and thus compensates for the loss. This is the reverse of science, but it is also not myth. The artist produces something that is both real and not the thing itself. Art hovers between mythical and scientific thought, and between the practical and the theoretical.”

- Janine Mileaf on Levi-Strauss, “Science of the Concrete” “A city has to take the long view, the view for the common good.”

– Amanda Burden

“The ideal project does not exist, each time there is the opportunity to realize an approximation.”

- Paulo Mendez da Rocha

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

– Jane Jacobs

“Ornamentation has been, is, and will be polychrome. Nature does not present us with an object in monochrome, totally uniform with respect to colour – not in vegetation, not in geology, not in topography, not in the animal kingdom. Always the contrast of colour is more or less lively, and for this reason we must colour wholly or in part every architectural element.”

– Antoni Gaudí “As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital “S” - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.”

- Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House

“After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders.

On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.

“There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.”

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Less is more.”

- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

“Cities are never random.

No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.”

- Neal Shusterman, Downsiders

“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller’s, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”

- John Updike, Trust Me

“Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.”

- Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“In merging nature and culture the most successful cities combine such universal needs as maintaining or restoring contact with the cycles of nature, with specific, local characteristics.”

- Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Chicago’s Urban Nature

“Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a “dead end”. “Street culture,” as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs.

This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people’s control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth.”

- Haki R. Madhubuti

“You can never learn less, you can only learn more.”

- R. Buckminster Fuller