quotations

 

list of collected quotations... continuing

 

<For fifteen years now I have felt that architecture is becoming more and more extravagent. That's incredibly embarrassing, and I don't really want to be a part of it. Hence this strategy of generic architecture. We want to dilerately make architecture more boring. Another strategy is preservation. Working of things that already exist and preventing them from being forgotten. In this way we try to avoid ending up in this cycle where you are expected to make one extravagant statement after another, try to buck the trend, and generate other possibilities.>  

-The Topsy-Turvy as Utopian Architecture / Rem Koolhaas and Pascal Gielen discuss Constant Nieuwenhugs
 

 

<...the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years.>

-The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

 

 

<...and sometimes his gifts were old beat up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.>

-The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

 

 

<Perhaps the most radical challenge to the idea of house-as-property was the 1924 Co-op Zimmer (Hannes Meyer) designed for a nomadic worker and reduced to one signel room containing only the essentials. Such a decision implies that, apart for the minumum spcae for self-seclusion, the rest of the space -the building and city- are considered as things to be shared with others. The lack of propety realises the possibility of happiness. It reveals what could be seen as an architecture of use against the architecture of property. While the latter is the reflection of teh identity of the owner, Meyer's room is radically generic and anonymous. Precisely for thsi reason, it promises its inhabitant the possibility of a life liberated.>

-A Room Against Ownership, Pier Vittorio Aureli essay in Real Estates

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<The late twentieth century rushed bleary-eyed after ever-bigger things, but little by little by the end of the millennium people began to notice that grand schemes and big biuldings didn't make them any happier... Smaller just seemed more interesting especially if it meant using materials close at hand, which people could put together for themselves. As a rule of thumb this means looking for things of dimensions that can be handled by an individual.>

-Small Architecture, Kengo Kuma

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<New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with a feeling of being lost. Lost, no only in the city, but within himself as well. Each tiem he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized taht he had no intention of ever leaving it again.>

-City of Glass / New York Trilogy, Paul Auster