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Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today QUOTES

Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today QUOTES

1 " Why didn’t I become an architect? Answer: Because I thought the sheets of paper on which I was to pour my dreams were blank. But after twenty-five years of writing, I have come to understand that those pages are never blank. (Orhan Pamuk) "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today

2 " It may fairly be urged that most writing about the history and theory of architecture should be as modest in language and recessive in tone as the writing about its science. You can after all draw effective attention to something special or beautiful without making a song and dance about it. Nor should you try to edge it out of the picture you are drawing. But if Adrian’s notion is true, and buildings and words are complementary, there must be occasions when the writing rises to meet the architecture and does not stand too abjectly in its shadow. The reason why Ruskin and Nairn at their best or, to take two other examples at random, Goethe on Strasbourg Cathedral and Wordsworth on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, are so exciting and moving is because they have the guts to try and respond to, even emulate, what they are talking about. "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today

3 " Now to think of concrete as both natural and artificial demands a greater degree of mental agility than most of us can manage. So much is invested in the absoluteness of this distinction between natural and artificial , so necessary is it to our whole cosmology, that to admit that something can be both of these would be just too anxious-inducing. To avoid this, we habitually operate on the assumption that concrete is just artificial, or alternatively, just natural, but never both. "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today

4 " Producing the prefect concrete has become a kind of philosopher’s stone of the late 20th century. "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today

5 " Why didn’t I become an architect? Answer: Because I thought the sheets of paper on which I was to pour my dreams were blank. But after twenty-five years of writing, I have come to understand that those pages are never blank. "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today

6 " Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that’s right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design. "

― , Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today