User:Brian Rex ( brex )
From TTU College of Architecture
The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of
finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of
solving it... stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is
inventing... Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never
have happened.
-Henri Bergson
The investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting concepts out of existing sense-data
through direct perceptions. Perception is prior to conception, when it comes to site selection or
definition. One does not impose, but rather exposes the site- be it interior or exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa. The unknown areas of sites can be best explored by artists.
-Robert Smithson
You know, there’s a conceptual artist I met a number of years ago and he asked me, “Why do architects always wait for a client?” and I kind wondered myself...I think maybe we shouldn’t always wait for a client. Maybe part of our work is to construct the client for these kinds of projects.
-Richard Sommer
Through this urban writing (we want to) raise questions about the conceptualization of the city, the rights of its citizens and articulation of time, space, and the everyday.
- Lebas, Elizabeth, Henri Lefebvre and Eleonore Kofman. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996. p.6.
But the real challenge facing studies of publicity now entails finding ways to analyze the temporal flow of structure, action, and agency within multiple, intersecting, and dynamic public networks.
-Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mimi Sheller. “Publics in History.” Theory and Society, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1999. p. 164.
According to J.B. Jackson in Lubbock, TX “...the roads have replaced the buildings as the basic building block of the city.”
-Jackson, J.B. “The Vernacular City.” Places, Vol. 1, No. 1, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1984
Architecture’s mission today is to convert chaos into order, change mechanization from a tyrant to a slave, and thus make place for beauty where there is vulgarity and ugliness. Architecture today cannot concern itself only with that one particular set of structures which happen to stand upright and be hollow “buildings” in the conventional sense. It must concern itself with all man-made elements which form our environments…
-Victor Gruen, “Cityscape and Landscape”
Infrastructure systems, by virtue of their scale, ubiquity, and inability to be hidden, are an essential visual component of urban settlements. Yet, the responsibility for designing this machinery into the landscape is diffused, falling piecemeal to many disciplines- engineering, architecture, landscape architecture, agriculture, planning, and biology.
-Gary Strang, “Infrastructure as Landscape”
Building, in this case, is understood to be the creation of a new economy, between pieces- reconditioning, recircuiting, and consolidating them at points of interface and crossing- to complicate and question the generic templates that we have applied to the landscape.
-Keller Easterling, “Conditioning Infrastructure”
I asked Goldsworthy to define the word “landscape,” and he replied, a bit cryptically: “A landscape does not have to involve land. Time is a landscape.
-Deborah Solomon, NYTimes July 25, 2004
What kinds of spaces or constructions might accommodate, show, facilitate, release, these ungrounded sorts of movement, encounter, connection, for example in urban spaces, and the ways in which we fill them out? What would an architecture of such trajectories and movements look like, and what larger philosophy of the body might it suppose?
-John Rajchman - “Grounds” in Constructions, 1998
The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself. . . . Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life.
-Bickford, Susan. “Constructing Inequality: CIty Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship.” Political Theory, V. 38, No. 3. p. 357.
I developed my way of working after completing my architectural studies, aware that a genuine spirit of change could not be achieved at the request of private economy. So, for five years I have worked to the best of my abilities to produce small breaks in the repressive conditions of space generated by the system. In spite of no longer working as an architect] continue to focus my attention on buildings, for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures. Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with language and others with groups of people: i.e. I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.
-Gordon Matta-Clark
An architectural drawing is an assemblage of spatial and material notations that can be decoded, according to a series of shared conventions, in order to effect a transformation of reality at a distance from the author.
-Stan Allen
The proper aim of art is the telling of beautiful untrue things.
Art does not imitate life, life imitates art.
-Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
Surfaces are where the action is.
-Avrum Stroll