#arc

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#buildings #poetry #architecture

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context." - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994 ↗

— Jonathan Hale

#architecture #building #new-urbanism #architecture

...In Jack Nasar's research on American's taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#architecture

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God "shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth. ↗

— Douglas Wilson

#architecture

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land. ↗

— Leon Krier

#community #architecture

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city ↗

— Janet Frame

#bean #beans #church #city #coffin

Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers. ↗

— Nick Flynn

#boston #description #ethereal #architecture

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962. ↗

— Owen Hatherley

#housing #social #architecture

Light must always win. ↗

— Maurice Smith

#architecture

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis. ↗

— Andrew Vachss

#city-planning #new-york-city #architecture