#architect

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. ↗

— David Graeber

#blueprint #capitalism #centralization #planning #social-change

Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#architecture

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up. ↗

— George Lamming

#future #gone #hardly #only #our

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#anything #architecture #else #every #himself

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it. ↗

— Daniel Libeskind

#articulate #history #meaningful #parody #provide

Every man is the architect of his own life. He builds it just the way he wants it. However, after he has built what he wants, he sometimes decides that he doesn't like what he has built and looks for someone or something to blame instead of changing himself. ↗

— Sydney Madwed

#architect #blame #builds #built #changing

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#class #poverty #society #architecture

I call architecture frozen music. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#call #frozen #i #music

Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great. ↗

— Enid Nemy

#building #corner #could #dead #designed

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house. ↗

— Thomas Reid

#built #house #navigation #never #rules