#it

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

Architect without Pencil is like Rock-star without Guitar. ↗

— Vinayak Hanchate

#architecture

The dissolution of the nation destroys the national religion, and dethrones the national deity. ↗

— William Robertson Smith

#destroys #dissolution #nation #national #religion

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#architecture

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains. ↗

— Leon Krier

#community #architecture

Honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#architecture #humor #architecture

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him. ↗

— Evelyn Waugh

#architecture

Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation. ↗

— Bill Hillier

#urbanism #architecture

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207) ↗

— Alain de Botton

#engineering #literature #simplicity #words #writing

I see her body as an arousing work of architecture. A sky-scraping building that I wouldn’t mind laying over a mountain to inject my whale-sized shank through its front entrance, knocking the doorman out of the way and flooding the lobby once I am finished with her. ↗

— Carlton Mellick III

#satan-burger #architecture