Every act of preservation is inescapably an act of renewal by the light of a later time, a set of decisions both about what we think something was and about what we want it to be and to say about ourselves today.
Architecture requires the displacement of conventions; the history of any discipline is about displacing conventions. … Architecture displaces in order to create what will be. Creation does not repeat what is.
Peter Eisenman, “On Architecture,” 2003
By drawing, you build the buildings again. Measuring — you’re in front of a blank page again.
Alejandro Aravena, “On Social Architecture,” 2016
All decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
To break ground is the first architectural act.
Peter Waldman, “On Architecture,” c. 2010
If people accuse us of creating nonsense, let's take it up as a positive word because it gives us freedom to think, freedom to act and freedom to make without all of the responsibilities of problem solving. So let's say: 'Yes, we make nonsense!' and let's say to the engineers: 'Yes, you make sense!' and see if we can connect.
Thomas Widdershoven, Interview with Marcus Fairs, 2014
nickkahler reblogged
Arguably, the act of memory is an act of fiction.
David Mitchell, "On Memory," c. 2010 (via theparisreview)
nickkahler reblogged
Gentrification is violence. Couched in white supremacy, it is a systemic, intentional process of uprooting communities… [Its] central act of violence is one of erasure.... In an appallingly overwritten New York magazine article with the (I guess) provocative title “Is Gentrification All Bad?,” Justin Davidson imagines a first wave of gentrifiers much the way I’ve heard it described again and again: “A trickle of impecunious artists hungry for space and light.” This is the standard, “first it was the artists” narrative of gentrification, albeit a little spruced up, and the unspoken but the understood word here is “white.” Because, really, there have always been artists in the hood. They aren’t necessarily recognized by the academy or using trust funds supplementing coffee shop tips to fund their artistic careers, but they are still, in fact, artists. The presumptive, unspoken “white” in the first round of artists gentrification narrative is itself an erasure of these artists of color.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges, "On Literature," c. 1960 (via quote)
Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
Mao Zedong, "On Revolution," 1927
Architecture arrives when our thoughts about it acquire the real condition that only materials can provide. It is in accepting and bargaining with the limitations and restrictions conveyed by the act of construction that architecture becomes what it really is.
Rafael Moneo, "On the Museum for Roman Artifacts," Merida, Spain, 1984
The history of modernism is full of strategies of refusal and acts of negation.
Raphael Rubinstein, "Provisional Painting," 2013
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art … All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s … mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, c. 1980
Is an idea, or an act, to be subservient to the non-existent past? ... The artist who has his foot in a history book and an eye on himself can move but not directly.
Robert Rauschenberg in Laura Hoptman, "Going to Pieces in the 21st Century" from Unmonumental, 2007
nickkahler reblogged
- Open the Imaginary
- Operate in Illusion
- Dislodge the Immobile
- Think Continuity
- Surf on the Surface
- Live in Obliqueness
- Destabilize
- Use the Fall
- Fracture
- Practice Inversion
- Orchestrate Conflict
- Limit Without Closing
Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter.
John G. Burnett, "On the Trail of Tears," c. 1838