When we choose an object, we’re actually trying to engage society. That’s what the very radical proposition of experimental preservation is: we deploy objects as a way to raise fundamental questions about what’s important to us.
Jefferson argued that free access to knowledge is fundamental to democratic self-rule
Deborah Natsios + John Young in Nicholas Korody, “The Whistleblower Architects,” 2016
I've always been appalled that abstinence is the one part of the architectural repertoire that is never considered. Perhaps in architecture, a profession that fundamentally is supposed to change things it encounters (usually before reflection), there ought to be an equally important arm of it that is concerned with not doing anything.
Rem Koolhaas, Preservation is Overtaking Us, 2004 / 2014
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930
Suddenly, information – already and always everywhere, as Warhol pointed out – was everywhere. As of the early 1960s, Conceptual artists dug into its systems, its patterns, its brute force. Following Warhol, they were drawn to the raw blankness of information, which they saw as a powerful opponent to the tyranny of 'content': art matters because it is, not because it is about something. Moving beyond the Warholian sphere of celebrity and popular culture, however, these artists shifted toward Wittgensteinian philosophy and considered the fundamental rawness and blankness of language, perception and knowledge, and what it all had to do with art.
Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007
For me, if an exhibition, or the artworks it presents, question the fundamental issues related to our lives, or universal thinking, then this is more important than thinking about the method or type of exhibition.
Mami Kataoka, Interview with Terry Smith, 2015
He had for so long given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that he believed, without ever saying so formally to himself, that this would not change as long as he lived; much worse, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether. Thus he had acquired the habit of taking refuge in unimportant things that allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things.
Light to me is the most profound truth in the universe. ... It permits the same freedom of expression as paint for the painter, numbers for the mathematician, or sound for the composer.
Wynn Bullock, "On Light," c. 1965
For millenniums, architects, artist and craftspeople — a surprisingly sophisticated set of collaborators, none of them conversant with architectural software — created buildings that resonated deeply across a wide spectrum of the population. They drew on myriad styles that had one thing in common: reliance on the physical laws and mathematical principles that undergird the fundamental elegance and practicality of the natural world.
Steven Bingler + Martin C. Pedersen, How to Rebuild Architecture, 2014
In-betweenness is a fundamental condition of our times.
Homi Bhabha, "On In-Betweenness," c. 2000
The fundamental issue of architecture is that does it affect the spirit, or doesn't it? If it doesn't affect the spirit, it’s a building. If it affects the spirit, it’s architecture.
John Hejduk, "On Architecture," c. 1980
Perhaps in architecture, a profession that fundamentally is supposed to change things it encounters (usually before reflection), there ought to be an equally important arm of it that is concerned with not doing anything.
Rem Koolhaas, Preservation is Overtaking Us, 2009 (via garage)
Capitalism ... is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. ... The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. ... The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation ... that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.
If we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial ... all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that the lieux de memoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.
An invaluable spiritual road map . . . As simple and fundamental as life itself.
Robert Rauschenberg vs. Catholic Review, "Collaged Text from Mother of God," 1950