It takes two people to make you, one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930
At each level of scale, it is those actually using the space who understand best how it can be made/altered to have the character of being conducive to the work, and this group should be given sole control over that space both in the physical definition of the territory and by giving the group power over placement of furniture, purchase of needed items, decorations, etc. Thus an individual has control over his/her workspace; the workgroup has control over the group working area but not over the individual workspaces; the department has control over its space but not over the workgroup spaces, and so on.
Therefore, we suggest using materials and structural systems which invite change and allow changes to accumulate, gradually fine-tuning some areas very closely to the real human needs that exist there.
Christopher Alexander, “Office Patterns,” c. 1980
The democratization of taste, abetted by the Web, coincides with the democratization of creativity. The makers have the means to sell, but everybody has the means to make. And everybody’s using them. Everybody seems to fancy himself a writer, a musician, a visual artist. Apple figured this out a long time ago: that the best way to sell us its expensive tools is to convince us that we all have something unique and urgent to express. “Producerism,” we can call this, by analogy with consumerism. What we’re now persuaded to consume, most conspicuously, are the means to create.
What we need is a shot of true beauty, and maybe a bit of nonsense.
Making a drawing on a piece of paper is changing the world.
The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything that is already finished, already made, or already existent in the world – it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by the way of the people.
El Lissitzky, "On Art and Symbols," c. 1920
A small interior world of color and form now came within grasp of small fingers.
Frank Lloyd Wright in Thomas de Monchaux, Learning From Legos, 1943 / 2014
After a hiatus of perhaps as long as forty years, sculpture is again leading the contemporary art discourse. Not all sculpture, but a particular kind that isn't cast, carved or molded, but rather built, sewn, glued or tied together. It often has many components, some of which are found, some of which are made and some of which are detritus.
Laura Hoptman, "Going to Pieces in the 21st Century" from Unmonumental, 2007
This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text.
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, c. 1974 (via mythofblue)