nickkahler reblogged
Massimo Gasperini, Morphing City, 2014 (via mythofblue)
Every good building is the illustration of a passing conviction. It has a civilizing effect on its environs. To illustrate means to civilize, to use the construction of an imaginarium to explain an unattainable state of completeness. Illustrations help us build a fuzzy story about their subject. 'There it is again,' we hear time after time... So, contrary to popular belief, an illustration is effective if it becomes the multiplication of an object's fiction - its memory-, firing the story towards other scenarios that initially seem inexplicable, like a great archaeological discovery that changes history in an unforeseen way... Then, like Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Tower of Babel, the image gets attached to the text and becomes its shadow: breathing its air, sharing its scale, occupying the same area, flirting with its time for a while. The task of architecture is to achieve that sliver of credibility.
Smiljan Radic, Illustration as Wasteland, c. 2013
Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, "On Ambition," c. 420 CE (via tower)
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms, 1918 (via tower)
nickkahler reblogged
AA Dutto, Late Entry for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow, USSR, 2014 (via thegrid)