Now the cars take you back and forth from home to office, office to home. You can listen to the news; talk into your mobile if you’ve hit the big time and the chauffeur’s driving. Stare out of the window at the postmodern blocks whose skins of reflective material might give you back a brief image of yourself inside your motor, only for an instant though, before the lights change color and you accelerate away again. Leaving the topography behind you.
— Alan Wall, [Grub Street], London: City of Disappearances, ed. Iain Sinclair
The simple truth that the heart is greater, worthier, nobler, finer than the head: that the heart is the sanctuary of the Temple of Man, the head its portal. That from the heart comes forth Sympathy into the open: the subtlest, the tenderest, the most human of emotions; and that of Sympathy is born that child of delight which illuminates our pathway, and which we call imagination...The world is filled with Knowledge; it is almost empty of Understanding. For let me tell you, Knowledge is of the head, Understanding of the heart. Knowledge is of the intellect, Understanding is of instinct.
—Louis Henri Sullivan
Memory is an effort to ‘re-open’ the past, including the tenses of relations to other events past and future to which it stood at that time. The time in which we live is essentially subjective. Past and future are defined against the present of and presence to a subjective body. When laid out as ‘before’ and ‘after’, time loses it’s subjectivity, but for us to understand events we need to unlock the events in such a way that we resituate ourselves as the present in relation to other events – “I know that I was in Corsica before the war, because I know that the war was on the horizon of my trip there”… Time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
A truly sustainable product can only be created if there is a sustainable process in place that is not only respectful of the traditionally given social, economic and environmental parameters, but also the spatial, cultural and technological. These collective issues, addressed through interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and lateral problem-solving by a diverse range of sector and discipline specialists that come together for every project, form the foundations to a more evidence-based approach to sustainable design. This inevitably helps create a more coordinate, holistic, and ultimately sustainable built environment, that not only addresses the environmental appropriateness of the design in the natural or manmade landscape, but also the cultural and socioeconomic intricacies of human intervention - enabling space to be turned into place.
—Jason Pomeroy, Idea House
Tomorrowwe shall have to think up signs,sketch a landscape, fabricate a planon the double pageof day and paper.Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,once more,the reality of this world.
— Octavio Paz, January First (Translated by Elizabeth Bishop)
The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.
— THE HISTORY BOYS
