That is a great quote, thanks for the thread, Vado.

"There is no strategy for either an ascendant career, or more importantly, for the way that we design. It is so easy to use the cushion of past thoughts to soften the terrifying free fall of starting a new project. It is inevitable that as we accumulate a longer design history we repeat things unconsciously. Still, perhaps naively, but in earnest, we try to start each project with a blank slate. The design is incremental - small steps that are made in response to the site, the client, the builder, and our own intuition. We try to fight through what we have learned, toward the freedom found in innocence. The design is a slow and often uneven accumulation of stitches, that are often ripped out part way through while we struggle to make clear, or to understand what the pattern and organization might be, even as we avoid as much as possible knowing what the final image might be."

tod williams + billie tsien, "slowness" in 2G issue n.9 1999

vado - you rock
yay!

(apologies for the double post, but i figured there would be a wider audience on this thread and rilke is like a hot cup of chamomile on a cold rainy night)

"i tell you i have a long way to go before i am - where one begins...
you are so young, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you b/c you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner!"

rainer maria rilke
from his letters on love in 'On Love and Other Difficulties'

Everyday people are not very good designers.
Donald Norman

here is a 3rd quote, to follow the 2 posted by holz.box and soleil, about questions and answers. i should mention that the kind and talented teacher soleil is responsible for directing my attention to the book wherein this quote was discovered. thanks, by the way...

"Young people go to university with the aim of becoming architects, of finding out if they have got what it takes. What is the first thing we should teach them?

First of all, we must explain that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answers s/he already knows. Practicing architecture is asking oneself questions, finding one's own answers with the help of the teacher, whittling down, finding solutions.

Over and over again."

-Peter Zumthor
from the book [u]Thinking Architecture[/i] (2nd expanded edition)
in a chapter entitled Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture

awww, shucks :)

"Architecture is invention. It must offer pleasure as well as practicality. If you only worry about function, the result stinks. Many of my buildings have been political and civic monuments, but perhaps some of them have given ordinary people, powerless people, a sense of delight. This is what architects can do. Nothing more."
Oscar Niemeyer

"My advice to any young architect [beginning their career], is to start the way you intend to finish"

- Glenn Murcutt (2001 GMMC, Newcastle)

atp-
like a grinning idiot, who has yet to realize how little they know?!?

oh wait, that's how i started.

"The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal."

--Michel Foucault, Heterotopias

To those who do not properly understand us, we say with utter contempt: The Situationists, of whom you perhaps believe yourselves to be the judges, will one day judge you.

-- Internationale Situationniste

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." — Tom Stoppard

Quite a lot for an architecture student to think about there...

"To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be." Le Corbusier

'what does a brick want to be?' - kahn

'kill the brick' -per correll

not to be a hater, but that stoppard quote is ridiculous, and not even true.

I've posted this one in another thread, but it's one of my personal favorites.

Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.


Mies

Every beautiful piece of architecture has survived its original appearance, purpose, and function, and many have served many functions successively. The right of an architectural work to last – and finally, its right to be – lies only in its beauty and not in its function. For it assumes a new function – beauty. Beauty is the most resistant structure and the most resistant material. – Gio Ponti

…we loved [Rossi’s] dry dictum “architecture is architecture” because it seems to be so provocatively simple-minded and pinpoints something that is still vital to us today: architecture can only survive as architecture in its physical and central diversity and not as a vehicle for an ideology of some kind. It is the materiality of architecture that paradoxically conveys thoughts and ideas. In other words, its immateriality…it is more relevant today than every before: architecture lives and survives because of its beauty, because it seduces, animates, and even inspires people, because it is matter and because it can – if only sometimes – transcend matter. – Jacques Herzog, Pritzker speech

In the city, there are no simple objects; one could say there are no objects at all. There are elements, which only acquire meaning through their combination with other elements in a larger whole, itself implied in the depths of the element. – Jean Renaudie, 1969, quoted from book A Right to Difference by Irenee Scalbert

can I maybe pay you NEXT Friday...I am wating for a few checks to clear and...

-a former boss

When I'm lazy, I'm lazier than this tree...When I'm busy, these bees are not busier than me...

"Architecture of silence must be pure. Within pure forms there must be a multiplicity of meanings...silent spaces are not seen with the eye, they are felt with the heart." Takefumi Aida

and to add that...

"To restore silence is the role of objects." Samuel Beckett...

"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul"

Ernest Dimnet

“no ideas but in things.”

-William Carlos Williams