“Розмір вимагає компетентності. Вона стає мірою успіху за замовчуванням, умовою, що надихає до наслідування. Приклад, навіть тріумф аеропорту Атланти в тому, що він просто найбільший. Як виявилося після закінчення Олімпіади в Атланті, якщо бути найбільшим, то можна й залишатися найбільшим — принаймні деякий час. Ніщо не сприяє успіху так, як сам успіх.”
Source: Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession
“When an American student did happen to dip into the work of a European theorist he tended to react to it as mere "ancient history." Once in a great while he was even willing to admit that it was interesting.”
Source: The City
“To begin again without regret, we must finish what we once left behind.”
“One thing is certain, we all translate our own ideas of happiness into form. It happens when you buy a car. It happens when a CEO contemplates the form of a new skyscraper headquarters, or when a master architect lays out a grand scheme for social housing. It happens when planners, politicians and community boards wrestle over roads, planning regulations and monuments. It is impossible to seperate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it, and to build it for society. The search shapes cities, and cities shape the search in return.”
Source: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
“Urban and untamed, Mexico City possesses a raw vitality; it is a city where the poetic is found in the most unexpected places.”
“Railroad rights-of-way are weird zones that you can find almost anywhere in the American Landscape. Our urban spaces have worked to overwrite them in favor of motor vehicles in the era since World War II; often you can see the traces of tracks from old streetcar lines or intercity routes peeking through the asphalt of a public street. Sometimes the remains persist as actual ruins.”
“The same term, "brown lands," is sometimes used to describe those parts of the modern urban landscape that have fallen to ruin, at least in the eyes of the planners who measure the city's health based on its contribution to the wealth and growth of the human community. Empty lots, abandoned buildings, trash woods—all the parcels whose former use for industry, residence, agriculture, or other productive purposes has been abandoned, often due to changing economic or technological conditions, and have not yet been replaced by or redeveloped for some more lucrative and vibrant contemporary use. They're zones of economic entropy that become almost invisible due to their removal from the dynamic commercial flows of metropolitan life. Since the postindustrial cleanup era began in the 1970s, the more common official term used to describe such zones is "brownfields," but that has a more specific meaning, describing areas polluted with environmental toxins. Brown lands are more inclusive, encompassing all the properties where human occupation has effectively ceased for many different reasons.”
Source: A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
“The idea of the frontier runs so deep in American culture that we internalize the idea that to find nature—real nature—you have to get in your car and drive out of town.”
Source: A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
“На противагу думки його невідгонної доброзичливиці «люба серцю мала батьківщина» насправді прибрала не такого вигляду, наче вона стоїть на порозі кінця світу, а радше що вже пережила його.”
“Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.”
Source: Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture