Reading seems to have overtaken any desire to write recently, and has even been competing with time for working on things in the studio. Feeling completely unqualified to elaborate on anything from this eclectic range of sources myself, I provide only quotations which I think may generate, if only for a moment, some spark inside an architect. None of the writers below are architects, yet it seems to me as if they each have some interest, or have found some role for architecture to play, or just something to say from which we might gain insight, in order to avoid the ideas read to death by countless students before.

 

“The house is not a house (a postal parcel): it is rather an amalgam or a combination of complicated relations derived from the function of residence, rest, writing – from the financial capabilities to build it (it is a node of economical capabilities) – from the fact of no earthquake occurring – from the combination of solidifying lime, iron, bricks, applying the appropriate technology, etc. etc.”

 

Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Meditazione Milanese” - 1928

 

“While your palace remains unknown to you and unknowable, you can try to reconstruct it bit by bit, locating every shuffle, every cough at a point in space, imagining walls around each acoustical sign, ceilings, pavements, giving form to the void in which the sounds spread and to the obstacles they encounter, allowing the sounds themselves to prompt the images. A silvery tinkle is not simply a spoon that has fallen from the saucer where it was balanced, but is also a corner of a table covered with a linen cloth with lace fringe, in the light from a high window over which boughs of wisteria hang; a soft thud is only a cat that has leaped upon a mouse, but is also a damp moldy space beneath some steps, closed off by planks bristling with nails.

The palace is a construction of sounds that expands one moment and contracts the next, tightens like a tangle of chains. You can move through it, guided by the echos, localizing creaks, clangs, curses, pursuing breaths, rustles, grumbles, gurgles.”

 

Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun - 1985

 

“The universe dissolves into a cloud of heat, it plummets helplessly into a maelstrom of entropy – but within this irreversible process there may appear zones of order, portions of a the existent that tend toward a shape, privileged points from which one may discern a design, a perspective…”

 

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium - 1988

[here was most difficult to stick to a single passage per book]

 

“In recent years many academics, including geographers, have embraced relational concepts and ways of thinking (though not very explicitly with respect to those of space-time). This move, as crucial as it is laudable, has to some degree been associated with the cultural and postmodern turn. But in the same way that traditional and positivist geography limited its vision by concentrating exclusively on the absolute and relative and upon the material and conceptual aspects of space-time (eschewing the lived and the relational), so there is a serious danger of dwelling only upon the relational and lived as if the material and absolute did not matter.”

 

David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism - 2005

 

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”

 

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness - 1969

[thank you to the person who left an english copy of this in the free exchange bookshelf at my apartment building in Switzerland]

 

“The aesthetic side of architecture can choose to combine formal innovation with functional literalism or formal literalism with functional innovation, but it has the unique capability - foreign to visual art- of deliteralizing both form and function, and should not discard this advantage lightly. The term “zeroing” is another name for such deliteralization.

 

The various zeroing techniques must be discovered and pursued by architects themselves. No philosopher can pretend to legislate them, nor does any philosopher actually attempt this”

 

Graham Harman, Architecture and Objects - 2022

 

“But the city's dependence on this first, original nature was not all that Chicago's monuments obscured. They also hid much of the human economy, that second, constructed nature of which the city itself was the most visible expression. This second nature was what the 1891 guidebook author found impossible to describe when looking down from the visitors' gallery at the Board of Trade. The commodities that flowed across the grasslands and forests of the Great West to reach Chicago did so within an elaborate human network that was at least as important as nature in shaping the region. The emergence of the city required that a new human order be superimposed on nature until the two became completely entangled. The result was a hybrid system, at least as artificial as it was natural, that became second nature to those who lived within it.”

 

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis - 1991