Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile and other Essays" (2000)

"Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and
its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted."

Mies van der Rohe, “Inaugural address as Director of Architecture at Armour Institute of Technology” (1938)

“No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time. Therefore we must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional and the spiritual.”

Spiro Kostof, "The Education of the Muslim Architect" (1986)

"I have long held that we have been missing a great chance to make architecture a vital part of the general discourse, a public concern like food and politics."

Ashraf Salama, "Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future" (2007)

“Research indicates that designers in the academia still distance themselves from the real world, still barricade themselves from real human problems, while missing the opportunity to learn from the richness and depth of human experience”

Ashraf Salama, "A Theory for Integrating Knowledge in Architectural Design Education" (2008)

"Typically, educators focus on offering students ready-made interpretations about the built environment rather than developing their abilities to explore issues that are associated with the relationship between culture and the built environment. If they do, they place emphasis on one single culture, which is their own."

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (2008)

“An eagle-reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage—the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some of the mystery…”.

Esra Akcan, "Melancholy and the 'other'" (2005)

"In a world where modernization is defined as the 'universal' processes guided by the 'West', in a world where the 'West' is perceived as the subject of history, while the 'non-West' as its inferior translation, the 'others' that are excluded from this definition of 'universality' live through a loss or lack of a natural right."