arch-peace favourite quotes...

Manfredo Tafuri, "Architecture and Utopia" (1976)

2012-01-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

"First among the intellectual illusions to be done away with is that which, by means of the image alone, tries to anticipate the conditions of an architecture ‘for a liberated society.’ Who proposes such slogan avoids asking himself if, its obvious utopianism aside, this object is perusable without a revolution of architectural language, method, and structure which goes far beyond simple subjective will or the simple adapting of syntax.” p.179

Max-Neef, "Human Scale Development" (1991)

2011-12-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

"Every discipline, in becoming increasingly reductionist and technocratic, has given way to a process of dehumanization. To humanize ourselves again from within our own disciplines is the great challenge. Only such an effort can build the foundations for a fruitful transdisciplinary endeavor that may truly contribute to the solution of the real problematique affecting our world today." PDF Book.

Dalai Lama, "Beyond Religion" (2011)

2011-12-04T21:19:00.001-08:00

"Of course, all the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion." The Huffington Post

Michael Benedikt, "The Ghost of Gresham: Economics, Architecture and the Progressive Loss of Designed Value" (2007)

2011-11-16T23:50:00.001-08:00

"To revive architecture’s value, we, as architects, need to identify publicly and quite specifically which irreducible human needs architecture serves and how it does so."

Bill Hopwood, et al, "Sustainable Development" (2005)

2011-08-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

"Sustainable development has the potential to address fundamental challenges for humanity, now and into the future. However, to do this, it needs more clarity of meaning, concen- trating on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having, and long term environmental sustainability, which requires a strong basis in principles that link the social and environmental to human equity."

David Suzuki, "Global economic growth is 'suicidal'" (2008)

2011-08-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

"Economics and ecology are words built on the same root – ‘eco’ – from the Greek word ‘oikos’ meaning home. Ecology is the study of home. Economics is the management of home. What ecologists try to do is to determine the conditions and principles that govern life’s ability to flourish and survive." To article.

Jeremy Till, "Architecture Depends" (2009)

2011-07-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

"One might think that an abstracted world can be ordered, beautified, and perfected, but in the end the real will come back to bite you."

David Milne, "Architecture, Politics and the Public Realm" (1981)

2011-06-29T04:06:00.000-07:00

"In fact, ever since the Greeks taught us that the 'public' constitutes a special and more exacting sense of the political, we have been able to understand and distinguish for example authentically 'public' architecture from the mere funerary works of autocratic political systems"

Anish Kapoor dedicates work to jailed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, May 2011

2011-05-26T01:48:00.000-07:00

"When governments silence artists it bears witness to their barbarity." Sculptor Anish Kapoor dedicates work to jailed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Eduardo Souto de Moura, Holcim Forum, 2004

2011-04-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

"There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture — there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects — one must always pay attention to all these."

Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

2011-03-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Tuan, Yi-Fu. "Dear Colleague: 6 July 2010."

2010-07-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

"In America, "private" and "privacy" are good words. "Public," by contrast, is somewhat suspect, suggestive as it does of faceless bureaucrats. In ancient Greece, it was quite the reverse. Recall that the word "idiot" is derived from the Greek word for "private." To be a private person, living in the sheltered home, was to be an idiot. If one wished to be a fully developed human being, a citizen, one must be engaged with one's equals in the city’s forum." (http://www.yifutuan.org)

Richard Sennett, Back to the bench (2008)

2010-06-10T03:43:00.000-07:00

"I don't think people dwell in a state of creativity; they actually have to do things." Needless to say, "gifted" – that mantra of every pushy parent – is "a word that makes me squirm, because it means you have the gift before you have the experience".

John Silber, "Architecture of the Absurd" (2007)

2010-05-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

"By means of this conflation the architect is permitted to create like an author, painter, or sculptor without regard for the fact that, unlike books, sculpture, and music, which may be ignored or visited at one’s pleasure, a building is lived and worked in and must meet the needs of the users."

Ian Baldwin, "Architectural responses to the Haitian earthquake reveal misplaced motives" (2010)

2010-04-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

"The question of how - or even if- designers should respond to humanitarian catastrophes touches many nerves. The architecture community's knee-jerk reaction in the face of any overwhelming event is usually some kind of 'rebuilding competition', but it is unlikely to do anything but give its organisers and participants a false sense of worth. There is a fine line between wanting to help and appropriating a disaster zone for intellectual self-gratification."

Thomas Fisher, "How Haiti Could Change Design" (Feb. 2010)

2010-02-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

"Public-health professionals do more than respond to disasters. In contrast to medicine, which, like design, tends to react to the problems that others present, public health puts much more emphasis on prevention, on changing the conditions that lead to problems in the first place. A public health version of architecture could do the same."

In Ananya Roy, "Urban Informality" (2005)

2009-12-05T05:37:00.000-08:00

“There is an urgency for urban studies and planning to move beyond the dichotomy of First World ‘models’ and Third World ‘problems’. One possible route is through policy approaches that seek to learn from Third World cities (Roy, 2003b; Sanyal, 1990).”

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

2009-10-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

"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)

2009-09-21T05:46:00.000-07:00

“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)

2009-08-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

"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)

2009-07-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

“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)

2009-07-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

"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)

2009-07-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

“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)

2009-06-17T04:08:00.000-07:00

"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."

John Clarke. "Dissolving the public Realm?" 2004

2009-06-17T03:56:00.000-07:00

"...by insisting that there is no general public interest (only private choices). Alternatively, they have insisted that if there is public interest, it takes the form of consumerist desire for efficiency and high-quality services, which will be best served by private provision and private choices."

Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development (2002)

2009-03-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

"We recognize that poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns and protecting and managing the natural resource base for economic and social development are overarching objectives of and essential requirements for sustainable development."

David Harvey, "Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?"

2009-03-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

"As I have been arguing the foreclosure stuff must be understood as an urban crisis not just a financial crisis; it is a financial crisis of urbanisation." Find this article here.

Jane Jacobs, "Downtown is for People", from the Exploding Metropolis.

2009-02-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

"No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at ... suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You've got to get out and walk." In Jane's walk.

Dr. Peter Slezak. Speech at the Rally for Gaza, Melbourne 18.01.09

2009-01-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

"We have a responsibility to turn our moral concern into meaningful action, because it is here, in the West, that the fate of Palestine is decided. We must find ways to counter the barrage of deceit that prevents people from understanding what is going on and reacting to it as human beings." Find speech here.

Sanoff, Henry. "Community Based Design Leaning." In Design Studio Pedagogy, Salama & Wilkinson. 2007

2008-12-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

"Architects need to be ethically involved in the creation of a sustainable environment because it involves the sustainability of the profession as well."

Alexander Cuthbert. "The Form of Cities: Political Economy and Urban Design". 2006

2008-10-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

“If we adopt a conspiratorial position to development, we assume that some other or others are actually in control of the process. If we do not, then we have to assume that global capitalism is fundamentally out of control, ...”

Richard Sennett. "Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization". 1994

2008-09-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

"From Perikles' Athens to David's Paris, the word 'civic' has implied an intertwined fate, a crossing of fortunes. It was inconceivable to a Periklean Greek that his or her fortune could be separated from the fortunes of a city, or to a pagan Roman of Hadrian's time."

Fredric Jameson."The seeds of time". 1994

2008-08-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

"...the end of civil society is also betokened by the disappearance of public space as such: the end of the civic, for example, and of official government, which now dissolves back into the private networks of corruption and informal clan relationships."

Henry Sanoff. In Ashraf M. Salama, "Design studio pedagogy horizons for the future". 2007

2008-07-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

"The culture of sustainable development, the concern for cultural identities and the respect for diversity should culminate into a type of architecture that can be taught as a highly powerful language of peace."

Spiro Kostof. "The Education of the Muslim Architect". 1986

2008-05-20T03:28:00.000-07:00

"We need to convey with force that the architectural enterprise is incremental and collaborative, across time; that cities we live in are elaborate, generational devices, always tidying up, never finished; that there are thousand of little incidents, of space and colour and repose, that account for a Venice, a Damascus, an Isfahan, and that these are not accidental not are they attributable to name architects"

A. Pérez-Gómez. "Architecture Ethics and Technology". 1994

2008-04-18T01:04:00.000-07:00

“Well-meaning cultural critics, seeking to deconstruct oppressive power structures from our tradition and to empower the free individual, have at the same time proclaimed the self-referentiality of art—the post-modern labyrinth of mirrors and relative values—implying that the personal imagination, and with it the very possibility of ethical action, may be an illusion.”

James Mayo. "Political Avoidance in Architecture". 1985

2008-04-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

"To be enlightened and emancipated, people must developed a way of thinking to be both free from self-delusions and self-defeating actions."

Necdet Teymur. "Architectural Education: Issues in Educational Practice and Policy" (1992)

2008-03-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

“Put in other words, the educational design process can be imaginative even when it is not imaginary (as it is the case most of the time!), and profoundly realistic without being expedient, subservient or mundane.”

Thomas Fisher. "In the Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture". 2000

2007-11-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

“To remain silent about the values represented in what we do, either out of mistaken belief that professionals must remain ethically neutral or out of a romantic dismissal of all normative values, is to eliminate one of the main reasons for the profession’s very existence”.

David Orr

2007-07-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane" David Orr

Laurie Baker

2007-07-01T06:21:00.001-07:00

"Cost-effective houses are not just for the poor, they are for everyone. The equation that a cost-effective house is a house for the poor, implying a bad looking house, can definitely be proved wrong. Isn't it the responsibility of the upper and middle classes to stop indulging in extravagance and make better looking houses instead?"(Laurie Baker )

Graffiti on Sydney Road, Coburg

2006-09-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is one of the highest in the industrialised world at 27.9 tonnes per person ..."our way of life is not under threat, our way of life is the threat!"

Margaret Mead

2003-02-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead.