Quotes

Architecture enables us to perceive and understand the dialectics
of permanence and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and
to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time.


Juhani Pallasmaa
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 2005: 71





The contrast between particular and universal, between individual
and collective, emerges from the city and from its construction, its
architecture.


Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City





It is an inescapable fact about human existence that we are made
of our memories: we are what we remember ourselves to be.


Edward S. Casey
Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2000: 290





What does ‘dwelling’ mean? It identifies all our architectural knowledge and historical experience...‘Dwelling’ in the existential sense, is the purpose of architecture. Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment, or in short, when he experiences the environment as meaningful.


(Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 1977)

“Places are a fusion of human and 

natural order and are the significant centres of our immediate 

experiences of the world. They are defined less by unique

locations, landscape, and communities than by the focusing

of experiences and intentions onto particular settings…they

are important sources of individual and communal identity,

and are often profound centres of human existence to which

people have deep emotional and psychological ties” (1976: 41).

Unconsciously or subconsciously we associate place with our

experiences of security and comfort. ‘Home,’ for example, is

physically and metaphorically our root of safety and security, a

point of care and concern, and the point from which we orient

ourselves to the outside world.

Edward Relph

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its
people, and like memory, it is associated with objects and places.
The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship
between locus and citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant
image, both architecture and of landscape, and as certain
artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge,

Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City, 1966:130


...the city is the collective expression of architecture and it carries in the weaving and
unraveling of its fabric the memory traces of earlier architectural forms, city plans,
and public monuments...its physical structure constantly evolves, being deformed or
forgotten, adapted to other purposes or eradicated by different needs. The demands
and pressures of social reality constantly affect the material order of the city, yet
it remains the theater of our memory. Its collective forms and private realms tell
us of the changes that are taking place; they remind us as well of the traditions
that set this city apart from others. It is in these physical artifacts and traces that
our city memories lie buried, for the past is carried forward to the present through
these sites. Addressed to the eye of vision and to the soul of memory, a city’s streets,
monuments, and architectural forms often contain grand discourses on history.


Christine M. Boyer
The City of Collective Memory, 1996: 30




We need a simplified physical environment from which we can reach out and understand the
world. Our individual and collective experience of time is an essential consideration of architecture, and one of our basic human needs. We as people cannot comprehend time as a
physical manifestation, “…we can only grasp time through its actualizations; the traces, places and events of temporal occurrence” (Pallasmaa, unpublished).


A trace is an outline, a proposal. That is taken up in an art of making or inhabiting that has no obligation to its past other than preservation of a tension between its forms and those projected out of the present.

David Leatherbarrow
Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture, 2004: 13\



The great majority [of a city’s inhabitants] may well be more sensitive to a certain street being torn up, or a certain building or home being razed, than to the gravest national, political, or religious events. That is why great upheavals may severely shake society without altering the appearance of the city. Their effects are blunted as they filter down to those people who are closer to the stones than to men – the shoemaker in his shop; the artisan at his bench; the merchant in his store; the people in the market; the walker strolling about the streets, idling at the wharf, or visiting the garden terraces; the children playing on the corner; the old man enjoying the sunny wall or sitting on a stone bench; the beggar squatting by a city landmark.

Maurice Halbwachs, “Space and the Collective Memory” (1939)



Collage and assemblage: media that enable an archaeological density and a non-linear narrative through the juxtaposition of fragmented images deriving from irreconcilable origins. Collage invigorates the experience of tactility and time.

Juhani Pallasmaa
“Melancholy and Time,” 1995: 325



It is not the obvious spatial relationship, but the use of a volume well articulated
by its involucre, extending or enclosing, to complement the cavity of its interior.
A portion of expanding space, but stayed by a shell that confines it: it may be a
part that breaks through to the front, or is contained by an interior. Space yielded
up by a void, but also space appropriated from a solid: a game of opposites,
transposing the meanings of spatial categories that are deliberately complex in
their roles, yet straightforward in formal definition. On the plane, this reads
as balancing of parts, play of chiaroscuro, modulation of rhythms, relating of
multiple symmetries and concealed alignments. Nothing here is casual. Every
factor has a purpose and represents a new departure.


Carlo Scarpa, as quoted from Architecture in Details



There is a tacit wisdom of architecture accumulated in history and tradition. But in today’s panicked rush for the new, we rarely stop to listen to that wisdom. Architecture needs slowness to re-connect itself with this source of silent knowledge. Architecture requires slowness in order to develop a cumulative tradition again, to accumulate a sense of continuity, and to become re-rooted in culture.

Juhani Pallasmaa
“Melancholy and Time”1995: 319



By architecture I mean not only the visible image of the city and the sum of its different architectures, but architecture as construction, the construction of the city over time.

Aldo Rossi
The Architecture of the City, 1966: 21