WrathOfGnon

[wrathofgnon]

“Modern planners are so concerned about traffic that they have stopped thinking about anything but the fastest movement of cars and the attendant problems, as if the only function of the city is to serve as a racetrack for drivers between petrol pumps and hamburger stands.” — Victor Papanek, 1995

[wrathofgnon]

“I can't myself raise the wind that might blow us, or this ship, into a better world. But at least I can put up the sail so that when the wind comes, I can catch it.”

— E.F. Schumacher, Good Work

[wrathofgnon]

“Some artists would like to have us believe that their works and theories are so advanced that only extraordinary feats of intellectual effort and patience will reveal the profound meaning of their work. They seem to confuse the methods and goals of the artist with those of the researcher and forget that the arts are not a field of pure research. A radical distinction must be made between products designed for a general public and those for the scientific community.” — Léon Krier

[wrathofgnon]

“The old dealt with pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds...the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”― C.S. Lewis 

[wrathofgnon]

“The buildings our predecessors constructed paid homage to history in their design, including elegant solutions to age-old problems posed by the cycles of weather and light, and they paid respect to the future in the sheer expectation that they would endure through the lifetimes of the people who built them. They therefore embodied a sense of chronological connectivity, one of the fundamental patterns of the universe: an understanding that time is a defining dimension of existence—particularly the existence of living things, such as human beings, who miraculously pass into life and then inevitably pass out of it.” 

— James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere, 1996

[wrathofgnon]

“Truth has nothing to do with the number of people it convinces.” — Paul Claudel

[wrathofgnon]

“When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is when a man’s body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.” — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1906

[wrathofgnon]

“I judge the true importance of an architect by envisioning what if an entire city block, an entire quarter, town, region, continent, the entire world were built according to his personal philosophy and maniera. Gaudi, Plecnik, Corbusier, simply don’t qualify for a pantheon occupied by the minds who built Venice, Pergamon, Dubrovnik, Dresden, Paris, Williamsburg, by Wagner, Schinkel, Persius, Palladio, Sanmicheli, Lutyens.” — Léon Krier

[wrathofgnon]

“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”— G.K. Chesterton

[wrathofgnon]

“Tradition is not something constant but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success. It changes but can rarely be deliberately changed. Cultural selection is not a rational process; it is not guided by but it creates reason.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

[wrathofgnon]

“Memory must be a road not only to the past but also to the future.”

— Ana Blandiana

[wrathofgnon]

“We are told that our works should express the spirit of our age but the best works of the past has always proved the contrary. To transmit a perennial message and value, our work has to transcend the particularities of its age of creation.” — Léon Krier

[wrathofgnon]

“The traditional city performs the miracle of allowing contrasting and competing ambitions, the most modest and greatest of talents to strive and thrive as neighbors; to build in harmony. That is the definition of urbanity and urban civilization.” — Léon Krier

[wrathofgnon]

“We shall never be rid of antiquity as long as we do not become barbarians again.” — Jacob Burckhardt

[wrathofgnon]

“Chronological connectivity lends meaning and dignity to our little lives. It charges the present with a vivid validation of our own aliveness. It puts us in touch with the ages and with the eternities, suggesting that we are part of a larger and more significant organism. It even suggests that the larger organism we are part of cares about us, and that, in turn, we should respect ourselves and our fellow creatures and all those who will follow us in time, as those preceding us respected those who followed them. In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy.”

— James Howard Kunstler

[wrathofgnon]

“The truth about Gothic architecture is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noises of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass, and amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the trowel and the sword.” — G.K. Chesterton

[wrathofgnon]

“The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.”

— Yoshida Kenkō (1283-1350), ca. 1338