Rebecca Solnit Quotes About Architecture

Quotes about: Architecture

• What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Art, Mean, Sea

  "The Faraway Nearby". Book by Rebecca Solnit, www.npr.org. June 6, 2013.

• I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Squares, Virginia

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.288, Univ of California Press

• Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Ice, Sea, Stories

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.5, Granta Books

• Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Cities, Way, Limits

• Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Italian, Cities, Long

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.138, Penguin

• The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Choices, Design, Desire

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.194, Penguin

• An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Rain, Coffee, Adventure

• Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Garden, Vegas, Oasis

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