Thought For The Day
Updated on March 8th, 2010
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7th 2010
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TUESDAY, APRIL 6th 2010
“In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life.”
- Jan Gehl
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MONDAY, APRIL 5th 2010
“Certainly artists are only the forerunners of high-income, youngish, non-minority residents. But after the artists, a rising tide of high-rents and condominium conversions seems unstoppable.”
- Sharon Zukin
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SUNDAY, APRIL 4th 2010
“The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property.”
- FREEE art collective.
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SATURDAY, APRIL 3rd 2010
“Regeneration schemes are about the remaking of the city in the cast of the bourgeoisie, about eradicating the ghosts and projecting holograms in their place.”
- Oldfield Ford
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FRIDAY, APRIL 2nd 2010
“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
- Jonathan Raban
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THURSDAY, APRIL 1st 2010
All Public Art should be Site Specific.
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31st 2010
In today’s trip around the Gorbals with Gerry Henaughen (one of the architects who worked on the 1990’s developments) Gerry mentioned that the earlier 1960’s development failed to recognise the way that ‘life happens in the street here – helped by the grid pattern.’ The 1960’s Masterplan ignored the lifeblood of the Gorbals – the life of the street, which lead to failure. The 1990’s competition for the development of a Masterplan was won by CZWG who proposed to reinstate the street grid pattern.That’s Progress!
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TUESDAY, MARCH 30TH 2010
“Our design process for the Hidden Gardens started with three questions:
What is paradise?
What is missing from this place?
What is specific to this place?
These questions opened our dialogue with the community and our attempt to create a space that would have a contemporary resonance. The Hidden Gardens celebrates the ‘given’ landscape alongside the cultural traditions of the people who live around it. The garden could not be anywhere else – it has developed very specifically in response to this site and this community.“
- The Hidden Gardens, Glasgow.
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MONDAY, MARCH 29th 2010
“For some time now, many parts of the world, particularly those that are governed by the imperatives of the global war against terrorism, have learnt to live with a state of emergency, a moderate intensity level of panic and anxiety that makes the predatory excesses of the scrutinizing eye seem banal by the mere fact of exhausting repetition. And so, we succumb. We do so not only at airports and border posts, but also at workplaces and public spaces in large cities the world over, to routine and random searches of our persons, to scans, registrations, surveillance and recordings of the traces of our actions, our encounters with others, our presences and transiences, our itineraries, purchases and decisions, our intimacies and our public acts, our utterances and our secrets, our habits and our desires – the minutiae of all our lives.”
- RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE
On Saturday we learned that Worcester City has invested in facial recognition technology.
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SUNDAY, MARCH 28th 2010
“We like the fast dual carriageways, the easy access motorways, the limitless parking lots. We like the control tower architecture, the absence of civic authority, the rapid turnover of friendships and the prosperity filtered through car and appliance purchases. We like roads that lead past airports, we like air-freight offices and rent-a-car forecourts, we like impulse buy holidays to anywhere takes out fancy. The triangle formed by the M3 and the M4, enclosing Heathrow and the River Thames, is our zone of possibility, far from the suffocating city politics and self-obsessions of the metropolis (transport, ugh, fares, rents, kerb-side vomit). We are the unenfranchised citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the internet and cable TV. And we’re in no hurry for you to join us.”
- J. G. Ballard
SATURDAY, MARCH 27th 2010
Carrying out an audit of public art in Worcester today led us to question why councils can only imagine two options; 1. public art means large, heavy objects plonked about the place, or 2. (and seemingly and perhaps more depressingly) public art means artists prettifying fences, benches and pavements.
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FRIDAY, MARCH 26th 2010
“A city should open up, invite and include people, having different activities and possibilities and thereby ensuring multiplicity and diversity.”
- Gehl Architects.
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THURSDAY, MARCH 25TH 2010
“ I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the façade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.”
- J. Pallasmaa (Thanks Celine)
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24TH 2010
“…the great cities of the earth…have become…loathsome centres of fornication and covetousness…”
I wonder what he’d have made of cities today? – John Ruskin (1880)
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TUESDAY, MARCH 23RD 2010
“Think now of a flower. ‘A rose does not know that it is a rose.’ Obviously, a city does not present itself in the same way as a flower, ignorant of its own body. It has, after all, been ‘composed’ by people, by well defined groups. Al the same, it has none of the intentional of an ‘art object.’
- Henri Lefebvre
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MONDAY, MARCH 22ND 2010
“Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, Pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded, but like stories held in reverse, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. “I feel good here.” the well-being underexpressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.”
- Michel de Certeau
***** SUNDAY, MARCH 21ST 2010
There are many intersecting lines which carve the city into pieces; roads, trains, canals. Walking the canal you see the city as if you are walking through its arteries – the walls of the vessels bursting open in places. I enjoy the halfway feeling, between urban and rural, that these canalside walks offer.
***** SATURDAY, MARCH 20TH 2010
“What makes up the collection of neighbourhoods that we call a city, how does a seemingly linear history actually unfold through creative examination, and what can be done to disrupt all of those things?”
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FRIDAY, MARCH 19TH 2010
“The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”
- Walter Benjamin (1938)
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THURSDAY, MARCH 18TH 2010
If you spend all your time slagging off the place you live, well, what does that say about you? You choose to live there!
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17TH 2010
“A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again. “
- Margaret Mead
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TUESDAY, MARCH 16th 2010
“The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused . . . The physical organization of the city may . . . through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.”
- Lewis Mumford (1937)
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MONDAY, MARCH 15th 2010
“Instead of living in just one place, and trying in vain to gather yourself together there, why not have five or six rooms dotted about Paris? I’d go and sleep in Denfert, I’d write in the Place Voltaire, I’d listen to music in the Place Clichy, I’d make love at the Poterne des Peupliers, I’d eat in the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, I’d read by the Parc Monceau etc. Is that any more foolish, when all is said and done, than putting all the fyrniture shops in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, all the glassware shops in the Rue de Paradis, all the tailors in the Rue du Sentier, all the Jews in the Rue des Rosiers, all the students in the Latin Quarter, all the publishers in Saint-Sulpice, all the doctors in Harley Street, all the blacks in Harlem?” – Georges Perec
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SUNDAY, MARCH 14th 2010
“Cultural policy can be divisive. Culture-led regeneration is only representative of a wider constituency and wider culture of the city when it is developed alongside a social policy that stems from a vigorous and democratic political process. This demands a political system that has the confidence to take on and discuss the bigger and longer-term problems affecting the city”
- Hewitt and Jordan (2004)
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SATURDAY, MARCH 13TH 2010
“You Will All Be Situationists.”
- Henri Lefebvre
***** FRIDAY, MARCH 12th 2010
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)
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THURSDAY, MARCH 11th 2010
“All great art is born of the metropolis”
- Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10th 2010
The Tesco development has created a psychological severance between my house and the city centre – I feel cut off…
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TUESDAY, MARCH 9th 2010
“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”
- Charles Baudelaire
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MONDAY, MARCH 8th 2010
“To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.”
- Frank Lloyd Wright, (1867 – 1959)
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SUNDAY, MARCH 7th 2010
“…in city planning… you start with the people and have motor traffic and buildings as second priorities.”
- Jan Gehl, 2010
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TALKING CITY is Anna Francis’ Longhouse Guest Editor project, for March 2010. Click here to go to the project page.
Yes, the quote from J. Pallasmaa (THURSDAY, MARCH 25TH 2010) comes from an amazing book about architecture and phenomenology : “The eyes of the skin, architecture of the senses”.