A Posy of Pansies: Architecture
A Posy of Pansies: Architecture
And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Act IV, Scene V
Over the years I have gathered precious and provoking thoughts from both great authors and obscure wisemen. Please enjoy this 'posy of pansies' from the wealth of my little garden of collected thoughts. Today's thoughts are on architecture.
Past Posies of Pansies:
If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House. William Morris, “Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” (1894).
Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. William Morris, “Hopes and Fears for Art,” (1882).
To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration. William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” (1877).
Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier men: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the others will have a hard time of it indeed. William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” (1880).
There are three forms of visual art: painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through. Dan Rice.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture. Constantin Brancusi.
The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time - is he who shall create poems in stone. Louis Sullivan.
Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.
Simplicity, sincerity, repose, directness and frankness are moral qualities as essential to good architecture as to good men. C. F. A. Voysey, prominent nineteenth century architect.
We require from buildings, as from me, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1880).
When we build, let us think that we build forever. John Ruskin.
Along with this dawning appreciation for building for the long-term comes the recognition that we will take care of things that are beautiful. Beauty, more often than not, comes from careful crafting. And when a well-crafted object ages, no matter what it is, society almost always helps it to age well. Just look at the buildings our culture has chosen to preserve - all of them were well-designed. Owner after owner of such homes has recognized the treasure inherited and cared for them lovingly. Susan Susanka, Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live.
The architectural profession gave the public 50 years of modern architecture, and the public’s response has been 10 years of the greatest wave of historical preservation in the history of man. George E. Hartman.
...fraudulent and barbarous movement called Modernism, which dedicated itself to the worship of machines, to sweeping away all architectural history, all romantic impulses, and to jamming all human aspiration into a plain box. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature means by a buttress, and what by a dome. John Ruskin.
Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else; it is also about the cultural setting and the ambiance, the whole affair. Michael Graves.
Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity. Spiro Kastof.
All rooms ought to look as if they were lived in, and to have, so to say, a friendly welcome ready for the incomer. William Morris, “The Making Best of It,” (1880).
Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest of all the arts.
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow.
The pansy has its name from the French word pensée, meaning thought. It was so named because the flower resembles a human face, and in August it nods forward as though deep in thought. "A Posy of Pansies" is a regular feature at Cabbages and Kings, and our next installment will be on age.
The beauteous pansies rise
In purple, gold, and blue,
With tints of rainbow hue
Mocking the sunset skies.
Thomas John Ouseley, The Angel of Flowers
Text: A Posy of Pansies. This compilation © Handmaidens of the Shepherd, April 2008.
Photograph: Pansy. The copyright information for this image is unknown. Pansies Hanging on Door Knob. Shaffer-Smith.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008