Sunday, March 14, 2010


Here are some of my favorite quotes from Michael Pollan's book that I just read titled "A Place of My Own; The Architecture of Daydreams:

"With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world" - Henry David Thoreau; Walden

"If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." - Gaston Bachelard; The Poetics of Space

"No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art." - John Ruskin

"That I had dreamt it and then had a hand in making it a fact was more gratifying than I can say, but now I was looking past that, or trying to , wondering, pointlessly perhaps, about how this building I'd helped to shape might come in time to shape me, where the two of us might be headed." - Michael Pollan

"As Venturi's comment suggests ("the relevant revolution today is the current electronic one"), the relationship between the information society and architecture may resemble a zero sum game. The culture of information is ultimately hostile to architecture, as it is to anything that can't be readily translated into its terms - to the whole of the undigitizable world, everything that the promoters of cyberspace like to refer to as RL (for "real life"). - Michael Pollan

This last quote speaks to my main reason for having this blog in the first place:

""Information overload" is something we hear a lot about these days, and there does seem to be a growing sense that technology, the media, and the sheer quantity of information in circulation have somehow gotten between us and reality - what used to be called, without a lot of quotations marks or qualifiers, nature." - Michael Pollan

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