spatial context Quotes

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape.

Where you're from only matters in relation to where you are.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.

It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at.

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.

The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

History is not intelligible without geography.

A house isn't really understandable until it settles into the site: until it's built, furnished and lived in for four or five years. The reality is not on paper but in how a building sits on the land - how it relates to trees, to slopes, to water, to gardens.

Boundaries are actually the main factor in space, just as the present, another boundary, is the main factor in time.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

Geography is everywhere

The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.

I think context, location matters a lot. Because location obviously in my situation, it's the space in which the work is going to be exhibited. And since some of the work I do is created onsite, it requires a different type of space, versus the smaller drawings or more subject-oriented work. So that the context becomes important.

Making sure that the geography and timelines work is always the hardest part of writing. But you owe it to the readers to get it right!

And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.

Next time you're stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.

My architecture is very much place-related.