10 Quotes by Adrian Forty

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    Although, as has been suggested, part of the attraction of these metaphors may have lain in their making architecture seem like science, and so amenable to scientific procedures of analysis, what they really do is – paradoxically – to confirm the opposite, that architecture is not a science, indeed is not particularly like a science.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    We talk as a matter of course about ‘reading’ a plan […] but to talk of ‘reading’ a plan is a very long way from claiming that a work of architecture is a linguistic sign.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    Within orthodox modernism, works of architecture were not there o be ‘read’ as narratives to external events – they were there to be themselves.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    Of all the metaphors found in architecture, there have been few put to such a variety of uses, and certainly none so contentious, as those derived from language.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    Even more than notions of architecture have changed, so have the conceptions of language. No social product has given rise to more continuous speculation and more various theories than has language, and in this has been much of its fascination to architects. Language has for the last two hundred years been an ever-open quarry, to which, as new strata become exposed, architects and critics have returned repeatedly to find fresh metaphors.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Adrian Forty
  • Quote

    Do we only have gender neuter architecture now? Does a particular system of mental distinction, in use for the best part of two millennia, cease simply because the metaphors in which it was presented have become unsuitable?

  • Tags
  • Share