18 Quotes by Christoph Grafe

The modernists tried to occupy multiple places within a single, indivisible moment, making it possible to take multiple positions simultaneously, so that reality took on greater transparency.

…but we all know that each reader reads a book that is different to the one written by the author, and that the reading is tainted by the memories, fears and traumas that are the true standard lamps by which the reader sits and reads.

Successful architects tend to be highly skilled in presenting and arguing for a proposed design, both to clients and to colleagues. The rhetoric of these presentation is often filled with metaphors that capture the leading concepts as well as the important experimental or sensual qualities of the design.

But this is where literature’s failing comes to the fore: it can describe, document and eulogize this loss, but can never intervene materially. This is what architecture can do, precisely because it cannot afford to linger over loss.

Viewed from this perspective, architecture no longer provides a happy ending, but instead allows stories to continue.

If there is one genre of literature in which architecture indisputably plays a leading role, it is the gothic novel.

Literature and architecture experience the world in the same way, but arrive at different decisions, and look in different directions.

Literature unleashes revolutions only to withdraw from the fray, while architecture makes the demolition permanent by erecting buildings…

What do you want this new museum of ours to be, the director had asked him at one of the meetings – an encyclopedia or a novel?