13 Quotes by Simon Unwin

All architecture is, metaphorically, a shadow cast on a cave wall. Architecture is a version of the truth – a version of sense – proposed by the architect and realised in the physical form of buildings and the identification of places for inhabitation.

We develop our architecture through metaphor. In the distant past we looked to those places we recognised and experienced in nature for ideas – the shelter of a cave, the shade of a tree, the original refuge of the womb, our own proud vertical stance and point of view, the communal circle we make with our friends in a forest clearing… – and sought to emulate them in our architecture.

The general argument is that metaphors live at the conceptual core of architecture; but those metaphors are of many and varied kinds, which change and grow as you try to pin them down.

There is no truth in architecture, only proposition and a yearning for sense.