9 Quotes by Sylvia Lavin

Architecture today need not be just that which you bump up against when you try to look at something else nor a monument culturally framed and rendered visible by its own importance. Architecture’s new confounds are not just making buildings visible but are encouraging them to find ways to make perception enter the realm of experience rather than vision, to make images that produce material impressions, to make experience that is vivid.

Architecture’s history of interaction with other mediums is a long and complex story of intimacy and separation, power and control, but it is also a history that has repeatedly played a central role in the discipline’s advancement.

Architecture’s original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism.

Insisting that architecture maintain such a profound lack of character without even the hint of any feeling is not a lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a commitment to a once progressive but now painfully outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pursuit of universality and utopia is today just banal accommodation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.

While architecture’s sense of disciplinary inferiority ultimately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture’s Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with the development of modern capitalism on the one hand […] and avant-garde strategies of opposition on the other.

Long since, the standard way of understanding surface has been as an abstract and undifferentiated plane that functions above all to veil or delimit a depth. From the face that mirrors the soul, to the magic writing tablet that reveals subconscious drives, the surface, any surface, all surfaces, have been considered worthy of attention insofar as they are the top layer, the outermost skin, the merely visible envelope of more particularized and specific under or inner depths.

Architecture’s most kissable aspect is its surface. Space is hard to get a hold on. Structure has historically been inadequately pliant. Geometry—well, who really wants to kiss a square? Architecture also has more surface and more kinds of surface than anything else: outside, inside, soft and hard, there’s a surface for everyone. Finally, surfaces are where architecture gets close to turning into something else and therefore exactly where it becomes vulnerable and full of potential.

Today, I would say at last, this disciplinary Tourette’s syndrome, where suddenly and even in the face of tremendous productivity architecture still blurts out a sense of shame, is starting to be understood as self-imposed and more likely to prolong paralysis than move the discipline further.

Architecture’s most kissable aspect is its surface. Space is hard to get a hold on. Structure has historically been inadequately pliant. Geometry – well, who really wants to kiss a square? Architecture also has more surface and more kinds of surface than anything else: outside, inside, soft and hard, there’s a surface for everyone. Finally, surfaces are where architecture gets close to turning into something else and therefore exactly where it becomes vulnerable and full of potential.