9 Quotes by Witold Rybczynski

The truth is that a nineteenth-century warehouse exhibits greater craft in its construction than all but the most expensive modern buildings.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything and is, therefore, a particularly compelling symbol of civilisation. (Attributed to Ralph Caplan)

The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.

You could walk out of the house, but you always returned home.

Architecture is an applied art, founded not on theories but on practice.

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure.

For where else, if not in the home, can we let our imagination wander?

There are scores of books offering ‘solutions’ to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book.

I enjoy visiting building sites. Unlike the ordered anonymity of office bureaucracy or the featureless regularity of a factory assembly line, a building site appears disorderly and chaotic. In fact, there is organization, but it is a loose orchestration of many separate trademen, working side by side but not necessarily together.