Joseph Rykwert > Quotes

“When I wrote that [Elias] Canetti ‘desired’ a book, I was perhaps understating. He conveyed the sense that select books were inexorably his – magically so. Some years later, he came into the room in which I worked and saw on my table two books I had found on a bookstall the day before. One was a collection of Indian folktales called, I think, Tales My Amah Told Me; the other was a literal translation of – a crib to – the writings of the Emperor Julian. His wanting them exuded from him as a blatant and viscous desire that seemed almost tangible, as enveloping and threatening as any tentacles of ectoplasm emanating from a Victorian medium. Those books were no longer mine. I handed them over.”
― Joseph Rykwert, Remembering Places: The Autobiography of Joseph Rykwert

“What Gaudi had attained by twisting the order to his peculiar missionary and structural purposes, Loos could only assert by isolation and giganticism: the supremacy of value pitted against the city of brute fact. The Doric order appeared to have been the ultimate historical form, the great human building achievement, unfettered by sculptural contingency or the base need for shelter. All of them – Gaudi, Sullivan and Loos, and Asplund – saw the Doric order as ultimate, though perhaps only for Loos did that imply the last ever, the last possible.”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture

“Orders mostly became “institutional vacuities”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture

“Perhaps the only possible answer to the primal estrangement is re-presentation, the constantly renewed ordering of the metaphoric experience and its re-enactment in the maturation process of the individual. And what representation is more elemental than reflection?”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture