Tom Turner > Quotes

“When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“He had broken the bank by making a reservation at a place in Islamorada for their first night called the Moorings Village Lodge, which was the real-life location of the so-called Rayburn House, Sissy Spacek’s cottage hotel in the Netflix show Bloodlines. He was undeterred by the $1,600 price because he loved the show and figured he could probably make up for it by staying at much cheaper places for the rest of their nights in Key West.”
― Tom Turner, Palm Beach Schemers

“The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these ‘styles’. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers’ outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were ‘modernity’ and ‘functionalism’.”
― Tom Turner

“and emails on the phone and noticed a lot of calls”
― Tom Turner, Palm Beach Piranha

“Beauty may reside in the eye of the beholder, but what we see is determined by what we expect to see.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Walking through a town can be like flicking through a picture book.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“It takes a poet to read a river and a community to make a response.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“More attractive metaphors create more popular buildings.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“A metaphor carries an idea from one area of thought to another. Furniture can have feminine legs; a flower is the day’s eye (daisy); an error glares at you; drinks are soft; cash is hard; our lives have a spring and an autumn.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Another famous town planning concept, the Finger Plan for Copenhagen, was based on a metaphor sand shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, the great hand has guided Copenhagen’s development. The merchant’s harbour, after which the city was named, sits in the palm of the guiding hand. Fingers point ways to new development. Power lines, telecom lines, and rapid transit lines follow the bones, arteries, veins and nerves of the fingers. Between those fingers we find the green lands of Denmark. Copenhagen was made into a garden city but the hand itself, of urban development, was grey.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Metaphors construct, or frame, views of ‘reality’, which can be used in policy-making or planning. They highlight structural characteristics of the world. It is dangerous if those who frame metaphors believe there is only one reality. But if metaphors are recognised as creative constructs, they can have immense value.”
― Tom Turner

“Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp can be seen as a crab, a duck, a hand, a hat and much else. Utzon’s Sydney Opera House can be seen as shells, a flower, or sails. The soaring curves of Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York symbolise flight. The Archigram building concepts of the 1960s were designed as pods. Significantly, all these buildings were curvilinear. Curves ‘carry’ ideas from the natural world. Rectilinearity [stet] is a metaphor for intellectualism and the works of man. Renaissance architecture was a metaphor for reason and delight, restoring order after the chaos of the Middle Ages. Thoreau’s house, by Walden Pond, was a New Englander’s protest against materialism. Hundertwasser’s Viennese architecture is a metaphor for the reassertion of nature and emotion, after the brutalism of the twentieth century.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Longer metaphors, in the form of stories, allow more sophisticated relationships: […] In planning, the boundaries between myth, history and fiction are not so consequential as one might think.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning