Adrian Forty > Quotes

“We talk as a matter of course about ‘reading’ a plan […] but to talk of ‘reading’ a plan is a very long way from claiming that a work of architecture is a linguistic sign.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Within orthodox modernism, works of architecture were not there o be ‘read’ as narratives to external events – they were there to be themselves.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Although, as has been suggested, part of the attraction of these metaphors may have lain in their making architecture seem like science, and so amenable to scientific procedures of analysis, what they really do is – paradoxically – to confirm the opposite, that architecture is not a science, indeed is not particularly like a science.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Successful metaphors rely on the unlikeness of things, not upon their likeness.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Metaphors are experiments with the possible likenesses of unlike things.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Of all the metaphors found in architecture, there have been few put to such a variety of uses, and certainly none so contentious, as those derived from language.”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Do we only have gender neuter architecture now? Does a particular system of mental distinction, in use for the best part of two millennia, cease simply because the metaphors in which it was presented have become unsuitable?”
― Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

“Even more than notions of architecture have changed, so have the conceptions of language. No social product has given rise to more continuous speculation and more various theories than has language, and in this has been much of its fascination to architects. Language has for the last two hundred years been an ever-open quarry, to which, as new strata become exposed, architects and critics have returned repeatedly to find fresh metaphors.”
― Adrian Forty

“In the way it transforms ideas and beliefs, successful design is like alchemy: it fuses together disparate ideas from different origins, so that the form of the completed product seems to embody only a single idea, which comes across as so familiar that we find ourselves supposing it to be exactly what we ourselves had always thought.”
― Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750