You only need to theorize the thing that you’re talking about.
— Lucia
When Noel Coward, whom Paepcke had met casually in the twenties, jocularly inquired of him in the year CCA’s corporate image took form, “What is a container and what does it contain?” Paepcke might have replied, “It is a box designed to be seen. It might contain nothing at all.”
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Here is the irony of the twentieth-century relationship between commerce and culture. By so successfully allying their cultural aspirations with commercial techniques, artists and intellectuals helped unify modern culture, but at the risk of turning art and ideas into commodities, things so readily and casually consumed that they must lose much of their power to criticize life and to change it.
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Pushup!
You go Glenn Coco!
— Damian, Mean Girls
Hasn’t stopped you looking.
— Cutter, The Prestige
4.1 Objects absorb only. They never tell (at least intentionally). They are the most faultless of all things.
— Caresse, “The Voyeurism of Objects”
Nothing happened, it’s just architects talking.
— Lucia
A mix of compassion and preemptive stabilization.
— Justin
And although he frequently referred to himself publicly, with the self-depreciation typical of the capitalist among artists and intellectuals, as “only a prosaic box maker,” he rose by means of the Container Corporation to prominence as an exponent of modern design and of cultural reform in the mid-twentieth-century America.
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Can you fit 7?
— Dad to an Uber as a joke that was then taken seriously
The collapse of the architectural object into a field of modulated patterns visible at every scale.
— Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space
Otto, why didn’t you run?
— Doc Watson, “Otto Wood the Bandit”
Art is for itself but can have effects that produce certain changes.
— Edgar Arceneaux
Influence assumes power.
— Debora Silverman
The seven sections of the thesis do not obey any rigorous principe of classification, and the similarities between the architectural skins discussed and their natural counterparts are sometimes implied.
— Clara Wong, The Seven Skins of Architecture
Sardines.
You’re fun.
— Older lady at Interstellar
Christmas time is here.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
I forgot to ask, what’s your name?
— Reading Room lady