Occult Architecture Quotes

The rest I omit, for many a bitter Pill can be swallowed under a golden Cover: I make no Mencion that in each of my Churches I put a Signe so that he who sees the Fabrick may see also the Shaddowe of the Reality of which it is the Pattern or Figure. Thus, in the church of Lime-house, the nineteen Pillars in the Aisles will represent the Names of Baal-Berith, the seven Pillars of the Chappell will signify the Chapters of his Covenant. All those who wish to know more of this may take up Clavis Salomonis, Niceron's Thaumaturgus Opticus where he speaks of Line and Distance, Cornelius Agrippa his De occuItia philosophia and Giordano Bruno his De magia and De vinculis in genere where he speaks of Hieroglyphs and the Raising of the Devilles. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear. ~ Peter Ackroyd

That Figure so impressd it self upon my Mind that I have been in a manner walking towards it all my Life. Then I peered into Wendel Dietterlin his Architectura, and there were unveiled to me the several Orders: of the Tuscan, which is now mine own, I was then mov'd by its Strangeness and Awefulness; the obscured Shapes, the Shaddowes and the massie Openings so in-chanted my Spirit that when looking on them I imagined my self to be lock'd in some dark and Enclosed space. The heavinesse of Stone did so oppress me that I was close to Extinction, and I fancied that I could see in the Engraver's lines the sides of Demons, crumbled Walls, and half-humane Creatures rising from the Dust. There was some thing that waited for me there, already in Ruines. ~ Peter Ackroyd

There are those who say further that these are meer Dreames and no true Relations, but I say back to them: look upon my Churches in the Spittle-fields, in Limehouse, and now in the Parish of Wapping Stepney, and do you not wonder why they lead you into a darker World which on Reflection you know to be your own? Every Patch of Ground by them has its Hypochondriack Distemper and Disorder; every Stone of them bears the marks of Scorching by which you may follow the true Path of God. ~ Peter Ackroyd

The latter part of our Journey from the entrance of Wiltshire into Salisbury was very rough and abounded with Jolts, the Holes we were obliged to go through being very many and some of them Deep; and so it was with much Relief that we left the Coach at Salisbury and hired two Horses for the road across the Avon to the Plain and Stone-henge. When we came to the edge of this sacred Place, we tethered our Horses to the Posts provided and then, with the Sunne direct above us, walked over the short grass which (continually cropt by the flocks of Sheep) seemed to spring us forward to the great Stones. I stood back a little as Sir Chris. walked on, and I considered the Edifice with steadinesse: there was nothing here to break the Angles of Sight and as I gaz'd I opened my Mouth to cry out but my Cry was silent; I was struck by an exstatic Reverie in which all the surface of this Place seemed to me Stone, and the Sky itself Stone, and I became Stone as I joined the Earth which flew on like a Stone through the Firmament. And thus I stood until the Kaw of a Crow rous'd me: and yet even the call of the black Bird was an Occasion for Terrour, since it was not of this Time. I know not how long a Period I had traversed in my Mind, but Sir Chris. was still within my Sight when my Eyes were cleard of Mist. He was walking steadily towards the massie Structure and I rushed violently to catch him, for I greatly wished to enter the Circle before him. I stopped him with a Cry and then ran on: whe ~ Peter Ackroyd

The true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones. ~ Peter Ackroyd

I wanted to be a pilot, but I was always drawing bodies. When I realised I wanted to pursue something creative, my parents pushed me towards architecture. ~ Hussein Chalayan

Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that. ~ Christian De Portzamparc

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius ... ~ Victor Hugo

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate. ~ Leon Krier

One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city ~ Aldo Rossi

She doesn't have any terrific talent for acting, but that's how it appears to go. People don't do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they're good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. Anything! It's a spite. It's having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don't need anyone else to do these things for you. ~ Saul Bellow

It is a mistake to consider any belief more liberated than another. It is the possibility of change which is important. Every new form of liberation is destined to eventually become another form of enslavement for most of its adherents. There is no freedom from duality on this plane of existence, but one may at least aspire to choice of duality. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it. ~ Arthur Erickson

In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The conclusion that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were acquainted with both the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section, says Stecchini, is so startling in relation to current assumptions about the level of Egyptian mathematics that it could hardly have been accepted on the basis of Herodotus' statement alone, or on the fact that the phi [golden] proportion happens to be incorporated in the Great Pyramid.

But the many measurements made by Professor Jean Philippe Lauer, says Stecchini, definitely prove the occurrence of the Golden Section throughout the architecture of the Old Kingdom.... Schwaller de Lubicz also found graphic evidence that the pharonic Egyptians had worked out a direct relation between pi and phi in that pi = phi^2 x 6/5. ~ Peter Tompkins

As a designer, the mission with which we have been charged is simple: providing space at the right cost. ~ Harry Von Zell

For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible. ~ Bjarke Ingels

And I, who have the world in my pocket, can bring them nothing to comfort their disappointment or reward their optimism, but supplicate the fatted calf which they killed so often before and so in vain. Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged. ~ Elizabeth Smart

What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different. ~ William Irwin Thompson

True architecture exists only where man stands in the center. ~ Alvar Aalto

What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness ~ Alain De Botton

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? ~ Lance Olsen

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level - consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed
physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or
two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system,
language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program - for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling - may likewise be described in only a few pages of
equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant
visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific d ~ Ray Kurzweil

White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it. ~ Al Sharpton

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise. ~ Arthur Erickson

Witches are liberated from their own fears and limited thinking. In turn, their presence has the power to liberate and consciously expand others. ~ Dacha Avelin

Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition. ~ John Portman

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) ~ Nancy Fichtman Dana

All the beautiful orders of architecture and creations of the pencil, all the conceptions of the beautiful in nature and art and humanity, are inventions extorted, as it were, from the mind to extend and increase the pleasures of sense. ~ Elihu Burritt

Mr Norrell determined to establish himself in London with all possible haste. "You must get a house, Childermass," he said. "Get me a house that says to those that visit it that magic is a respectable profession - no less than Law and a great deal more so than Medicine."
Childermass inquired drily if Mr Norrell wished him to seek out architecture expressive of the proposition that magic was as respectable as the Church?
Mr Norrell (who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them in books, but who had never actually been introduced to a joke or shaken its hand) considered a while before replying at last that no, he did not think they could quite claim that. ~ Susanna Clarke

Let beauty influence the architecture of thought ~ Matthew Goff

Modern architects and engineers are still trying to understand how the ancient Greeks were able to build the Parthenon in ten years when the restoration of the monument has continued for more than three decades and is still not complete. What they have learned and shared along this arduous path of rediscovery is that the Greeks were highly skilled at building visual compensations into their structures. Columns were crafted and positioned to compensate for how the eye interprets what it sees at a distance. Subtle variances in the surface of platforms, columns, and colonnades provide the appearance of geometric proportion, whereas if they had worked from the perspective of a flat datum surface, the brain would interpret the results as being slightly skewed. ~ Christopher Dunn

To become aware of what is constant in the flux of nature and life is the first step in abstract thinking. The recognition of regularity in the courses of the heavenly bodies and in the succession of seasons first provides a basis for a systematic ordering of events, and this knowledge makes possible a calendar ... Simultaneously with this concept, a system of relationships comes into the idea of the world. Change is not something absolute, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic; its manifestation is a relative one, something connected with fixed points and a given order. ~ Hellmut Wilhelm

Opening up to perceive and interact with subtle energies can drastically change your life; it can help you find clarity, bring peace into your life, empower yourself and others, and create effective change within our world. ~ Mat Auryn

The Classic games were Classic because, like classical music or architecture, they strove to give life and weight to ideals of order and proportion, to provide a vision of timelessness. In 'Double Dragon,' we can see the cracks in the brick, the mold growing on the drainage pipes, the unmistakable deterioration of the world we live in. ~ D. B. Weiss

Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book. ~ Terence McKenna

It's like making a sandwich. I start with the bread and the meat. That's the architecture. Add some cheese, lettuce and tomato. That's character development and polishing. Then, the fun part. All the little historical details and the slang and the humor is the mayonnaise. I go back and slather that shit everywhere. The mayo is the best part. I'm a bit messy with the mayo. ~ Laini Giles

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya. ~ Judith Clancy

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art ~ Daniel H. Pink

This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture. ~ Malcolm Miller

Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments. ~ Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

I am big supporter of the idea of a global anti-corruption movement - but one that begins by recognizing that the architecture of corruption is different in different countries. The corruption we suffer is not the same as the corruption that debilitates Africa. But it is both corruption, and both need to be eliminated if the faith in democracy is not going to be destroyed. ~ Lawrence Lessig

I'm involved in everything from highly progressive lighting systems to airline interiors. In the field of transportation I can go from the micro to the macro: architecture, transportation, industrial product design, right across the board. It's Russian dollism, because they all interrelate: one goes into the other. ~ Ross Lovegrove

In one sense, burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don't need doors; they'll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall (or underneath the floorboards, or up in the trusses of an unlit crawl space). They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only wish we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by laws that hold the rest of us in. ~ Geoff Manaugh