Building and action interpenetrate

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its "thus and not otherwise". 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 169

The old wild is dead. But the new wild is flourishing.

The old wild is dead. But the new wild is flourishing, and will do better if we allow it to have its head. [...] Nature never goes back; it always moves on. Alien species, the vagabonds, are the pioneers and colonists in this constant renewal. Their invasions will not always be convenient for us, but nature will rewild in its own way.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 250

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire to see more nature on a larger scale than we have been used to. But if such efforts are to become something other than a large zoo or a theme park for scientists, if they are to be nature 'red in tooth and claw', open to evolutionary change and able to contribute to genuine ecological revival, then we have to let go and let nature take its course, however novel, however divorced from what we night like to think of as pristine nature.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 249

A miracle which is taking place every instant

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 10

The name is the only thing that remains constant

It never occurs to people that the one who finishes something is never the one who started it, even if both have the same name, for the name is the only thing that remains constant.

José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (The Harvill Press, 1998) p. 37

The complaints of change

It is useful, for example, to see three main periods of rural complaint in which a happier past is explicitly evoked: the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth; the late nineteenth and early twentieth. And it is clear enough that each of these corresponds to a period of exceptional change in the rural economy, which we find directly reflected in varying ways. But it is not only that each of these reflections comes to include other social and metaphysical ideas. It is also that the convention of the country as a settled way of life disturbed by unwanted and external change has been complicated, in our own century, by very similar ideas about towns and cities. The complaints of rural change might come from threatened small proprietors, or from commoners, or even, in the twentieth century, from a class of landlords, but it is fascinating to hear some of the same phrases – destruction of a local community, the driving out of small men, indifference to settled and customary ways – in the innumerable campaigns about the effects of redevelopment, urban planning, airport and motorway systems, in so many twentieth-century towns and even, very strongly, in parts of London. I have heard a defence of Covent Garden, against plans for development, which repeated in almost every particular the defence of the commons in the period of parliamentary enclosures. Clearly ideas of the country and the city have specific contents and histories, but just as clearly, at times, they are forms of isolation and identification of more general processes. People have often said 'the city' when they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralised power, while 'the country', as we have seen, has at times meant everything from independence to deprivation, and from the powers of an active imagination to a form of release from consciousness.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 291

Time has two aspects

Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years; and so on, one can count the orbits endlessly – an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time – it constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or non-cyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tony time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
[...]
Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore... If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chonosophy should provide a field in which relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 185-186

A change in the conditions of change

The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination. The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems that the historicist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 120

Blueprints

'Anna, it occurs to me – surely I can't be so bad – if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone... then it's a kind of blueprint for the future, isn't it?'
Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.434

We are at the goal constantly

I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 72

It is a desire to stand in the ritual unfolding of the world that inspires me to build, rather than only wander and see, for to build is to participate more fully in the great cycles of natural change. In building, I do not propose a return to nature, much less a return to primitivism, but an alignment of modern technology, including that of architecture, with cycles of change and the great powers both active and latent in the world.

Lebbeus Woods, Origins (Architectural Association, 1985) p. 42

The construction of a new city within and in opposition to an existing one amounts to an act of renunciation and even of violence, more lasting in its effects than those achieved by the gun. One need only compare the changes made to cities by modern warfare and by modern architecture to confirm this idea. The process of changing from one type of order to another is always violent. Over time, architecture can be the most potent weapon of change.

 Lebbeus Woods, 'Underground Berlin' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 50

Self-preserving cultures seek static equilibrium, the maintenance of a status quo, as the founding principle of social coherence. The means of this maintenance is conformity to standards and norms. Contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are intolerable in such societies, because they are inconsistencies that undermine requisite conventions.

Contemporary society is not self-preserving, but essentially self-transforming. It seeks dynamic equilibrium. Continual change is what it is based on, and what it needs above all else. This extends fully into the realm of knowledge, what it is and what it means today. Knowledge is no longer that inertial body of facts which enforces stasis, but is in fact the impetus to and energy driving change on every level of society and culture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

architecture resisting change, even as it flows from it, struggling to crystallise and be eternal, even as it is broken and scattered – architecture seeking nobility of presence, yet possessed of the knowledge that only the incomplete can claim nobility in a world of the gratuitous, the packaged, the promoted and the already sold – architecture seeking nobility of persistence in a world of the eternally perishing, itself giving way to the necessity of its moment

Lebbeus Woods, 'Turbulence' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 40

The architecture of tactility cannot be separated from the architecture of ephemerality, either in concept or in implementation.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 13

One does not participate by following the crisis of change, but by being part of its initiation.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11

The difference between the hierarchical and the heterarchical city is the difference between being and becoming.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11