The Dancing Column Quotes

“Orders mostly became “institutional vacuities”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture

“What Gaudi had attained by twisting the order to his peculiar missionary and structural purposes, Loos could only assert by isolation and giganticism: the supremacy of value pitted against the city of brute fact. The Doric order appeared to have been the ultimate historical form, the great human building achievement, unfettered by sculptural contingency or the base need for shelter. All of them – Gaudi, Sullivan and Loos, and Asplund – saw the Doric order as ultimate, though perhaps only for Loos did that imply the last ever, the last possible.”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture

“Perhaps the only possible answer to the primal estrangement is re-presentation, the constantly renewed ordering of the metaphoric experience and its re-enactment in the maturation process of the individual. And what representation is more elemental than reflection?”
― Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture