City as Landscape Quotes

“The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“Landscape planners will have the opportunity to make sculptured roofscapes, so that cities appear to be verdant hills and valleys. Streets will become shady routes carved through the undergrowth. Roofs will become mountain tops. People will become ants.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“It takes a poet to read a river and a community to make a response.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Beauty may reside in the eye of the beholder, but what we see is determined by what we expect to see.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Longer metaphors, in the form of stories, allow more sophisticated relationships: […] In planning, the boundaries between myth, history and fiction are not so consequential as one might think.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Walking through a town can be like flicking through a picture book.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp can be seen as a crab, a duck, a hand, a hat and much else. Utzon’s Sydney Opera House can be seen as shells, a flower, or sails. The soaring curves of Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York symbolise flight. The Archigram building concepts of the 1960s were designed as pods. Significantly, all these buildings were curvilinear. Curves ‘carry’ ideas from the natural world. Rectilinearity [stet] is a metaphor for intellectualism and the works of man. Renaissance architecture was a metaphor for reason and delight, restoring order after the chaos of the Middle Ages. Thoreau’s house, by Walden Pond, was a New Englander’s protest against materialism. Hundertwasser’s Viennese architecture is a metaphor for the reassertion of nature and emotion, after the brutalism of the twentieth century.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“More attractive metaphors create more popular buildings.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“Another famous town planning concept, the Finger Plan for Copenhagen, was based on a metaphor sand shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, the great hand has guided Copenhagen’s development. The merchant’s harbour, after which the city was named, sits in the palm of the guiding hand. Fingers point ways to new development. Power lines, telecom lines, and rapid transit lines follow the bones, arteries, veins and nerves of the fingers. Between those fingers we find the green lands of Denmark. Copenhagen was made into a garden city but the hand itself, of urban development, was grey.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“A metaphor carries an idea from one area of thought to another. Furniture can have feminine legs; a flower is the day’s eye (daisy); an error glares at you; drinks are soft; cash is hard; our lives have a spring and an autumn.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning

“To look after a medieval estate, one required a map, an indexed account book and an abacus. For its time, this was a highly sophisticated geographical information system. Looking after the earth and each of its parts requires more data, a better index and more data processing.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape