The reality of the building One day I went to my study at Taliesen to sit down and rest. I picked up a little book just received from the ambassador to America from Japan. It was called The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. I wonder how many of you have read it? Well, in that little book I came upon quotations from the great Chinese poet-prophet Laotze, things he had said five hundred years before Jesus. As I turned the pages I suddenly came across this: "The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in..." The answer is, reality is the space within, into which you can put something. In other words, the idea. And so it is with architecture; so it is with your lives; and so it is with everything you can experience as reality. You will soon find out for yourselves if you begin to work with this principle in mind, that things will open to you...Therein lies the secret of great peace, missing in Western Civilization today. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Book of Tea space
I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities The stoop is a space of spectatorship danceorder