architects-from-the-united-states

"Some of them act as though they want to bar me but I walk in, throw my cards down and I'm in. My money talks."

"The house and its surroundings are intimately connected with the home, each modifies the other. Hawthorne's , Poe's , there reports of investigations of housing committees, , all tell us the same story. The dwellers in a house put their stamp upon it, even when they have left it empty it reflects something of their characters and habits from its walls and floors, from the very air which has surrounded them. Still more the house modifies the home and the people who dwell in it. Disease and death come more frequently to the damp, unventilated house than to the sunlit one. The inconvenient house, making irksome the necessary work, influences the dispositions of all under its roof. The quiet dignified house with a beautiful outlook brings soothing and inspiration."

"A convenient kitchen is one in which the necessary work can be done with the least possible effort. To plan such a kitchen requires at least two things. First, there must be a clear idea of all the routine jobs to be done in the kitchen in the order that they are most likely to come. , cooking, serving, clearing away and are the jobs that follow each other most often in the majority of kitchens. Second, after the plan of work is clearly in mind, comes the choosing and placing of the needed equipment. The relation of the kitchen to the rest of the house, especially the dining portion, also plays an important part in convenience."

"A two-year study made by Gray (3) of one family's food during the indicated that even intelligent persons living on a very low income are likely to have a deficient diet. The of the three women in this family, two of whom were college students, furnished per person per day 2372 Calories, 41 grams , 0.59 gram , 0.79 gram , and 0.000754 gram iron. ... 3. Gray, Greta. One family's food during the depression. Jour. Home Econ. 27:24-25. 1935."

"The garden has always been subject to two main influences—the outer influence from the and the inner from the house."

"It was who spurred the design of , bringing from Chicago to plan his last great triumph in the late 1920s."

"In this magnum opus, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the and a longtime administrator of that celebrated oasis, stakes out and cultivates a breathtakingly vast terrain: the history of man-made landscape from to the present. Though Rogers focuses on a number of well-known gardens and parks — from of A.D. 118-38 outside Rome to Antonio Gaudí's of 1900-14 in Barcelona — her subject is less than the social interaction of various cultures with their natural settings. Encompassing as much as , this panoramic study is impressive not only for its encyclopedic scope but also for the author's authoritative command of so much diverse material and for her lucid writing."

"Named to the Yale faculty in 1945 as assistant professor of , he eventually became director of Yale's graduate course in |city planning when it was initiated in 1950 and which he directed for the next decade. In 1962 he became professor of city planning and in 1965 he was named chairman of the department. In September 1969, as the result of a major reorganization of Yale's School of Art and Architecture, which split the school into two divisions, Professor Tunnard was appointed director of studies in planning, and remained in that post until his retirement in 1975."

"The - manner of looking at nature according to the principles of painterly composition is symbolized by a device known as a . Reputedly invented as an aid by the painter , it was a convex, dark-toned glass that reflected landscapes in miniature, with "" tints and merging detail. It was popular with s and gentlemen travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and was still used in the first half of the nineteenth century."

"My personal emotional response to , like that of so many others, is sensory—stretching out on a large sun-warmed rock outcrop, watching players and picnickers on the , seeing a great production of The Tempest in the in the gloaming of a summer evening, a flash of red from the plumage of a on a spring day in , walking barefoot on the grass of the , the memory of on the frozen on New Year's Day 1981, listening to the moody sound from a saxophone being played beneath the one of the park's reverberating stone arches ... I could go on."

"The recent obituaries of gave a measure of tribute to his engineering innovations at . It was undoubtedly he who conceived of tracks, bridges and buildings all in a single structural entity; the double-deck track fan to save space and the loop connection to circulate the trains. It was he who worked out all the details with the first official architects, , but to these winners of the competion for the new station goes the credit for the device for looping on "exterior circumferential elevated driveways" instead of through the centre of the station athwart the concourse as Wilgus had suggested."

"During the summer of 1966 and in subsequent years, operated as the venue for rock 'n' roll, jazz, , pop, and concerts sponsored by . Overlooking the objections of his recently appointed Central Park curator, , played on the public's justifiable fear that the park had become unsafe at night: "It's my responsibility to make it so exciting that people will come there in droves, and that also is protection." He did not foresee the event to which his "attractions to draw teenagers" would stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in the park, nor the effect this would have on the park's landscape and future safety."

"faced the challenge of converting what was still a ragged 843-acre wasteland into a pleasure ground that is a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence, while my task was not to build such an extraordinary civic amenity but to develop a plan and find the means to rescue this underappreciated, wholly original tour de force from further destruction—a less remarkable but nevertheless important feat."

"[Success is] that old ABC — ability, breaks and courage."

"If we have no faith in ourselves and in the kind of future we can create together, we are fit only to follow, not to lead. Let us remember that the Bible contains two proverbs we cannot afford to forget. The first is "Man does not live by bread alone" and the second is "Where there is no vision, the people perish.""

"The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth."

"A few years ago Peter Van Dresser mentioned the Clothesline Paradox."

"We’ve built two greenhouses utilizing the beadwall, and our test results show... it will do much of the heating and cooling required by an average office building or home."

"Solar energy advocates are continuously humiliated by being shown "energy pies." Slices are assigned to coal, gas, oil, hydroelectric and even nuclear. but is evidently too small to appear."

"Peter Van Dresser... built a solar heater here in New Mexico in 1956 or '58. We published his book, Landscape for Humans. One of the greatest forces... has been Harold Hay from California. ...I ...heard him in ’68 at the Solar Energy Conference. I had... a design and... modest success... Harold showed everyone... dead simple methods of doing the same job. He... completely changed my head around on how to attack these problems. ...[W]e’ve worked together a lot since then trying to bring some reforms into the Solar Society."

"I found out that the people at were building domes and I went up there and helped... Then they came down and helped me. ...We built the first structures from car tops. We chopped the tops out of over a thousand cars... ...[W]e paid 25 cents apiece for them. ...They’re a good building material ...except that getting stuff from junkyards ...is ...bad for your ...mentality. You... become a parasite on something you criticize... You’re feeding on something you hate."

"At one time an individual could fix everything in his life with his thumb nail or his teeth. ...I believe the ground rules can be transformed so that technology simplifies life instead of continually complicating it."

"[W]hen you're experimenting, about 80% of the ideas you try are failures... But we put all these concepts together and they performed the first time. ...[W]e had pretested most of the ideas we incorporated into this [our] home. We'd never used aluminum-skinned, honeycomb-cored structural sandwiches and... no one had... fabricated a complete building from the material... but every architectural and engineering book mentions the possibility... The 55-gallon, water-filled drums... [W]e... knew the amounts of energy... such... could pick up."

"[T]he philosophical tactics and... approach taken by the giant corporations and... power groups miss the point... A pencil can break on you and you can sharpen it with your thumbnail and go right on... but if a circuit board or a resistor or condenser quits somewhere inside this recorder, we’re stopped and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. ...[Y]et we increasingly use tape recorders instead of pencils."

"I don't think that building everything out of stones and living in animal skins is necessarily... healthier... I'm saying... life can be much more satisfying for an individual if he feels that he is in control of his destiny... Society and the tools of society, should be organized to give each one of us that feeling."

"[W]hen I was... 18 I... read... Lewis Mumford and... [saw] that... we could have a science and technology... understood and controlled by the individual instead of the other way around. ...I've been trying to crack the crap in science for 15 or 16 years now."

"[T]here's Dave Harrison's bead wall. I teach... classes at the University of New Mexico and Dave... one of my students... said. "...I've got this idea of building a wall out of two panes of glass... and you can blow Styrofoam beads between the panes at night to insulate the wall." ...Here's a problem ...nobody has thought of a way to solve. I've tried... and... Harold Hay has... and... a lot of others... Dave Harrison has the answer! ...[A] ...low-tech ...answer ...simple ...easy to understand, that a heating and ventilating man in any town can fix... [W]e’ve made a deal with Dave so that he’ll get a big part of any royalties we realize..."

"[T]he beadwall insulated window panels... this wonderful invention of David C. Harrison’s... a kind of super curtain that... transform[s] a clear dual-panel of glass into an opaque, well-insulated wall and back again."

"[W]ith its unique construction—there are never any air leaks."

"[I]f folks don’t like the idea once they’ve given it the once-over, we’ll be glad to buy the plans back at the full $15.00 purchase price."

"If you... remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy which is now drying clothes."

"We have associated the thirty-one zone star throughout with the icosahedron and... dodecahedron. It also fits perfectly with the three smaller regular polyhedra. The , the and the fit inside the icosahedron and... dodecahedron. Their vertices touch a vertex, an edge midpoint or a face midpoint of the larger figure. This regular match... positions the smaller figure so that regular patterns on the large figure project inwards as regular patterns on the small figure. In each case either five or ten small figures fit at once within the larger..."

"Five fold symmetry does appear among other symmetries in nature."

"Each of the regular polyhedra is thus a convenient core from which to define the regular thirty-one zone star. The geometric regularities insure simplicity in the connections. Any one of the regular polyhedra can be used with the same pattern of flanges or holes on each of its faces as a connector for the thirty-one zone structural system."

"The regular polyhedra are like seeds from which growths may appear. They are the connecting joints for the zonohedra."

"The forms possible using this system are limitless; there is no attempt here to explore these possibilities—the examples shown are small probings. The booklet describes the mathematics of the process that creates these limitless forms."

"Zonohedra have bands of parallel edges. Any such band... can be stretched to alter the shape of the zonohedron. Stretching the band... does not alter any angles."

"[[w:Recursion|[R]ecursive]] growth... In the case of... five fold symmetry there isn't uniformity. ...Instead of reproducing itself... it becomes steadily more intricate."

"The joint must... be strong and inexpensive. If the joint is a ball and the A, B and C connections are... holes which the members screw into... holes of the same type... and the ends of all structural members are identical. ...[Y]ou can't make mistakes..."

"I have applied for a patent on this structural system. The patent is assigned to Zomeworks Corporation. The predecessors of this system are the octet truss and the MERO space grid system. The relative potentials of these systems are discussed briefly by a comparison of their geometric possibilities."

"Zomes can cluster together like soap bubbles. Their zones can be stretched, shrunk, or omitted completely to make the various zomes' different shapes and sizes. The zomes can also pack several layers deep."

"The , because of its shape and the arrangement of its structural members is extremely strong, but its uses are limited because of the inflexibility of its shape. It is always part of a sphere... any variation would destroy the structural properties... It is complicated in structure and simple in shape. Zomes are simple in structure and complicated in shape."

"The and the are duals of each other—the vertices of one match the face midpoints of the other and vice versa."

"Stretching zones allows... buildings of different shapes using the same kinds of components."

"The icosahedron and the dodecahedron have five fold symmetry. They cannot occur as crystals."

"The coherence proof demonstrates that if one builds a structure using the A and B lines of the 31 zone star (...C lines ...used only within ...forms defined by ...A and B lines) and always follow the rule... no matter how far or intricately one builds, two extensions of two entirely different limbs of the same structure can always be locked back together in a perfect fit with a combination of our simple parts."

"Holly had... toys made from polyhedra and she built one of these things and... it... blew my mind... I... found some mathematics books that described the geometry of polyhedra and convex figures. This wasn't too difficult since I had always been fascinated by math. It was the subject I had spent the most time on in school and... was studying at the time."

"[W]e left and... moved to Albuquerque where I worked as a surveyor and... welding trailer frames for Fruehof and Holly had a job and we didn’t spend much... I began to experiment more and more with structures."

"I went to in Massachusetts for a couple of years and I went to UCLA for a year or two and then I went back to Amherst... I never quite fit... that... college thing. ...I joined the Army in 1960 and got married and Holly and I went to Germany... after I got out of the Army, I went to school in ."

"So many... good ideas... worked... but they couldn’t keep working. Some of the first buildings we put up weren’t good buildings because they leaked. Many of those first solar heaters weren’t... very good..."