"I intensely dislike generalisations."

"Indeed, the real product of genuine systems analysis is not solutions but wisdom. To wit, understanding that excessive complexity is both costly and perilous and that management in the sense of control is unachievable. This would lead us to see that the proper (or only) way to “manage” civilization is by not allowing it to become too complex—in fact, deliberately designing in restraints, redundancy, and resiliency, even if the price is less power, freedom, efficiency, or profit than we might otherwise gain through greater complexity." from Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, CreateSpace, North Charleston, SC (2012)

”Soon after I enter Decentraland, I fall through a fountain and land in a bar, where an octopus is serving drinks. In the corner, two bots are having a scripted conversation about why the NFTs on display in the metaverse are superior to physical artworks. (It’s because they aren’t hidden away in a collector’s archive.) At least at the Tate my ability to view the art isn’t limited by my computer’s processing power, I think, as I try — unsuccessfully — to order a virtual pint from the octopus."

"...the four horsemen of late-stage capitalism: inequality, austerity, deregulation and privatisation." The Guardian, Tue 11 Sep

"If you are playing a miser, always emphasise their generosity".

"Hyper-mobile societies are anonymous and paranoid societies."

"Do not touch the federal agent."

"One of the effects of the lottery bonanza has been to create a group of clients with great ambition but little building experience."

"The current mantra of "try a new procurement system every five minutes", spearheaded by bean-counters and the Egan brigade, means novice clients are being encouraged to enter into novel forms of procurement where the traditional role of their architect, their principal adviser, has been sidelined as part of an inappropriate efficiency drive. These new procurement methods remove a service traditionally provided (and paid for) by one party and include it as part of the duties of another, in the hope that the charge will disappear."

"Getting things built is difficult enough when everyone knows the score and is being paid properly to do their bit."

"A cynic might note that when things go wrong, and everybody involved in the actual building has a bloody miserable time of it, it is business as usual for our colleagues in the legal profession."

"If you want to see examples of beautifully designed work in the £250K bracket, you are unlikely to see it in a hospital or library. You will see it in a one-off wine bar or restaurant or advertising agency; these building types are often fizzing with ingenuity … Unfortunately all that hard work has a lifespan of about 20 minutes. In the meantime, the public has to sit in unbelievably gruesome waiting rooms or work in awful neon-lit offices for years and years."

"All really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.”

"I am cleverer than a whippet."

"Transparency is the enemy of profit."

"Design and Build is fine for those who know precisely what they want, but are not too particular as to what they get."

"My team does not appreciate my humming, which I find helps me concentrate".

"I'm not very good with light"

"Mistakes are valuable guides: they should not be forgotten or concealed. Rocks and reefs are chartered on maps as a warning to sailors - shouldn't we do the same with our mistakes and failures?"

"Enthusiasm is like the fire that keeps the steam engine going."

"It takes an architect to think up the problems which can only be solved by an engineer. Which is why I find life so complex."

"You can see the ball go past them, or the man, but you'll never see both man and ball go past at the same time. So if the ball goes past, the man won't, or if the man goes past they'll take the ball."

"That boy throws a football farther than I go on holiday."

"To be extraordinarily happy and have no concern for money drives some people nuts."

"In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture."

"... I have painted the walls of my new flat the colour of the macaroons from Laduree. It's very restful."

"The only way we can actually preserve things for the future and look after the environment is to change how we live, to use fewer resources, to value things in another way."

" ... sunglasses are the exemplary modern product, a neat synthesis of redundant technology and frivolous fashion, functional and irrational all at the same time."

"Christmas is a design calamity. Form and function are at odds: symbol and substance go veering off on madly divergent vectors."

"You can't sit in that. It's a family show."

"The evidence is clear:bad things happen literally every time organisations become large."

"Who painted the Sistine Chapel?". "Wasn't it Underwood's of Batley?" .

"What strikes you about a prison is not that it's unlike any place you have ever been in, but that it's quite like lots of places you have been in. "

"They always have oval heads and are wholly intent on using the space the architect has so thoughtfully provided."

"The trolley will shortly be coming through with a selection of hot and cold snacks, tea and other beverages. For your information, pushing the trolley this morning is Miss Castleford 1996."

"Walton-Hayfield. On 26th March 2008, to Rebecca and Mark, a precious son Ptolomy Ned, brother to the gorgeous Atticus Monty, and the beautiful Octavius Kit."

“To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”

"When you read 1984, were you aware that it was a novel, not an instruction manual?"

"When Nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and Commerce settles in every tree."

"My worst hotel? Modern designer hotels where it takes you half an hour to turn on a tap or the lights in your room. They're designer-mad and nothing to do with usability. Even flushing the loo can be a big operation."

"Post-apocalypse science fiction has been moved - it can now be found in current affairs."

"A smile is the shortest distance between two people."

"I realise that ... there's no such thing as perfection. My wife is an architect."

"That one blew out the candles on the birthday cake."

"Most problems are people problems, and most people problems are communication problems. If you want to make progress, go and give someone a damned good listening to."

"The house was designed to satisfy the growing trend for contemporary living with a minimalist approach to interior design and use of modular furniture."

"The main criticisms were poor ventilation, noise from surrounding buildings and the media attention on the project."

"We have defrosting breaks."

"All progress is based on a universal innate desire of every organism to live beyond its income."

'There is no way that anyone at Apple could have come up with that bloody paper clip or "My Documents". You can imagine Bill Gates with drawers labelled "My Socks", "My Hats", "My Shoes". Apple shows that computers can be simple without infantilising us".

"Sure it used to be a shed, but that was part of its appeal; it was a clean and tidy shed with a few shops and a catering establishment that did a passable impression of a pub. Now it has acquired airs and graces and aggravation - and lost its grip on reality."

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch procejt, it deosnt mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter."

"It’s surprising how well the building works, once people surrender to its limitations." ... about Mies van der Rohe’s Berlin Art Gallery.

"It's surprising how well the building works, once people surrender to its limitations" on Mies van der Rohe’s Berlin Art Gallery.

"I still would prefer straight to slanted walls, so as to put up bookshelves and a blackboard."

"We are now entering a period of consequences."

"Every no takes you one step closer to a yes".

"Most politicians are incompetent with a veneer of competence. You seem to do it the other way round. "

"A sustainable school is one that turns into a chiropody clinic over seventy years."

"Without innovation we are left with traditional methods which are no better than poorly managed new systems."

"Don't call me ubiquitous. You can say I'm crap. But don't say I'm ubiquitous."

"When entering the building, I have to pretend I'm a normal human being!"

"No bugger in Barnsley has heard of Scott Fitzgerald. "

"Wouldn’t it be more sensible and less dangerous to take the view that losing is simply not winning and leave it at that?"

"To remove this label, peel it off."

"Sincerity is the juice of hypocrisy"

"Complexity is profitable. That's why bankers compiled a single collateralised debt obligation with four million pages of data backup. ... Complexity makes people believe you understand it."

"When they start demolishing your life's work, it is a depressing experience buit it shouldn't be. "

"It's all very funny if you like laughing".

"Space is a medium of communication that tells you immediately how unimportant you are."

"Kitsch-me-quick housing estates "

Q: Does the creation of design admit constraints? A: Design depends largely on constraints.

I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work.

"I’ve not failed ten thousand times. I’ve successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work."

"Five per cent of the (UK) construction industry is world class. The rest is crap."

"If we knew what we were doing it would not be called research, would it?"

"This is the nearest humanity has got to reproducing itself in metal"

"Architects understand technology as metaphors."

"We sell dreams and install nightmares!"

"Jack's courses are like hot-air dryers in toilets. They are a good idea but take too long."

"Keyboard malfunction. Press F1 for help."

"At least the ideas are recycled."

"In my experience low maintenance means impossible to maintain."

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."

"Our leaders have harmed the economy by treating common interests as a hindrance to the wealth accumulation of a few, and neglected the institutions, people and professions most needed in a time of crisis."

"Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish."

"All you learn from prototypes is that most changes for the better turn out to be for the worst."

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."

"The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done."

"Government does not impose product quality requirements directly on upstream materials and components manufacturers, but onto designers and builders."

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."

"They're part of the reason that things are ugly, but don't realise it."

"The future’s already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed."

"I got rid of the Ferrari: it was bad for my hamstrings."

 "My heart was bigger than my head."

"Originality and innovative potential are more important than the actuality of its performance."

"...the construction industry provides an example of a federation of villages at work. Each job has to be treated differently, so that consistency must be left to the lowest common denominators. Sub-contracting is an accepted principle of the work. Attempts to rationalise the CI ... failed to have their expected impact. The nature of the work does not suit Apollo."

"An implicit and almost universal assumption….is that the (environmental) problem … has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values."

"Murray Angry At Losing His Temper. "

"Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build"

"Wavell had a shrewd, penetrating mind and an immunity to cant and conventional wisdom. [He] first labelled the Versailles Treaty ... "the peace to end all peace". He understood that politicians invariably found ways to create disasters, which soldiers, like himself, had to clean up."

"I wanted to prove to my friends that I was still fit."

"All this adds up to is a philosophy which can be succinctly expressed as 'love the assets, not sweat the assets' and 'just in case, not just in time".

"It's a no-win situation, a competition, except that, obviously, somebody does"

"We have got to stop the corporate sector driving us into conditions which they claim we want."

"Thisldo."

"I’d rather have 5% less productivity and a world to pass on to the next generation"

"Nanotriumph: The length of time it takes before a new set of Venetian blinds don't quite work properly."

"If God is in the detail, Ikea is on the atheistical side of agnostic."

"Meanwhile it's a relief to know that the people who might be to blame are not in fact to blame."

"The problem with assumptions is that we always assume they are right."

"Standardisation is the parent of stagnation". Dark Age Ahead, 2004, p119

"Perhaps the greatest folly for a culture is to try to pass itself on by using principles of efficiency". Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004, page 160)

"To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy."

"Multi-functional bio-diverse green space network." Planning jargon for 'field'.

"Angry Raisins."

"I think it's impossible to live in a room which isn't at least 13 feet tall. Don't you?"

"We tend to report rather than predict. You won’t see us out there saying what the PC is going to look like in 2016. We quietly go try to invent the PC for 2016."

"The paradox of public transport is the better it does its job the less 'efficient' it may be."

"[In the 20th century] ... we built a really inefficient environment with the greatest efficiency ever known to man"

"Answering machines and old people. That's not a good combination, I find."

"Shyness is egotism out of its depth"

"Alas nothing is more subject to losing value by going out-of-date than something that is valued solely for being up-to-date."

"The necessities were going by default to save the luxuries until I hardly knew which were necessities and which luxuries."

“I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.” (fungible = easy to exchange)

"A system without feedback is stupid. You keep making the same old mistakes rather than interesting new ones."

"Regulation is always at least one major blunder behind the cutting edge of worst practice."

"The UK has spent two decades Eganising the wrong things."

"The best way to understand old buildings is to talk to old people. Unfortunately the old people we need to talk to are so old they have been dead for a long time. Hence, we have to use a new tool unknown in the Internet age—books—and really old ones that are typically written in some language other than English by some long dead European."

"If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock', then everyone looks lovely."

"What does less swearing and funnier mean? "

"Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?"

"Modern life is rubbish".

"Being healthy ... means being alive to our lives in their fullness. It means responding to the world and our inner state honestly and openly."

"The first time I saw the Rietveld Schroder House I keeled over and broke my ankle in excitement."

"In 1939 there wasn't just concern for the future of the country it was also a troubling time for Queen of the South." Queen of the South is a football club based in Dumfries, Scotland

"The house builders' biggest mistake is making their houses too big. Very few are small and compact. Most people tend to build 15 to 25 per cent bigger than they need. It's a sort of disease".

”’I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the English language.”

" ... science is no longer science when it makes up factual statements to conform to people’s preferences.",

"Architecture in Britain is becoming a culturally reductive retrovirus."

"I learned French the hard way: from a Spaniard. "

"Of all the adaptation schemes, the least effective is denial."

"It is better to be on the ground wishing to God you were in the air, than in the air wishing to God you were on the ground."

"Quiet Sheep."

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

"A management technique is something which can be used instead of a brain."

"If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn't have had the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap."

"A constrained world cannot afford the rich."

"The life I lead is very autobiographical."

"I don't mind the outside. The inside could give us trouble. It's an inflexible design."

"There are few things more likely to annoy busy people than a computer that thinks it is really helpful."

"Fink dslow drink drive"

"Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to"

“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

”Ladies in shorts and gentlemen with naked torsos are invited to forbid themselves to enter the church." Church notice, French Pyrenees. Source: Memex 1.1 blog

"All I really want is seamless integration between devices and the death of cables"

"Good design is about problem-solving under constraints - design has to have a goal of achieving some purpose."

"People often overestimate the impact of change in the short term, but they also underestimate it in the long term"

"To Mavis Enderby and Old Bolingbroke. The Gift of a Son "

"... big windows mean big problems"

"Standards ... are highly detailed prescriptions for certain aspects of action and so intended to formally institutionalise particular behaviour” Sustainable Energy for All: Innovation, Technology and Pro-Poor Green Transformations, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2016, p. 123

I never thought playing with Plasticine would lead to such a glamorous lifestyle."

"I was intrigued to see Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC, born His Serene Highness Prince, referred to as "socially ambitious" .

"Many spatial dependencies are so thoroughly built into our constructed environment that little can be done about them."

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

"We founded the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust over lunch.  Duck, I think it was."

"An excessive dependence on narrow targets and an inability to work for “system-wide efficiency” have become the dominant characteristics of layer upon layer of command-and-control bureaucracy. ... so-called "unintended consequences abound."

"Measures taken to promote genuinely sustainable improvements in society ... are fighting all the time against the kind of consumerist, materialistic values that governments feel they have to stick to in order to keep the wheels of the economy turning."

"I refuse to die to this music."

"Building regulations!? What do you mean building regulations!?? Where do you get these from?"

"Is there anything you do that's not sustainable?"

"Do not eat the blackcurrant jam: it tastes of fish."

"We can't really demolish it until we finish building it."

“In our business, the 'truth' is mostly unknowable and takes many forms. In any case, it is less important than practical utility."

"Work comes in two varieties: the first involves altering the position of matter relative to the earth’s surface; the second is telling other people to do so. The first is agreeable and well-paid; the second is not.” Paraphrase of Bertrand Russell's original in context of piece on human sweating.

"The politically acceptable is ecologically disastrous while the ecologically necessary is politically impossible. " Wackernagel, M. & Rees, W. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. British Columbia: New Society Publishers (1996)

Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.

"In the UK, post-occupancy evaluation is about people and making their lives better at lower cost to all. In the US it seems to be more about product validation."

"He (Alfred Wainwright) told me that his mother hid him a drawer when visitors came."

"Q: What can the UK construction industry learn from the USA? A: ... there is much more opportunity for discussion during meetings ... in the UK we are more concerned about sticking to the agenda."

"This is a luvvies award - an award for doing it, not for doing it well."

"“A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.”

"In geographical parlance, the built environment produces space-time; it is naturalized as the taken-for-granted and normal. This means that changing the built environment is as much a social and psychological challenge as it is a physical and financial one. "

"I try not to meet people I despise in case I find out they’re not that bad after all."

"The easier it is for you to access your data, the easier it is for someone else to access your data."

"Fifty thousand flies can't be wrong."

"I can't see any clouds on the horizon. I assume they're there, though."

"The chief cause of problems is solutions."

"First see that the design is wise and just; that ascertained; pursue it resolutely."

"I've seen many low-carbon designs but hardly any low-carbon buildings."

"And who would run, that's moderately wise, a certain danger for a doubtful prize." John Pomfret (1667-1702)

"In general, if you pick an academic field X and google “the end of X”, you’ll find an essay from the last decade wondering if it’s over — or declaring outright that it is."

"If the choice is between cooking alive and wasting money unnecessarily I would rather waste some money, because long before we cook we are going to kill each other if we don't deal with climate change."

".. absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

"Climate and sustainability professionals should be at the very epicenter of innovation and strategic learning within institutions, businesses and communities. They rarely are. That’s because in most settings, climate and sustainability professionals are not getting paid to change important things, they’re getting paid to protect important things from change."

"No it bloody isn't. It's supposed to be like that."

"It is easier to introduce new complications than resolve the old ones."

"Designers know too much about the equipment to make a good user interface. It is hard to be ignorant when you know so much."

" Designers should be clever and creative and give users time to catch up with them. You make progress by collaboration between user and designer with prototypes ."

"I have tried minimalism and it stinks."

"They seemed so bloody smug I had to fight an uncontrollable urge to whip out a paintball gun and spray the whole lot with some non-approved shade of duck-egg blue."

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . .”

"No strategy is viable that steals from the future to support the present".

"Every time history repeats itself the price goes up."

"You get three rotations for seven pounds."

“I'm not going to sing the one that she asked me for because, ... I can't actually... I can't remember a lot of the words. But I'll tell you what, if it's any consolation, the one I'm going to sing will have a lot of the same ... notes.”

"This Monty Python: is he one of us?"

"We can only discuss quality when we are sure of purpose. "

"... This is such a crucial point for us as designers - don’t struggle to reconcile impossible criteria, reframe the brief upstream".

"Is this the second turning on the left?"

"We will be visiting Huddersville, Holmfirth and York."

"The worst linguistic poseurs are those who use the word 'feedback'. It is the number one pretentious word. "

"... You can be wrong by being right too soon". Quoted by Simon Jenkins in the context of exclusive news reports.

"At all costs we must learn to avoid self-imposed constraints."

"In case of fire do not panic. Dial 9 and warm reception."

"Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do."

"We've privatised the rewards and socialised the risks."

"People have stopped counting their blessings."

"Research is all about self-perpetuation, answers are the very last thing you want, only more research pays the mortgage and the Guardian subscription."

"The key to success is being able to save some contingency - but whatever you do, don't call it that."

"At first, people grinned and mugged and went "Whoa!", as ferry passengers do when first coming to terms with the swell. But after a few minutes of being unable to walk without your legs crossing under you like a pair of scissors, it became annoying. Tony (Caro), Norman (Foster) and Ove (Arup), we said to ourselves, come and explain to us again how this thing is supposed to work. "

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."

"Theory is when you know what should happen, but you can't get it to work. Practice is when things more or less work, but nobody knows why. Combining theory and practice is when nothing works and nobody knows why. "

"Theory is when you know what should happen, but you can’t get it to work. Practice is when things more or less work, but nobody knows why. Combining theory and practice is when nothing works and nobody knows why."

"There’s been a tendency lately, especially in Silicon Valley, to accept the whole motto of “failing forward.” Or “failing fast.” They’re very good at accepting failure there. But they’re not any better than anyone else at learning from failure, because they then make the same mistakes over and over again. You want people to take meaningful risks and learn from them. That’s where the action is, when it comes to innovation."

"Seek simplicity and distrust it. "

"Hoodezfield"

" Do you want a new building, a DNA sequencer, or a salaried post?"

"If you save the living environment, you will automatically save the physical environment. But if you only try to save the physical environment, you will lose them both."

"You don't want to say more. You want to say less. Less is good."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity."

“I am not interested in erecting a building, but in [...] presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings.”

"The fact that the South Buckinghamshire District Council offices are in Slough, Berkshire, really does make you wonder whether their hearts are in it."

"Q: Who led the pedant's revolt? A: Which Tyler."

"Twenty minutes of feeling a wee bit uncomfortable."

"The case for vapour open materials needs to be stated much more strongly, with stronger warnings of the dangers of plastic insulation."

"The only snag was that it wasn't practical."