Compare & Contrast

“This is an awareness that a student cannot really get from listening, however attentively, to lectures, no matter how skilled and sympathetic the lecturer. Nor is he or she well placed to grasp it by looking at photos, though photos are certainly a help. It needs to be got, and can only be acquired from the presence of the thing itself.”

“It was being gradually borne in on me by Rome that one of the vital things that make a great city great is not mere raw size, but the amount of care, detail, observation, and love precipitated in its contents, including but not only its buildings. It is the sense of care—of voluminous attention to detail—that makes things matter, that detains the eye, arrests the foot, and discourages the passerby from passing too easily by. And it goes without saying “, or ought to, that one cannot pay that kind of attention to detail until one understands quite a bit about substance, about different stones, different metals, the variety of woods and other substances—ceramic, glass, brick, plaster, and the rest—that go to make up the innards and outer skin of a building, how they age, how they wear: in sum, how they live, if they do live.”

— Rome: A cultural, visual, and personal history by Robert Hughes

“By mixing the soil samples with water, she creates a rough form of paint, which she brushes onto watercolor paper. Matching the reddish, burnt-orange and ocher soils to paint chips, she hopes to find inspiration for the project’s color palette, “though at the time we’re collecting it, we don’t know what we’ll use it for,” she admits. Her goal: to communicate a sense of place.”

— Images for Wine in Down-to-Earth Designs by Julia Flynn Siler

“One’s interest in the past is, at a young age, minimal―it seems so distant and irrelevant and, in so many ways, imbued with the failure. The future is equally inconceivable; one is overwhelmed by the romance of possibility.”

— Rome: A cultural, visual, and personal history by Robert Hughes

“It is an inescapable part of the human condition that we live our lives on the knife edge of the present, forever trapped between an unchangeable past and an unknowable future. The attempts to measure time, from simply watching the heavenly bodies sail across the sky to building atomic clocks that are accurate to within a second a century, have been one of the great stories of human history.”

— The Watch Men by John Steele Gordon

“And of course the sense of it cannot come into existence, as a general characteristic of a city, unless the city has the charity and deliberation of something that has been made, preferably by hand, and bit by bit—unless you can see that the depth of a molding or the sculptural profile of a capital is not there by accident or habit, but by intent, by design. That it is wrought, not just slapped on. It is too much to expect that everything in a city should partake of this quality of attention and intention. But without it, you have a suburb, a mall, whatever you want to call it—not a real city.”

— Rome: A cultural, visual, and personal history by Robert Hughes

“The “smart bench”—an art project by designers JooYoun Paek and David Jimison that aims to illustrate the dangers of living in a city that is too smart—cleverly makes this point. Equipped with a timer and sensors, the bench starts tilting after a set time, creating an incline that eventually dumps its occupant.”

— Is Smart Making Us Dumb? by Evgeny Morozov