"Indigenous architecture tends to the small and round, though, following the model of nests and dens and burrows and redds and eggs and wombs—as if there were some universal pattern for home."

The telephone, as much as the elevator, had made skyscrapers possible... "How many messages do you supposed go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility."

"It is terrifying how quickly an ordered structure dissolves. Where does it all go? Buildings, like anything, are mostly empty space."

"If... certain types of thought require certain types of spaces, then any attempt at 'context collection' will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities."

"Urban experience is a state of tension maintained against the instinct to disperse."

"Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along."

"A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay... In a publish space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place... those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat."

"And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town? Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses." — Wittgenstein