"The soft underbelly of my refined upbringing is my soft underbelly."

Andy Bernard, The Office.

"Monumentality is enigmatic: It cannot be intentionally created. Neither the finest material nor the most advanced technology need enter a work of monumental character for the same reason that the finest ink was not required to draw up the Magna Carta."

Louis Kahn, The Need for a New Monumentality (1944).

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London cafes: the surprising history of London's lost coffeehouses →

Despite these diversifications, coffeehouses all followed the same formula, maximising the interaction between customers and forging a creative, convivial environment. On entering, patrons would be engulfed in smoke, steam, and sweat and assailed by cries of “What news have you?” or, more formally, “Your servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?” Rows of well-dressed men in periwigs would sit around rectangular wooden tables strewn with every type of media imaginable - newspapers, pamphlets, prints, manuscript newsletters, ballads, even party-political playing cards. Unless it was a West End or Exchange Alley coffeehouse, the room would be cosy but spartan - shaved wooden floors, no cushions, wainscoted walls, candles, the odd spittoon. In the distance, a little Cupid-like boy in a flowing periwig would bring a dish of coffee. It would cost a penny and come with unlimited refills. Once a drink was provided, it was time to engage with the coffeehouse’s other visitors.

[…]

Coffeehouses brought people and ideas together; they inspired brilliant ideas and discoveries that would make Britain the envy of the world. The first stocks and shares were traded in Jonathan’s coffeehouse by the Royal Exchange (now a private members’ club); merchants, ship-captains, cartographers, and stockbrokers coalesced into Britain’s insurance industry at Lloyd’s on Lombard Street (now a Sainsbury’s); and the coffeehouses surrounding the Royal Society galvanized scientific breakthroughs. Isaac Newton once dissected a dolphin on the table of the Grecian Coffeehouse

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431

"Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement— One of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch. It can be compared only with the Classic discovery of man as a person, the Roman will to power, and the religious movement of the Middle Ages. Technology is far more than a method, it is a world in itself. As a method it is superior in almost every respect. But only where it is left to itself as in the construction of machinery, or as in the gigantic structures of engineering, there technology reveals its true nature. There it is evident that it is not only a useful means, that it is something, something in itself, something that has a meaning and a powerful form— so powerful in fact, that it is not easy to name it. Is that still technology or is it architecture? And that may be the reason why some people are convinced that architecture will be outmoded and replaced by technology. Such a conviction is not based on clear thinking. The opposite happens. Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture. it is true that architecture depends on facts, But its real field of activity is in the realm of the significance. I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit. Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names. Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form. That is the reason why technology and architecture are so closely related. Our real hope is that they grow together, that someday the one be the expression of the other. Only then will we have an architecture worthy of its name: Architecture as a true symbol of our time."

Three addresses were given at the Blackstone Hotel on April 17, 1950 in celebration of the addition of the Institute of Design to Illinois Institute of Technology.

Architecture and Technology
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Director, Department of Architecture
Illinois Institute of Technology

"Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind."

George Lois.

"This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold"

This is just to say by William Carlos Williams

"We have learnt to discover the beauty of bare stone."

Adolf Loos, Architecture, 1910.

"Hope is a memory that desires."

Balzac.