Quotes from Robin Evans

a paradox: architecture can only escape the flatness imposed by drawing through drawing.

Likeness is not identity; orthographic projection is not orthography; drawing is not writing and architecture does not speak.

It is often assumed that a symbol, while not necessarily representing a truth, represents a belief, and so speaks directly for a historical frame of mind.

An architecture devoted to its freezing and display could only be its mausoleum.

As time passes, what was once an unpredictable step sideways becomes a definitive step forward for art.

It is a conservation of momentum: what is diminished by time is augmented by the pencil. As the idea fades, the agitation around it has to increase to keep it alive; and as the scope of the architectural profession also reduces, the designer's visible impact on the object increases, as if to recall lost powers.

The truly haunting Other is not what lies outside the text but what lies outside the picturesque garden of the Western world.

Architecture led to the vanishing point which led to architecture.

Even were we to agree, we could notice that things do not develop by continuous extrusion through time like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

The mystery of building is that many things conspire to stand as one.

Art needs to be imaginatively undressed in order to be appreciated, and so does the world.

the opposite of man is woman. Language enable us to deny this, but makes affirmation easier.

Mathematics, after all, lives on unambiguous exactitude, whereas there are types of art that die of it.

A person alone in a room is like the soul in the body.

I do not wish integrity to be taken in some vague metaphorical sense; I mean it quite literally.

Imagination is not held within the mind, but it is potentially active in all the areas of transition from persons to objects or pictures. It operates, in other words, in the same zones as projection and its metaphors.

Design is action at a distance.

architecture begins and ends in pictures…

I am exalted at the thought that I see through his eyes as well as mine.

Is Ronchamp reminiscent of the Ark left stranded on Ararat, or like 'bits of broken china thrown on top of the hill'? Is the roof like a bird's wing, or does the whole edifice look like a decoy? Is it an alighting dove or a sitting duck? Good taste bids us to suppress the latter in favour of the former, although the latter is as easy to see.

the extent of Ronchamp's resemblance to other things is exceptionally broad. Nor is it only an issue of extent. More is at stake. The nature of the building alters drastically when what it resembles cannot be traced back to Le Corbusier's mind; it becomes less predictable and its meaning is less stable.