“Ever since I was a child I’ve collected things: pebbles, shells from the rocks of Abruzzi, strands of wire, little screws. While I was still very young I remember something momentous happened in the form of a chicken my mother was preparing for our Sunday roast. In its stomach was a collection of glass and pebbles worn smooth by water, in shades of green, pink, black, brown and white. My mother gave them to me, and that was the start of my collection, which I kept in a little powder compact, a present from my Aunt Esterina, made from the blue steel of German guns abandoned after France’s victory in the First World War. I was six years old.” (Lina Bo Bardi)
“Taking architecture seriously ... means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread ... More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall - in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.” (Alain de Botton)“Living and architecture enjoy in Australia a curious, close relationship. Where else can one start a word association game with ‘architecture’, assured that the response will be, not ‘building’ or ‘city’ or ‘monument’, but ‘home’? What is more remarkable is this: if the prompting word in the game is changed to ‘living’, a high proportion of the responses will be the same word: ‘home’ … where they sleep and eat and rear children and watch telly and make cakes, tea and love—in private. So architecture and living are linked by home.” (Robin Boyd)