Quotes from Paul Shepheard’s What Is Architecture? #2

Two more quotes from Paul Shepheard’s What Is Architecture?.

When archaeologists started looking at the Greek temple precincts, they could not make out at first what principles of planning governed the relationships between buildings. They seemed haphazard and unaligned. It was not until the archaeologists unraveled the myths, and how the stories of creation were thought to inhabit the landscape, that they realized what was done. The buildings were placed in a landscape vigorous with meaning, They were set down, not in relation to each other, but into this—and I hesitate, to savor the phrase—this charged void. The people who discovered this say it like this, charg-ed void, in three syllables, to lend it mystery.

Great. And this:

There are illusions of form in literature. The pages of the books, with their margins and footnotes and headings, for one thing, and the structure of letter into word into sentence into paragraph, for the other. Well, it must impress itself onto our senses somehow. The words must have order and form enough to be perceivable, but how many ways there are for them to break into the physical world. Words can be spoken as well as written. They can be coded into morse. They can be transmuted into binary numbers and put on a compact disc and sent down wires. The content stays the same. Here’s Hazlitt’s essays on my desk. Here’s T. S. Eliot’s. The books are exactly the same, in structural terms. The structure that makes them different in a critical sense is a mental notion. It doesn’t exist.

The continued text (p. 75) is my top favorite passage so far.