«Seeing implies a non-manipulated objective ‘vision’, whereas showing is always contaminated by a subjective will or strategy.»

«Fortunately, these programmed finalities are being diverted by the user, whose inventive or perverse reactions can never be included in the planning. There is no politics. There occurs a duel with an adequate opponent that too often is regarded as passive, but that too often does not follow the rules of the game. The user takes possession of an architectural project; even if there is no free space left, the user will rebuild an un-designed dimension. It is questioning the mastery of the architect: where he tries to assign a function to a place, others will turn it into a non-space and will invent another rule. This may be immoral, as Baudrillard states, but it is not positive values that advance the society, but immorality and vice.»

«Architecture is actually not to be found in its decoration, but it is structured by its decoration.»

«Nietzsche has already noted that a creator should always destroy and that the new forms can just be introduced by the destruction of old, existing ones. A creator is actually a destructor of value: ´And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.»

«Fictions are considered as artifices within practice. They are successful when they help, as Sloterdijk puts it, theory to pass into practice.»

«Thereby truth simply is the most appropriate error.»

«Architecture emerges, when it is visible, readable, or hearable. How to do this, cannot be determined by an objective procedure, because the rules, contained in every algorithmic method, have to be interpreted for every individual case, they have to be adapted to contexts, and they have to be realized under particular conditions. This always depends on subjective decisions of a designer- in the same way, as stock picking is a subjective decision of a broker.
Such decisions bring about dramatic, highly visible, and speculative results. And they have to; otherwise, we could not recognize them at all behind the multitude of already existing or just emerging architectures. That architectural forms, above all images of architectural forms, which have the advantage of being mobile, shall become visible- and with them, their author- means that they have to speculate on desires and wishes of viewers, that they actually have to be somehow subjective. They have to tell stories and symbolically comment on the technical, they have to enchant and manipulate.
It is thus a leap between objective and rational methods, from the statistics of algorithmic procedures, and subjective, speculative interpretation that makes visible. If this leap is successful, it is like magic.»

«When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong.»

«As a general rule, it is foolish to do just what other people are doing, because there are almost sure to be too many people doing the same thing.»

«Contrarians `zig´, while others `zag´. In the fourteenth reprint, Neill´s classic introduces the `contrary thinking´as art of being `a nonconformist when using your mind.´In order to avoid the naturally homologue thinking, the speculator should practice to throw his `mind into directions which are opposite to the obvious.´Because, obvious thinking, that is, mainstream thinking obviously produces wrong conclusions and decisions. Beyond any claim for rationality or truth, the idea of contrarian speculation is to act against the mainstream, not for meta-reasons but for `counter-mimicry´. This is not meant as a cynical thought of an elite, but as a promising strategy to succeed, which `is more of an antidote to general forecasting than a system for forecasting. In a word, it is a thinking tool, not a crystal ball. It forces one to think through a given subject´, or in the words of Loos, as `the Other´.»

«The avant-gardist, therefore, has to create continuous distinctions between itself and the others, by developing strategies that detect fashions and fads to counter them. Only in a position of difference, one is avant-garde at all.

Becoming an avant-garde author, the means to constantly re-establish the difference, to constantly become the Other.»

«I´m a communist. The only difference between me and the Bolscheviks is that I want to turn everyone into aristocrats while they want to turn everyone into proletarians.»

«…`were using capitalism to smash capitalism.´… creating a spectacle to smash the spectacle.»

«It is the performative separation from an established fashion, through the speculation on another fashion, which characterizes the contrarian as well as the avant-garde. The spectacle, in other words, thereby is to claim and make visible an authority that may challenge an established fashion.»

«It thereby radicalizes the contrarian strategy, in again assimilating all styles, and in authorizing the most disparate constructions. It exploits the paradox of being novel by not wanting to be novel. The strategic feature of post-modernism is to make a speculative profit out of the absence of the event: the novel and the original are just denied, turning the act of denying into the new novel. Gilles Lipovetsky claims that, just like the big ideologies, art, no matter if carried out by the avant-garde or the ´trans-avant-garde´ is ruled by the same devoid logic of fashion and attention.»

«Quite the contrary is true: The visible break with precedent forms and values, the negation of the old, in favor of the novel, has become the main point of valuation. Modernism´s reductionism is not to omit all dispensable and redundant, but to become spectacular by valorizing what formerly is not valuable: it is truly contrarian. Is there perhaps a novel canon after all?»

«The resulting shifts in the proportions of history come from the valorizations of commonly ignored or even devalued issues.»

«He quotes Pietro Belluschi´s definition of communal architecture as: ´a communal art, not produced by a few intellectuals os specialists, but by the spontaneous and continued activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting under a community of experience.´»

«Authorship, in this sense, does not mean any longer that the artists have produced a certain object, but that they have ´used´ it in an interesting and novel way.»