telling stories

"Some people do not tell you what their work means. They offer no explanation of it. All they do is tell how it was they happened to think of doing this or how they hit upon that. Most contemporary painters and scuptors still take this line, despite the external pressure to legitimize their work by dressing it in a theory in the way that architects of note very often feel obliged to do. It is note that painters and sculptors are more honest and less pretentious: there is more advantage in it than this. It allows them to evade, to some extent, the intrusive, constricting authority of words. Although they are visual artist, there is no way they can keep their work out of range of words, any more than a writer could keep their work out of range of vision. Since silence is no answer, they tell stories.
[...]
The rapid obsolescence of the thoughts in the writing compensates for the changelessness in the architecture. Under the circumstances there would be no point at all in demanding that architecture live up to the writing or that the writing correspond to the architecture, reasonable as the request may seem."
in Translations from Drawing to Buildin and Other Essays by Robins Evans

Walls

"Walls are the armoury that preserves our personal integrity against the inroads of the rest of humanity and nature."
in Translations from Drawing to Buildin and Other Essays by Robins Evans

Beauty by Alberti

"Alberti Thought it prudent to build beautiful buildings, because beauty preserves things from assault. He asks, 'Can any Building be made so strong by all the Contrivance of Art, as to be safe from Vilolence and Force?' and he answers that it can, since 'Beauty will have such an effect even upon an enraged Enemy, that it will disarm his Anger, and prevent him from offering it any Injury: Insomuch that I will be hold to say, that there can be no greater Security to any Work against Violence and Injusty, that Beauty and Dignity.'" in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays by Robin Evans

by Le Corbusier

Architecture is the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathematical order, speculation, the perception of the harmony which lies in emotions. This is the aim of architecture.