Constantinos A. Doxiadis

We take lessons from the monuments, but what kind of lessons? First we copied them and tried to revive the dead city as it used to be. Then we found out that we had only attempted a resurrection of the dead, that we had erected corpses in our towns and we started to laugh at them. What we forgot was that the monuments and the buildings are but the skin of the real city, of real life. Our concern for the skin remind me of the people who once visited the workshop of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and asked him how he managed to create such perfect surfaces for his statues. "Surfaces?" said he, "but I am inside the marble and work from there".