ETTORE SOTTSASS
"Even the rite of building a house has two different moments in time: one is that of space in the universe, with days, nights, seasons, forests and deserts traveling through it--an uncontrolled, mysterious space, charged with favours and misfortunes; the other is ritual time, when an artificial, known, prepared and controlled space is constructed to evoke and capture favours and fortunes from the boundless space of the universe." (1956)
"The environment ought not even to be a house any more. It ought to be a corpse, with miscellaneous things, floors and little rooms designed in it. A place where the most important thing must be its deep integrity. Or it should be a garage, a total neutralisation of all the mythologies that society continuously uses to recognize itself and to know where to lay its hands." (1976)
"Anyway, perhaps, what I know is that designing a place for living means designing or at least supposing to design, on each different occasion, a kind of temple, a closed place, within the limits granted to our scope for respite. But it is always a temple, because it is built for that certain degree of sacredness that we, by designing, manage to devote to protecting those who will be living out the days of their existence and also their lives in that place." (1995)