Mark Wigley Quotations

Any city that only tries to preserve itself is already dead. The great tragedy would be to embalm New Orleans by simply rebuilding it the way it was.

Architecture never derived its force from stability of culture, but rather from the expression of those moments when that sense of stability slipped.

This is one of the few moments in time in which the entire population of a city can tell you what they miss about it. It's like when people sit around a room wearing black talking about the person who's gone. The French Quarter is probably one of the smallest elements of what people treasure.

We have to get past the standardized image. It didn't include any of the poor people - any of those neighborhoods that we only know now because they're filled with water.