Saturday July 30, 2005

"The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason, sheltered by the Gate from the turmoil of the Delta, with its endless cycles of erasure and reinscription. This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale…."

— Architects John Outram Associates
    on work at Rice University

Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001:  

    "When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
    Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
    Scully said the colony's founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a 'nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'"

"Real and unreal are two in one:
    New Haven
 Before and after one arrives…."

 — Wallace Stevens,
    "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,' XXVIII