so difficult to sail away from your immovable home... To move from an apartment floor plan to the map of the world

"Should we build small houses on legs, a separate room, a studio for one person, so that he can be either with everyone else or completely alone? Or should we build huge buildings with elevators and maybe tram cars in the hallways? We don't know... Our house floats like a small steamship, exhaling heat through the funnels. It floats under the sky. That's probably called 'drifting'... The house drifts on the ground. Nothing has been decided yet. The way hasn't been found... Reader, it's so difficult to sail away from your immovable home... To move from an apartment floor plan to the map of the world. Silence befalls when you finish the book."

— Viktor Shklovsky "On Architecture" [1930] in A Hunt for Optimism [1933], translated by Shushan Avagyan (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012) p4-5.