top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Architect
"A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe."
12
"It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city."
12
"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."
12
"Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process."
12
"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters."
12
"Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long."
12
"Larry wanted us to reposition the tower. We wouldn't, and won't. He's been holding back our fees. We want to get paid. And that's it. It'll get solved and we'll carry on with planning Ground Zero."
12
"The worst-tempered people I've ever met were the people who knew they were wrong."
12
"The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation."
12
"Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times."
12
"No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order."
12
"With a painter or a sculptor, one cannot begin to alter his works, but an architect has to put up with anything, because he makes utility objects - the building is there to be used, and times change."
12
"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."
12
"Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands."
12
"When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything."
11
"But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour."
11
"They didn't sell, people just weren't used to the idea of living in apartments."
11
"In all my activities as Armament Minister I never once visited a labor camp, and cannot, therefore, give any information about them."
11
"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention."
11
"I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us."
11
"Pictures can and do make a difference. Strong images of historical events do have an impact on society. They can help with change."
11
"There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart."
11
"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site."
11
"Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training."
11
"A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it."
11
"Temporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941."
11
"A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive."
11
"The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture."
11
"Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new."
11
"I have no philosophy, my favourite thing is sitting in the studio."
11
"It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process."
11
"I believe that we must understand the economy of the situation."
11
"It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way."
11
"We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe."
10
"When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it."
10
"True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is."
10
bottom of page