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Quotes by Architect

"The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again."

"It is quite interesting that whilst there are tremendous theories, in the 1960s when IT was born, everybody was supposedly going to their cottage in the countryside to work in a virtual way."

"Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest."

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."

"And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole."

"What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority."

"The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity."

"You'd never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago's Michigan Avenue. But in a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner."

"After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings."

"Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times."

"In setting out the walls of a city the choice of a healthy situation is of the first importance: it should be on high ground, neither subject to fogs nor rains; its aspects should be neither violently hot nor intensely cold, but temperate in both respects."

"I'm not Candide, nor Dr Pangloss, but we know that faith moves mountains."

"All I know is that these two gases both had a quite extraordinary effect, and that there was no respirator, and no protection against them that we knew of. So the soldiers would have been unable to protect themselves against this gas in any way."

"So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course."

"Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion."

"Well, I think one doesn't really have to invent this memorial space, because it is already there. And it is speaking with a voice and, you know, 4 million of us came to see the site."

"There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization."

"I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened."

"Like flats of today, terraces of houses gained a certain anonymity from identical facades following identical floor plans and heights."

"We will work with everybody for the good of New York."

"If you look at the buildings, you'll find that one part looks as if it was designed by one man, and you go around and look at another facade and it looks as if it was designed by another man, you see."
Man,

"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."

"The worst-tempered people I've ever met were the people who knew they were wrong."

"All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected."

"Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it."

"I, therefore, O Caesar, do not publish this work, merely prefixing my name to a treatise which of right belongs to others, nor think of acquiring reputation by finding fault with the works of any one."

"Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly."

"The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens."

"Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture."

"Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom."

"The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions."

"I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly."

"Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art."

"I had lived in Fukuoka during the mid 1990s, and I was a volunteer with the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival."
Film,

"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."

"Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious."

"Nothing requires the architect's care more than the due proportions of buildings."
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