Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Integrity has been enhanced.
A suburban mall turned vertical.
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
It fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
The taste of people with large bank accounts tends not to be on the cutting edge.
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
Fashion is just a name for one of the things that happen where mind and body intersect.
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.
Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.
Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.
It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.
The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.
the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. ... At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There's no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.
I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.
Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
California ... is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.
On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.
I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?
I try to do everything from thinking about big issues like how a building fits into the larger stream of architectural history to practical issues such as how it feels to navigate your way through its interior.
Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others - I am one of them - abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
Wright's building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.
There are two kinds of people in the world - those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.
Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.
Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history. ... Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.
The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are architecture.
By any reasonable standard, Riverside Drive would be considered the best street in New York. Where else, after all, are there such views-not of a narrow river, as there is across town, but of one of the noblest rivers in the United States.
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.