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American Architect Quotes
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Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
Charles Jencks
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Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.
Vito Acconci
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It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.
Christopher Alexander
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When one understands the principles of design, his taste will have something more solid as a basis than mere whim or fancy, which in the untutored is more likely to be bad than good. Acquainted with the rules of good design he will not accept articles made in defiance of them.
Ernest Flagg
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Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.
Buckminster Fuller
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For the scientific materialist the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence.
Philip Johnson
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Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.
William McDonough
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... talking as though the Standard Oil Company was the smallest thing he owned.
Addison Mizner
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Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier.
Robert Moses
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I came and knelt at the king's feet, and when he put the crown on my head, I felt that he had just honoured all the women of Iran. Only four years earlier we had been in the same category of the mentally handicapped: we did not even have the basic right of choosing our representatives. The crown wiped out centuries of humiliation; more surely than any law, it solemnly affirmed the equality of men and women.
Farah Pahlavi
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Unfortunately, buildings are not like drawings. You can't just erase them.
Richard Roth, Jr.
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One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.
Vincent Scully
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Alas, the world has never known a sound social fabric, a fabric sound and clean to the core and kindly. For it has ever turned its back on Man.
Louis Sullivan
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As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.
Robert Venturi
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Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.
Frank Lloyd Wright
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Over the years, it has slowly dawned on me that the people who cause my painful experiences are ignorant and crude. They are the critics who have not read enough and the clients who do not know why they have come to us. I have been helped to realise this by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose friendship inspires us, have no problem understanding my role. They are the sophisticates. Partly through them I gain heart and realise that, over the last twenty years, I have managed to do my work and, despite some sliding, to achieve my own self-respect.
Denise Scott Brown
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Discussions of female spectatorship among feminist film critics over the last fifteen years have relentlessly pursued the elusive problem of gender and visual representation through various intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfactory, models in linguistic, psychoanalytic, and narrational convention.
Alice T. Friedman
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Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere commonplace of the day after to-morrow.
Claude Fayette Bragdon
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The space of time in which a great work can now be accomplished is not marvellous. Brain, muscle, materials, and the means of rapid transport are instantly at command. If one has capital and a well-considered plan, the thing does itself. But that which is wonderful and which I can scarcely believe, although I have been in the midst of it, is the noble, artistic result which has come from the work of American artists who have had only a few months' time to prepare those very designs for the great buildings of the Exposition which have actually been executed with little change from the sketches which were presented in February, 1891.
Daniel Burnham
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A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness
Clarence Stein
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The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation his ability to find greatness.
Minoru Yamasaki
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The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible.... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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The architect should always live better than his clients.
Stanford White
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In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.
Louis Kahn
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On the World Trade Center buildings in New York:
So utterly banal as to be unworthy of the headquarters of a bank in Omaha.
Paul Goldberger
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But if the young are never tired of erring in conduct, neither are the older in erring of judgment.
Frances Burney
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