Herman Hertzberger Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Knowledge and experience keep forcing us back into the old grooves of the old record of meanings, the way a knife keeps returning to the original striations in a sheet of cardboard.

Herman Hertzberger
Architects, including the seriously gifted, construct their ideas, even ifthese are keys to utterly new insights, out of raw material that in one way or another had to be already present in their minds. Nothing, after all, can be born of nothing.

Herman Hertzberger
The difficulty of finding the new is mainly that of shaking off the old.

Herman Hertzberger
Just as the painter needs a subject, so too the architect needs to have something to say that rises above the obscure jargon that architects share with one another.

Herman Hertzberger
Changes, small ones as well as big, are the sparks that feed fresh impulses to the motor of architecture and keep it ticking over.

Herman Hertzberger
To find new concepts as an answer to new challenges you first have to unmask the existing clichés.

Herman Hertzberger
The architect's most important attributes are not the traditional emblems of professional skill, the ruler and pair of compasses, but his eyes and ears.

Herman Hertzberger
Creativity in that respect is the capacity to see 'things' differently by lifting them from their present context so that they lose their original meaning and, seen in a new context, evoke another and so become something else.

Herman Hertzberger
We will have to accept that buildings, like household and other appliances, are showing less and less of their contents and their workings, and starting to behave increasingly like urban containers.

Herman Hertzberger
It is only where architecture generates other space, creates other experiences and satisfies other conditions which cause sensibilities to change, that it signifies anything of value. Architecture is more than just a free-ranging, narcissistic phenomenon.

Herman Hertzberger
Ingenuity in finding new concepts is all too often seen as something exclusive, reserved for the few who are gifted in that respect.

Herman Hertzberger
Too often we find the creative process of the architect depicted as a succession of flashes of inspiration that the privileged evidently receive as a gift and others vainly keep waiting for, as though ideas are some kind of thunderbolt from on high.

Herman Hertzberger
Architects must react to the world, not to each other.

Herman Hertzberger