Philip Johnson Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?

Philip Johnson
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Philip Johnson
I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.

Philip Johnson
The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

Philip Johnson
The essence of a theater is elegance, just as the essence of a church is spirituality.

Philip Johnson
I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back to back bathrooms.

Philip Johnson
The painters have every advantage over us today... Besides being able to tear up their failures—we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough—their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life—for an artist.

Philip Johnson
The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

Philip Johnson
All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Philip Johnson
Darwinists believe that the mutation-selection mechanism accomplishes wonders of creativity not because the wonders can be demonstrated, but because they cannot think of a more plausible explanation for the existence of wonders that does not involve an unacceptable creator, i.e., a being or force outside the world of nature.

Philip Johnson
The assumption of naturalism is the realm of speculative philosophy, and the rule against negative argument is arbitrary. It is as if a judge were to be charged with the crime.

Philip Johnson
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