100+ Philip Johnson Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

source: - New York Times 27 Dec. 1964, p. 9E

Topics: Art, Badass, Bad Ass, Interior Space, Modern Architecture

quote all architecture is shelter all great architecture is the design of space that contains philip johnson Quotes

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

Topics: Beach, Hate, Vacation, Architectural Design, Architecture And Design

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

Topics: Badass, Bad Ass, Space, Interior Space, Modern Architecture

Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?

Topics: Moving, Doors, Tears

Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.

Topics: House, Skyscraper, Harder

Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.

source: - "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

Topics: Glasses, House, Saving, Glass Houses, Heating

The future of architecture is culture.

Topics: Culture, Architecture

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Topics: Death, Want, Architect, Modern Architecture

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

Topics: Class, Want, Way, High Class

In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.

Topics: Scary, Intellectual, Doctrine, Naturalism

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.

Topics: Mean, Scary, Evolution

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

Topics: Scary, Facts, Common

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Topics: Mean, Scary, Materialism, Naturalism

Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.

Topics: Reality, Law, Scary, Naturalism

In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

Topics: Scary, Process, Materials, Unintelligent

I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

Topics: Art, Building, Should

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

source: - "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

Topics: Arrogant, Architect, Modest

I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.

Topics: People, Want, Making Money

The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

Topics: Pride, People, Corporations

I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.

Topics: Gadflies, Chameleon

I get between nine and ten hours of sleep. Go to bed at 8:30 and get up at 6:00 or 6:30 if I oversleep.

Topics: Sleep, Nine, Bed

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

Topics: Cities, Houston, Building, Showcase

I guess I can't be a great architect. Great architects have a recognizable style. But if every building I did were the same, it would be pretty boring.

Topics: Style, Would Be, Boring

I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.

source: - "Architect Philip Johnson Dies at 98". www.foxnews.com. January 26, 2005.

Topics: Looks, Thrill, Earth, Parthenon

There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.

Topics: Mistake, Feelings, Realizing

So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.

Topics: Delight, Anything Goes, Form

I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate.

Topics: Thinking, People, Made

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

Topics: Cities, Architecture, Automobile

You're going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You'll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.

Topics: Giving, Trying, World

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

source: - "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

Glibness will get your anywhere.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

Topics: Design, Wish, Cathedrals

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

source: - "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

Topics: Tradition

Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.

Topics: Bother

We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.

Topics: Positive, Thank God, World

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

Topics: Sex, Age, Desire, Inbreds

Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going.

Topics: Moving, Men, Space

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

Topics: Cities, People, Challenges

In my own work, I'd say I'm a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don't study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that's a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that's a major part of the study.

Topics: Thinking, Looks, Purpose, Classicists

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

Topics: Art, Wish, Doe

I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Topics: Children, Frank

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.

source: - Philip Johnson (1979). “The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1979: Presented to Philip Johnson”

Topics: Spiritual, Religious, Inspiration

When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.

Topics: Art, Architecture, Building

The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

Topics: Consistency, Mind, Lines

We do pretty much whatever we want to.

Topics: Want

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.

Topics: Wall, Talking, Body, Talking Back

I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.

Topics: Mold, Riches, Twists

Faith? Haven't any. I'm not a nihilist or a relativist. I don't believe in anything but change. I'm a Heraclitean - you can't step in the same river twice.

Topics: Believe, Rivers, Steps, Nihilist

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

Topics: Art, Space, Design, Interior Space

Architecture is art, nothing else.

Topics: Art, Architecture

It is wonderful to be in the country in a glass house, because no matter what happens out there, you're nice and safe, you know, cuddled in your little bed, and there it is, raging storms, snowing - wonderful.

Topics: Country, Nice, Glasses, Glass Houses

There's no such thing as old age. I'm no different now than I was 50 years ago. I'm just having more fun.

Topics: Fun, Years, Age

I used to think that each phase of life was the end. But now that my view on life is more or less fixed, I believe that change is a great thing. In fact, it's the only real absolute in the world.

source: - "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

Topics: Real, Believe, Thinking, Phases Of Life

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

Topics: Beautiful, Purpose, Building

American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.

Topics: School, Growth, Responsible, Megalomania

Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

Topics: Years, People, House, Opera House

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

source: - Source: business.highbeam.com

Topics: Real, People, Scary

I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

source: - Source: business.highbeam.com

Topics: Hate, Architect, Journalist, Demeaning

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

source: - Source: business.highbeam.com

Topics: Architecture, Building

The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.

Topics: Water, Use, Things To Do

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