Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you’ve got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is.
If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly.
We boast the highest standard of living when it’s only the biggest.
Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.
Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?
Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.
Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality.
The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.
Taste is a matter of ignorance. If you know what you are tasting, you don’t have to taste.
The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.
Prison house for the soul.
The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
Well, now that he’s finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.
If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall.
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.