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.
If architects weren’t arrogant, they wouldn’t be architects. I don’t know a modest good architect.
The people with money to build today are corporations – they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.
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.
Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
Don’t build a glass house if you’re worried about saving money on heating.
We do pretty much whatever we want to.
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.
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.
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.
All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.
I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.
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.
Pick very few objects and place them exactly.
So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.
The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.
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.
The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.