Philip Johnson
All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.Collection: Architecture
Architecture is the art of how to waste space.Collection: Art
All architects want to live beyond their deaths.Collection: Death
Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.Collection: Architecture
The future of architecture is culture.Collection: Architecture
I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.Collection: Design
You cannot not know history.Collection: History
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.Collection: Architecture
Architecture is art, nothing else.Collection: Architecture
I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?
Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.
Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.
The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.
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 always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.
There's only one reason for my whole life, and that's art. Nothing else counts; nothing else gives me pleasure; nothing else gives me satisfaction.
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.
If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.
There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
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?
I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.
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.
Dullness is the enemy.
Glibness will get your anywhere.
I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.
I'm about four skyscrapers behind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.
I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?
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.
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.
The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
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.
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.
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.
Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.
I'm a chameleon, so changeable. I see myself as a gadfly and a questioner.
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.
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.Collection: Class
Pick very few objects and place them exactly.Collection: Objects
We all see the world differently. And thank God for that. Otherwise, what a boring world this would be.Collection: Positive
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.Collection: Spiritual
We do pretty much whatever we want to.Collection: Want
The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.Collection: Cities