Quote

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.

Philip Johnson

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Philip Johnson
Age: 98 †
Born: 1906
Born: July 8
Died: 2005
Died: January 25
Architect
Art Historian
Cleveland
Ohio
Philip Cortelyou Johnson
Phillip Johnson
Point
Twist
History
Twists
Thing
Mold
Something
Onto
Make
Riches
Like
Improve
Deny
Buttoned
Tradition
Plucked

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Glibness will get your anywhere.
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There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
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All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.
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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.
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The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.
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Architecture is art, nothing else.
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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.
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Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
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So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin. Anything goes.
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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.
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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.
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Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We do pretty much whatever we want to.
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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.
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The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.
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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.
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I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?
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