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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.

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
Live
Building
Come
Cities
Important
Challenges
Architectural
People
Shall
Creations
Maybe
Challenging
Lasts
Satisfying
Last
Surely
Care
Creation

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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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Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
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Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
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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.
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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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I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.
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I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
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Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.
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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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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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Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
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Pick very few objects and place them exactly.
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Architecture is art, nothing else.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
Philip Johnson
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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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The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
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American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
Philip Johnson