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

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There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
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Architecture is art, nothing else.
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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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I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.
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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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I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.
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Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
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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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I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
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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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[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.
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Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.
Philip Johnson
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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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Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.
Philip Johnson
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The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.
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Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
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.
Philip Johnson
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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.
Philip Johnson
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The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.
Philip Johnson
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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.
Philip Johnson