Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?
Philip Johnson
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Philip Johnson
Age: 98 †
Born: 1906
Born: July 8
Died: 2005
Died: January 25
Architect
Art Historian
Cleveland
Ohio
Philip Cortelyou Johnson
Phillip Johnson
Potential
Build
Wouldn
Building
Wasn
Interest
Art
Work
More quotes by Philip Johnson
I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
Philip Johnson
American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
Philip Johnson
Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating.
Philip Johnson
Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
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
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.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
I haven't any wisdom - just a child like everybody else. I'm not as great as Frank Lloyd Wright.
Philip Johnson
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
Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
Philip Johnson
The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
Philip Johnson
We do pretty much whatever we want to.
Philip Johnson
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.
Philip Johnson
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
Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
Philip Johnson
[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.
Philip Johnson
