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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?

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
Wouldn
Building
Wasn
Interest
Art
Work
Potential
Build

More quotes by Philip Johnson

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Architecture is art, nothing else.
Philip Johnson
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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.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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
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When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.
Philip Johnson
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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.
Philip Johnson
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I guess I want to make money just like other people, perhaps more than most people.
Philip Johnson
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I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
Philip Johnson
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Pick very few objects and place them exactly.
Philip Johnson
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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.
Philip Johnson
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There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
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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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
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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.
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.
Philip Johnson
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Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
Philip Johnson