Quote

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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Philip Johnson
Age: 98 †
Born: 1906
Born: July 8
Died: 2005
Died: January 25
Architect
Art Historian
Cleveland
Ohio
Philip Cortelyou Johnson
Phillip Johnson
Body
Havens
Marvelous
Back
Haven
Concrete
Feel
Line
Walls
Feels
Wall
Surprised
Room
Presses
Rooms
Press
Lines
Architecture
Talking
Straight
Mold

More quotes by 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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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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[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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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.
Philip Johnson
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Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
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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.
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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.
Philip Johnson
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American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
Philip Johnson
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Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson
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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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Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
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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Architecture is art, nothing else.
Philip Johnson
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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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I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.
Philip Johnson
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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.
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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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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Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.
Philip Johnson