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
Feel
Line
Walls
Feels
Wall
Surprised
Room
Presses
Rooms
Press
Lines
Architecture
Talking
Straight
Mold
Body
Havens
Marvelous
Back
Haven
Concrete

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The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.
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Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
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Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
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Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.
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Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
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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.
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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.
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Glibness will get your anywhere.
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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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We do pretty much whatever we want to.
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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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[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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American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.
Philip Johnson
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Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.
Philip Johnson