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Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

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
Make
Necessary
Building
Purpose
Beautiful

More quotes by Philip Johnson

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There's no worse feeling than seeing my buildings and realizing the mistakes.
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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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Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.
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The best thing to do with water is to use a lot of it.
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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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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.
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When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.
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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Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
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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Architecture is art, nothing else.
Philip Johnson
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Pick very few objects and place them exactly.
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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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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Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.
Philip Johnson
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Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
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.
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The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.
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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