Paul Goldberger Quotes

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

We are producing urban places which are disjointed and disconnected and not worthy of our civilisation

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.

Buffer between commercial, memorial and retail space.

Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails. Women have the mall.

We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore.

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.

The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold; And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities.

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century.

We are the only country in the world that trashes its old buildings. Too late we realize how very much we need them.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.