Oscar Niemeyer Quotes

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Living, Changing, New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form. Only such architecture is creative.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.

I just want to build the best buildings. It's not about me, it's about the buildings, creating a space where society can gather and marvel in beauty and nature.

I am ever hopeful that there are generations of young Chinese people who are really thinking about the future and what kind of society they want.

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.

I'd like to design something like a city or a museum. I want to do something hands on rather than just play golf which is the sport of the religious right.

I don't see that any buildings should be excluded from the term architecture, as long as they are done properly.

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience.

What's clear - and exciting - is that communication for social change is growing.

I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It's more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

It would be wrong to say that the city of Berlin is not regulated. What I think is more interesting is to what extent a city creates a sort of safe haven for its users, so that people feel confident that the city works on their behalf.

Countries aren't built by boring people.

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

Without culture, development falls apart.

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been very widely aroused; and the broad line of its future development are already clearly discernible.

All of us who care about the world going forward would like to engage the government more.