Daniel Libeskind Quotes

In many places, the zoning prohibits the mixing of retail and residential. This stupidity has been accompanied by stupidities in municipal policy, such as disallowing accessory apartments - under the theory that renters are incapable of behaving decently.

Annexation is probably the most valuable tool a city has to ensure orderly growth and development.

A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.

I hope that any expansion of London will learn from the planning examples of some of its most desirable areas such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Mayfair. All are characterised by high density and a generosity of green spaces. They are all pedestrian-friendly with shops, entertainment, restaurants and pubs within easy walking distance.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.

One of the things I thought a lot about was how can we get the views, for instance, the main plaza, you look up to Telegraph Hill from there and therefore it would be a disaster to close that view off.

The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

There are lots of brownfield sites in Stoke, but they are not suitable for building executive homes. It needs to be surrounded by fields. It needs to be on greenbelt land. That's what executives want.

For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital. We faced many challenges. Art was part of the answer, and my name, in the very beginning, was linked with two things: demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back, and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Business was bound to come; light industries were already shopping for land. The quiet country farms were already going, and developments would take over... Eventually, of course, we will have to have some sort of plan to guide future development.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

Tackling affordable housing via land use planning won't necessarily solve the problem.

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

You can't just have a clean public space - you also have to have people willing to use it, and something that will draw them in.

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.