Olafur Eliasson Quotes

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

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

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

Melbourne is wonderfully altered since I last saw it. There are some very fair buildings in it now, and things are a little cheaper than they used to be.

The City gets more and more beautiful every time I come home.

I have great memories of the old Times Square - wouldn't have missed being here to see that place for the world - but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. 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 see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

I'm trying to change the culture in New York City; that's hard enough!

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

I'm a native of L.A. I've seen the city change and develop over time, and I still believe there's no place like home.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

Cities are immortal.

The city of magnificent intentions.

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.

I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.