John Hench Quotes

I like to use the analogy of going to the gym. If you go to the gym and your goal is, 'I want to look just like David Beckham,' then that drives you to do certain things. You may never look like Beckham, but it is a goal. Cities need the same thing. They need a vision and a plan for their ideal physique.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow - shopping centers, airports - it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture.

The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.

A premise of the new city is that we want a society to be as egalitarian as possible. For this purpose, quality-of-life distribution is more important than income distribution. [And quality of life includes] a living environment as free of motor vehicles as possible.

In architecture it isn't enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. [] I like and respect Brasí­lia very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasí­lia

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

It all must start with an inspired, spontaneous idea.

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

We think about project's public nature and how that can be enhanced, how the spaces we create can enliven the experience of being there.

I'm part of what I consider the entertainment industry. For my photos to be entertaining, they have to be provocative and new.

We make our buildings, and then our buildings make and shape us.

We try to avoid the single-building syndrome. You have to look at the big picture. If you try to put social and cultural development ahead of economic development, it doesn’t work. You have to do it all together.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there.

As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development.

There are places that are so designed they're unlivable.

The thing is, if people get it right away, I just don't think you're making art. I think you're making something they're comfortable with. You have to challenge people. You know, it has to be new. It has to be something they haven't seen before. Just bring them something they haven't seen before. They aren't going to love it right away because they haven't seen it before. So they have to take a minute, you know?

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.