David Byrne Quotes

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

You will find in the streets of New York every variety of architecture, just as you find in its libraries all the literatures of the world, and in its theatres all the music, and in its houses all the decorative arts.

The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

You can never design the best city, but you can design the best city you know how to design at this time.

That is the way to lay the city flat, To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles of ruin.

Paris is a city of centralisation--and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point. We see radiating many long arms with innumerable tentaculae, and in the centre rises a gigantic head with a comprehensive brain and keen eyes to look on every side and ears sensitive to hear--and a voracious mouth to swallow.

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.

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

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

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design.

In Bogotá, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Over the last 80 years we have been making cities much more for cars' mobility than for children’s happiness.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?