Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

A limit on the automobile population of the United States would be the best of news for our cities. The end of automania would save open spaces, encourage wiser land use, and contribute greatly to ending suburban sprawl.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

All through my twenties, I lived in very walkable cities - Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York.

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

I like a walking culture; I need to be in a city where you can walk everywhere.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

In the urban areas, we have focused on infrastructure roads, telecommunications, power.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

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

Cities are immortal.

Cities are created by and for traffic.

The energy crisis has given new urgency to the need to improve public transportation, not only in our cities but in rural areas as well…. Mass transit is an essential element of the improvement of life in our cities and towns.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

Infrastructure deficit is an issue in all urban areas.