David Chipperfield Quotes

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

We live in what virtually amounts to a museum - which does not happen to a lot of people.

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians--but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendants of those who made them

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

By virtue of the standing and prestige of President Ben-Zvi, some 3,000 manuscripts originating from Arab lands, some of them of major significance, have been deposited at the Ben-Zvi Institute. In contrast to the Aleppo Codex, most of these documents were donated willingly, in the confidence that the institute would protect and preserve them.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.

Yankee Stadium, it's like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

You see all these old buildings [in Rio] going down or catching fire overnight, and it is so sad. I am very connected with these buildings because they are our history. It is the only one that we have.

The museums used to be exhibition halls for government propaganda, and now every city wants to build a museum. A few thousand are to be built in the next few years, all using taxpayer money. But there is no system, no research, no content, no good programs, no good managers.

I take the museum space also as sacred in a sense.