Ma Yansong Quotes

Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.

New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, where I was born, you are in the middle of nature surrounded by mountains and ocean. But you are still in a capital in Europe. So I have never understood why I have to choose between nature or urban.

The only place where people in Manhattan walk for leisure is in the park.

There's something so soothing about the hum of Grand Central Station.

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

I love the Park. I like to walk on the East River, too, up at Gracie Square, but Central Park is my favorite part of the city.

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

Good and bad make up a city.

The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns; for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.

Certain parts are bad in every city, but Chicago is beautiful.

In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning - not only as a landscape but a part of daily life.

One of the great things about New York is this wonderful park we have.

One of the reasons I like living in Bangkok is that, although it's a megacity, it's very saturated with nature - the vast and brooding skies, the sudden storms and rains, the vegetation and even the animals that abound.

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Bears don't live on Park Avenue.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

…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.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.