Mary H.K. Choi Quotes

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

Cities are about juxtaposition.

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.

My favorite thing about New York is the view, the skyline.

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

New York is vertical - all skyscrapers.

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

Not only did America invent the skyscraper, it invented the skyline.

Chicago is a city built on architecture, and there are plenty of buildings to scale.

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

...Skyscraper National Park

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

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.

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.

Looking at the town of Misr from a distance, one has the impression of a mountain. There are houses fourteen stories high, while others are limited to seven.

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.

That New York energy, when you've got the benefit of great weather, it really is terrific. You look up at that skyline, and the Empire State Building is literally in your eyesight - there's nothing like that.

New York's got a little rougher edge to it than Chicago.