Ken Loach Quotes

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

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

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

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

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

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 they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

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

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

The city of magnificent intentions.

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

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.

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.

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.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

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

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

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.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.