Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I love Columbus Circle. I rebelled against the construction for a while because I go back to the '70s. There was no Time Warner building. Now I've started to really like it.

I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial.

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

Melbourne is wonderfully altered since I last saw it. There are some very fair buildings in it now, and things are a little cheaper than they used to be.

We can’t be a great country unless we have great cities.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I'm not nostalgic about the old city. I don't enjoy it that much.

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.

the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. ... At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

They build too low who build beneath the skies.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

[Ayres] was our city because we were building it. That's how I felt when I walked around town.

[It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

I'm proud to be Archie's son. Being a quarterback, I had my mentor and hero living in the same house.

I have always stated I designed the stadium as a toilet seat. I don't care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.

We're going to do a lot of work on the inner cities, I have great people lined up to help.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.