Douglas Tompkins Quotes

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building.

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

So what we have tried to do in our later buildings is to try to be completely consistent, as a painter is consistent or as a sculptor is consistent. Architecture also must be very consistent.

With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.

Seeing architecture differently from the way you see the rest of life is a bit weird. I believe one should be consistent in all that one does, from the books you read to the way you bring up your children. Everything you do is connected.

Form follows function.

Repetition creates pattern. If I have a hundred of these, a hundred of those, it doesn't make any difference what these and those are. If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches. It doesn't make any difference.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial.

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

I love seeing things that work in the micro and work in the macro.

There is something nice about wearing the same thing everyday, having that go-to.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.

In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

I am actually very well-organized. All I need to do is open my closet and just choose. But, you see, although I carry many different choices with me, I always end up wearing a tank top, jeans and sneakers.

Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.