Chantal Akerman Quotes

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

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

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

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

How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!

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.

New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

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.'

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks - that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

Detroit is really the most perfectly laid out city one could imagine, and such an enchanting park and lake, - infinitely better than any town I know in Europe. It ought to be a paradise in about fifty years when it has all matured.

It is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it.

We were just looking at maps.

In every detail a city should reflect that human beings are sacred and that they are equal.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

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

Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.