Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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

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.

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.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

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

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

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.

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

Hyderabad is my brainchild. I have developed it with passion.

I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul...There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them.

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

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

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.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

It's nice to get president candidates' attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we're gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation's cities.

I love going to the river not only to enjoy nature, but to think about the Los Angeles River's place in our city's history and to envision its great place in our future.

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.