David Rockwell Quotes

It's not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots.

People are renovating places and opening ambitious new venues. That's one thing that music does. It gets people out of their houses, and gets them hanging out together.

It is my belief that exciting things happen when a variety of overlapping activities designed for all people-the old and the young, the blue and white collar, the local inhabitant and the visitor, different activities for different occasions-meet in a flexible environment, opening up the possibility of interaction outside the confines of institutional limits. When this takes place, deprived areas welcome dynamic places for those who live, work and visit; places where all can participate, rather than less or more beautiful ghettos.

Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.

The arts can play a vital role in revitalizing neighborhoods, using and improving vacant space, bringing new jobs and new sense of opportunity, and improving public safety by generating more foot traffic and more eyes on the street.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.

Normally you hear about Southeast London, and you hear about all the stuff that goes on down there, all the negative things, and the tabloids kind of stay away from all the positive things that happen that I see every day, which kind of outshines the negative.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

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.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life.

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

That is the effect of my sculptures in the public domain: people are making contact with each other again.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

The key to truly rebuilding our central city on a vital and sustainable foundation is people.

We will emerge stronger as a diverse community; the area will be rebuilt with life around the clock, new buildings, restaurants, places of entertainment.

In December of 2001, after September 11th, my wife, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert DeNiro asked me if I would help them create the Tribeca Film Festival. The idea was to revitalize lower Manhattan. We would show films on piers, in high schools. It was all about the community. We wanted it to be accessible to everybody.

And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.

If you don’t put positive things in the city’s open spaces, they will be filled by negative things.

You can’t throw a park down and think everybody is going to mix and be happy and share picnic tables and sing songs together.

The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.

I have my chops in organizing, and I know how to create political space through movement building.