Richard Meier Quotes

In Italy, there are so many significant architectural structures in history such as the Pantheon in Rome, or the Duomo.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

It's a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they've demolished so many landmarks. It's a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It's a strange town, it's this sprawling suburb, and then there's a city, the old town.

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

I love Rome and the way that you can wander around and find something interesting around every street corner. You can smell the history.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

Shooting in Brooklyn is like opening a time capsule. Nothing has changed. Everything looks like it did in the eighties.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Houston is undoubtedly my showcase city. I saved all my best buildings for Houston.

Architecture is a political art connecting our values to the ages.

I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.

I definitely think New York is a very, very vibrant, wonderful city, but I certainly, of course, can't help but miss a lot of the stuff that's no longer there.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

Western Mosul is the historic heart of one of the oldest cities in the world. Its narrow streets and alleyways are impassable for armored vehicles.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.