David Roberts Quotes

Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.

There will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons.

The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.

The Pyramids are perfect, but you can't put the Pyramids in the middle of Manhattan. In the desert, the combination of light and form makes it perfect.

When you look at classical structures, they're often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it's not something standard that you can copy.

Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.

I like the word monument, because the word monument is a Latin word.

Suppose you want to be a great archeologist, and you join a successful archeologist as a student assistant, and he tells you where to dig. You dig up a marvelous discovery. Now I ask you, who should get the credit: the director or the digger?

Art is about forgetting all these feelings, good and bad, and trying to understand what acts will last longer, which symbols will remain in history. It's a question of perspective: The further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems.

Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.

I just want to build the best buildings. It's not about me, it's about the buildings, creating a space where society can gather and marvel in beauty and nature.

It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.

Gutzon Borglum, the individual, is nothing. Art, expression, freedom are everything. On this I stand or fall.

In northern architecture - the cathedrals of Europe and all the little churches - the details, the carving of stone, become necessary because the light is not there to help you very much. You have to enrich surfaces. The desert reduces form to its simplest nature. There is no need for gargoyles or flying buttresses in the desert.

The Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio comes from afar. Our land has a millennial history of emigrations: master masons, architects, builders, decorators, plasterers, artists from the world of building.

In Mexico, I want to be known as the Aztec Warrior.

You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.

Lincoln has been my first love, and as always with first loves, it fixed a standard. So I scaled sunlit heights with Lincoln and produced the colossal marble head in the rotunda of the capitol of the United States.

Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.

What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?

Driving a steamroller over an old trumpet or a teaspoon is no more destructive than taking a chisel to a lump of marble already torn from the landscape. But people don't see it that way because marble is considered noble.

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

A chap was digging a pond for his carp in the garden behind his terraced house in the small town of Raunds, when he unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon body. Because he'd seen 'Time Team', he knew exactly what to do with it - he cleaned it very respectfully and then called the local archaeologist, who called us in.

A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.

It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space.