Daniel Libeskind Quotes

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

Certain parts are bad in every city, but Chicago is beautiful.

Part of me would love to be mayor for the simple reason that I love my city.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

Washington, D.C., has for too long ignored the reality that if we do not invest in infrastructure in urban America we are doing so at the jeopardy of the economy.

As mayor I don't intend to be just a voice for Portland. I intend to be a voice for urban America.

Brussels is sort of a mini London in the sense that if you think about putting a football pitch in London, people laugh at you. There is just no space.

Trinity River Vision is huge for Fort Worth.

People think that buildings are permanent, but in China, this isn't true; we can always demolish and remake it better.

A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

They should've built a city on rock and roll.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall.

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I'm not nostalgic about the old city. I don't enjoy it that much.

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.

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.

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.

If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.