Martin Filler Quotes

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

I had always thought that Gurgaon was some village, it was only when I came here that I realized that it is nothing less than a world-class city.

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

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

Urban development in India... will be the biggest sunrise industry that any country has seen in any part of the world.

I started my career with 'Refugee' in Bhuj. Now, it has become a full-fledged city.

What made Manhattan Manhattan was the underground infrastructure, that engineering marvel.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It's a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.

Manhattan seems pretty developed, you know what I mean? Like, it has peaked in culture.

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.

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

In the urban areas, we have focused on infrastructure roads, telecommunications, power.

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.