Roland Barthes Quotes

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

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.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

One great building does not make a great city.

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.

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.

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.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

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.

Urban planning should be done with the mindset that we are determining the city's fabric for 100 years to come.

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

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

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution.

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.

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

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

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.