Martin Filler Quotes

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

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

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.

Most of the job on DDP was already done by the time I became mayor. So was Gwanghwamun Square, described by many architects as the city's worst architectural creation, and the new city hall. I did not think that redoing them would be the right approach as that would only create new problems.

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.

A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.

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

One great building does not make a great city.

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

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.

Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.

Cities are created by and for traffic.

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.

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

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

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.

...Skyscraper National Park

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.

Berlin is liberation. Architecture, man!

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

You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.