Martin Filler Quotes

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

It ought to be considered a reward for good citizenship and good parenting to get into public housing.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.

There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy.

I used to walk in the burnt up Harlem of the '80s, and I'd look at brownstones that were dilapidated or apartment buildings, thinking 'Whoever designed this and built this did not want it to look like this.' So, I used to visualize one day being able to contribute and build in Harlem.

When the government sees a poor area, its solution is to move the poor out.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

... the best public housing I've ever seen.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

What's wrong with Hell's Kitchen? You don't change a neighborhood by changing its name. You change it by building a school.

If I become mayor of London, my single biggest priority will be to build thousands more homes every year. I will set a target to make half of all the new homes that are built genuinely affordable, with first dibs for Londoners.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

As someone who grew up in public housing, I've known these conditions.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.