Richard Meier Quotes

I just want to make my last demand in reverence to the work of what has been done by architects of the past. what was, has always been. what is, has always been. and what will be, has always been. such is the nature of beginning.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

History didn't begin yesterday.

It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

Each of us is tied, in some fashion, to the past. We are all part of a continuum.

To-day is the pupil of yesterday

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

Building the future, and keeping the past alive - are one and the same thing.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.

the tentacles of today reach out like an octopus to swallow yesterday.

Nothing fine and noble will ever perish from the earth as long as there are hearts to remember.

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.