Philip Johnson Quotes

Well-building hat three conditions. Commodity, firmness, and delight.

Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

I think architecture has to be a gift.

I love architecture.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

Architecture is invention.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

The quality of the Neues Museum's construction is extraordinary even by German standards, and people can smell that quality. The concept would not have been so convincing without it.

Architecture remains a passion and a subject I'm very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

You build a player like you build a house. You start with the foundations. The fundamentals.

Building is a sweet impoverishing.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.

Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.