Frei Otto Quotes

It is the daydreaming of some people who live in a make-believe world who think you can make roads, hospitals, and railways without any social impact!

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.

Rio is an energetic, vibrant place, full of beauty and nature. But we face the kinds of problems any developing metropolis does - with pollution, traffic congestion, poverty. Distribution of green areas, for example, is not uniform. Madureira, the heart of the suburb in Rio, is a concrete jungle.

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings - because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.

The design of a city is like a strange archeology.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

Urban development in India... will be the biggest sunrise industry that any country has seen in any part of the world.

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

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.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

To develop or not to develop, that is the question.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

My father was into fame and leaving his mark. He was a city planner, sort of a genius in that world, the Robert Moses of Philadelphia. He was on the cover of 'Time' once, and I remember going to his office and seeing, like, two hundred copies, which he would hand out to people.

Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.

When one deals with urban issues, one never deals with clear black-and-white issues; they're all trade-offs. Important urban issues present conflicting values.